The Fashionable New Cowardice

Without anyone really noticing, cowardice has overtaken the American public square, and is now widely retailed as if it were the sensible, proper response to violent Muslim intimidation.

Last week Newsday ran an opinion piece about Pamela Geller’s pro-freedom American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) ad in the New York subways: “Anti-jihad ads in subway may be legal, but they lack street-smarts,” by Joseph Dolman. And how exactly did the ads lack “street smarts”? Dolman says of Geller: “As a New Yorker who was present in Manhattan on 9/11, I can promise you, I don’t like jihadists any more than she does.” Then he adds: “But is it really wise to bait them? Right now? After what has happened in Egypt, Libya and Lower Manhattan (more than once)?”

In other words, if Muslims react violently to something, then the proper response of non-Muslims is not to stand up and condemn their bloody madness, and resist it by all possible means, but to practice self-censorship so as not to offend them.

[link to atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com]