If you missed the story, here's what happened. Some idiot decided to hold a Mohammed drawing contest in Garland, Texas. Two other idiots decided to start shooting. The idiots were killed before they did anything except wound a security guard. ISIS is claiming credit for getting two idiots killed for no good reason.
I've seen a couple of general reactions to this incident. On one hand, there are the people speaking out against provoking Muslims by drawing Mohammed. On the other hand, there are people who seem to think this was the first battle in the war to take back America from the Muslims.
My first reaction is that I'm glad to see the cops shooting people who are actually armed for a change. In this case, they did their duty well.
I have no respect for Pamela Geller, the idiot who organized the event. This wasn't a case of someone involved in thoughtful political satire in order to make a point. She was agitating. She obviously has the right to agitate in America, but I don't respect the way she did it. To me, she's like the Westboro Baptist Church picketing funerals or those open-carry fairies taking their rifles into restaurants. She's exercising her rights in a ridiculous manner.
On the other hand, this is America, a more-or-less civilized nation dedicated to the idea of individual liberty. Being more-or-less civilized means that we if we don't like the way someone is expressing their rights, we don't just shoot them. The use of deadly force is limited to the protection of life, not the protection of feelings.
In this case, the two people who decided to try to shoot up the drawing contest were in a whole different class of idiot. They weren't exercising a civilized right. They were trying to scare other people, including you and me, into not exercising our rights. They essentially launched an attack on the entire idea of civilized society. If the two terrorist wannabes had held a "Draw the Pamela" contest, that would have been fine, and they would be alive today instead of being dead idiots.
They were even more idiotic to try this in Texas. Our Texan police might be lacking in brain power and morals, but if you make them angry, they will fuck you up. Even if the police hadn't been there, I'm pretty certain there were some armed Texans at the event who would gladly, almost gleefully, have killed the gunmen themselves.
This brings us to the real idiots in this case. ISIS. By claiming credit for this abortive attack on free speech, they seem to think they're going to frighten America into thinking that we face an imminent threat, and that we'd better start respecting ISIS if we know what's good for us.
That's not going to work here. Okay, it will work on a few Americans, but only the really stupid ones, the kind who see fluoridated water and climatology as imminent threats or the ones who view feelings as an endangered species.
But for the rest of us, ISIS made itself look stupid in addition to looking barbaric. They claimed credit for a totally failed operation, and no good American is going to respect that. All ISIS has done is prove that American civilization, despite having plenty of flaws, is still far better than the savage, head-chopping caliphate that ISIS envisions.
We have to back that up of course. Right now there are some people in America thinking how easy it would be to start threatening American Muslims, to show groups like ISIS that terroristic violence can cut both ways.
Don't.
You can't just claim that your society is morally superior to others. Talk is cheap. You have to demonstrate the superiority through your actions. If anyone in America decides to start terrorizing American Muslims as some sort of half-assed retaliation for the attack in Garland, they would be no better than those two dead idiots who launched that attack in the first place. They would be no better than ISIS. They would be surrendering rather than "fighting back".
Americans should stand tall, not slither. Respect each others' rights, just like we want our rights respected, even if it means respecting the rights of people you don't like. That kind of disciplined, moral behavior is what keeps the wheels of American civilization turning.
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