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| Garland Mayor Douglas Athas |
Garland Mayor Douglas Athas, like many in his city, said he wished AFDI president Pamela Geller hadn’t picked Garland as the site for Sunday’s event.
“Certainly in hindsight, we as a community would be better off if she hadn’t,” Athas said Tuesday. “Her actions put my police officers, my citizens and others at risk. Her program invited an incendiary reaction. She picked my community, which does not support in any shape, passion or form, her ideology.
“But at the end of the day, we did our jobs,” he said. “We protected her freedoms and her life.”
One can only imagine this poor guy's frustration.
One day he's worried about keeping the trash picked up off the streets, and dealing with petty crime crime, and the next his officers are warding off an attack from assailants aligned with a dangerous terrorist group.
But hey, it's not Pamela Gellar's fault. As she explains here courtesy of Time Magazine:
So, why are some people blaming me? They’re saying: “Well, she provoked them! She got what she deserved!” They don’t remember, or care to remember, that as the jihadis were killing the Muhammad cartoonists in Paris, their friend and accomplice was murdering Jews in a nearby kosher supermarket. Were the Jews asking for it? Did they “bait” the jihadis? Were they “provoking” them?
Are the Jews responsible for the Nazis? Are the Christians in the Middle East responsible for being persecuted by Muslims?
Drawing Muhammad offends Islamic jihadists? So does being Jewish. How much accommodation of any kind should we give to murderous savagery? To kowtow to violent intimidation will only encourage more of it.
This is a war.
Actually it's not war. It's random, often unrelated, acts of terrorism that will surely increase if people go out of their way to provoke a certain element in the Muslim community.
Now I support free speech as much as anybody, actually more than some. But what Gellar did was not in the name of free speech, what she did was to attempt to agitate a certain segment of the community so that she could prove to people that she was correct in writing terrible things about them.
Were they wrong to attack the AFDI? Yes, of course.
Was Gellar and her group wrong to place the lives of police officers at risk in order to play the victim, and garner support? Yes, of course.
You know it's kind of like the riots in Baltimore.
We all condemn the burning of police cars, and property damage, but we also have to realize that there were factors which inspired that response.
Are we at war with black people in Baltimore as well?
There is no defense for the atrocities perpetrated by terrorists happening around the world, however we can do much to demonstrate that America is a place where people of all ethnic and religious backgrounds can live in harmony.
A huge part of that might be to stop attacking Muslim countries and killing their people, and to stop our police from shooting black people in the back or severing their spinal cords.
Just a thought.
P.S. Just a note in case I did not make myself clear. Killing people because they draw a picture of your prophet is never a reasonable response. My point was that if we were not also raining down death on innocent Muslims from the skies in Pakistan and other places, perhaps there would be fewer folks willing to kill over a cartoon.
