Margaret Halsey Quotes
This year's blasphemy is next year's liberating truth.
Halsey, Margaret. The Pseudo-Ethic. Simon and Schuster, 1963, p. 27.
Marlette was inundated by complaints from Muslims for his 2002 cartoon depiction of Muhammad driving a Ryder rental truck like the one used by convicted Oklahoma City terrorist bomber, Timothy McVeigh. The caption was, “What would Muhammad drive?” He was front-page news in Saudi Arabia and other Islamic nations. He received death threats. The Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Muslim World League both demanded an apology. Marlette refused. When he was killed in an automobile crash in July of 2007, many Muslims believed that this was the retribution of Allah.
Many Arab orthodox Muslims would be terribly angry and insulted if Islam or key elements of it were insulted. To them this was obscene. Culturally, sarcastic comedic attacks and insults in general are not common in Arab culture. Making fun of Islam or the Prophet was unheard of. Under Sharia (Islamic Law) this is heresy and must be stopped, with the heretic put to death. In the early 21st century, the Internet and other modern communications exposed Muslims to the West in a level of detail that had been unknown before. Satirical TV shows like South Park and political and social cartooning in Western countries sometimes made fun of Islam and Muhammad, and militant Muslims would exploit these situations to produce huge protests including violent attacks on Westerners or interests of the countries where these “offences” took place. With little or no understanding of freedom of speech, many Arabs saw governments that would “allow” such satire as attacking and wanting to destroy Islam.
The Vatican Congregation of the Index had banned Greene’s Book, The Power and the Glory. See {598544}.
Islamic modernists like Serageldin are many among the educated Muslims but their views are often drowned out by the violence and extremist statements of the fundamentalists.
In some universities would sometimes protest the selection of a commencement speaker and demonstrate. On some of these occasions the school administration withdrew the invitation. In addition to the problem described by Beckel, the university sells out its basic intellectual commitment to hear all ideas and points of view—regardless of how repugnant or evil. Commencement speakers tend to create a bigger problem because of the custom of the university granting the speaker an Honorary Degree. Whereas it is against the academic tradition to censor a speaker and having a speaker does NOT associate the University, the faculty or the students with the views of the speaker. But the granting of the Honorary Degree does imply an institutional approval and admiration of the speaker, and that is fair game for student protest. However in the beginning of the 21st century some extreme left wing students succeeded in intimidating spineless university administrators and trustees into censoring speech and the ideas of the speaker. This was typical behavior of the right wing brownshirts of the 1930s when it was the Fascists who were prohibiting certain speakers—usually left wingers. 80 years later it was the left wing extremists engaging in this undemocratic behavior.
Margaret Halsey was an American writer who lived in the United Kingdom for a short time. Her first book With Malice Toward Some (1938) grew out of her experiences there. It was a witty and humorous bestseller, selling 600,000 copies. It won one of the early National Book Awards: the Most Original Book of 1938, voted by members of the American Booksellers Association.
