Molly Norris no longer exists. But she isn’t dead. She decided that she values her life more than her name. After receiving death threads and continued harassment, the FBI counseled her to erase her identity and start life over. Her former editor described it as akin to going into the witness protection program, except Uncle Sam doesn’t foot the bill. So ends, in unnecessarily ironic fashion, another flare-up in the struggle between religious tyranny and civil humanism.
It all began with a joke. That’s what these sorts of things are inevitably called when they go horribly wrong. A Seattle cartoonist named Molly Norris was upset after Comedy Central decided to censor an episode of South Park because it contained depictions of the Islamic prophet Muhammed, which had offended some Muslims and resulted in death threats.
Norris decided that she would respond by defying the censorship, and used her position as a cartoonist for the Seattle Weekly to draw and disseminate her own cartoon depictions of Muhammed, which is exactly what she did on April 20 of this year. The other local media picked it up, and she enjoyed a stir of publicity. To build on her newfound momentum, Norris declared that May 20 would be “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day.”
She had no idea what she was getting into.
Death threats are a fact of life for anyone in the public limelight who does anything remotely controversial, or, alternatively, is provocative in any way. Markos gets death threats all the time, many of which are published in his Saturday hate mail. But, as you can imagine, most death threats are just noise. Some of them, however, are not, and that gap of uncertainty can scare the hell out of a person. It sure scared the hell out of Molly Norris. As her cartoon was carried around the world upon the fleeting waves of the daily news cycle, she attracted tremendous opposition…including the death threats.
Drawing Muhammed is an offense to Islamic sensibilities. It is a harassment of the followers of that religion. All else aside, you probably shouldn’t do it unless you have a good reason. But Molly Norris did have a good reason: South Park had been censored, and its creators threatened with death, for doing exactly the same thing. It was an overreaction, either way you look at it: The Comedy Central people overreacted by censoring their show, and the Islamists making the death threats had overreacted, too--that is, unless you buy their argument that the visual depiction of Muhammed really is a crime worthy of death.
Norris declared “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” because she wanted Americans to exercise their right to free speech. As the controversy intensified, she stood by that claim and insisted she harbored no enmity toward Muslims generally. That’s probably true. From what I was able to read of her website (which has long since been erased from the Internet), she was a liberal dilettante who kicked a hornet‘s nest to complain against their propensity to sting humans, thinking they wouldn‘t string her because she had acted out of ethical conviction rather than malice. She was foolish in her rationale, but even more foolish in assuming that the Islamic response would be reasonable.
As things got hotter for her, she finally renounced “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day.” She adopted the mantle of religious sensitivity and apologized profusely for offending anybody. She was running scared. But her antagonists were not the type to cease their pursuit of her after she surrendered and disavowed any interest in free speech once her personal security was on the line. No, they smelled blood. And the threats persisted, and grew even worse, and finally the FBI told Molly Norris that it would be best if she erased her identity.
This is the part where many people would include some kind of platitude about how Islam is not a monolith and cannot be judged by the actions of its most extreme followers. They may even go so far as to embrace the “No True Scotsman” logical fallacy and declare that “no true Muslim” would be a violent radical, and that Islam itself is indeed the “religion of peace” its public relations people make it out to be.
Not me. As an anti-religious, secular humanist myself, I can look upon all religions with equal opportunity distaste. Islam is not a religion of peace any more than Christianity is. Islam is whatever its living followers want it to be, and, as we in the dKos community have begun to learn from our own experiences in political activism, it is the activists who make the most difference. The difference between “activist” and “radical” is little more than subjective; maybe we’d say that extremism begins with the threat of physical violence or defiance of the law, but a fundamentalist Muslim could just as logically conclude that extremism begins with the willful desecration of one of Islam’s holiest figures. We all have our own cultural point of view. Islam is certainly not a monolith--no social institution can be--but its most influential activists are monolithic in their opposition to some of my own ideals for what a society ought to aspire to be. They are gung-ho about violating human rights in a way that eerily reminds me of Christianity’s long rampage through the darkness of the Middle Ages. They certainly terrified Molly Norris.
Honest criticism of non-Christian religions tends to get lost in the din of right-wing bigotry. Our own homegrown Christian radicals say that Muslims are all a bunch of terrorists who worship a fake god and want to destroy freedom, and those kinds of all-encompassing generalizations suck up all the oxygen from those who have legitimate, meaningful criticisms to make about Islam (or any other non-Christian religion). As if that weren’t bad enough, fundamentalist Muslims are as unashamedly proactive in thrusting their interests upon the social scene as fundamentalist Christians are, with the result being recent diaries like this one taking increasingly unbelievable stances in open contempt of our rights and liberties.
These crazies are the proverbial rock to Christian conservatism’s hard place. With Islamic activists asserting that any criticism of Islam is bigotry (and scores of naïve “multiculturalists“ coming out in support of them), and with the Christian activists providing endless supplies of anti-Islamic bigotry, it’s becoming a very strange time to be a secularist in this country.
Molly Norris learned that the hard way.
Extra Links:
These links relate to the Norris story:
http://blog.seattlepi.com/...
http://www.seattleweekly.com/...
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/...