©Jack Cashill
WND.com - October 1, 2014

The discussion about the Oklahoma beheading by MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry and her like-minded panelists this past Sunday has already ascended to the level folklore for its astonishing empty headedness.

The idea that a Muslim did the beheading, they all agreed, should not have been “the relevant piece of information.” Said the comically self-righteous Harris-Perry, “It is a story that I read as a workplace violence story.”

Panelist Negin Farsad, an actual comedian of sorts, hoped for a cultural paradigm shift that would make it “not okay” to suggest a “linkage” between Muslims and violence. Harris-Perry suggested a new stereotype, namely that Muslims are funny. They all laughed.

The joke, I am afraid, is on them. As the Danish cartoonist and other satirists like South Parker’s Trey Parker and Matt Stone have learned the hard way, Muslims don’t take a joke the way, say, Mormons do.

They don’t think their beliefs are funny, and they have zero tolerance for progressives who think they are. Europeans have known this for at least ten years.

Progressive Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh was fully ecumenical in his satirical assaults. He had once referred to Jesus Christ as “that rotten fish of Nazareth” and was not above ridiculing the Holocaust.

In the language of the artistic left, this great grand-nephew of artist Vincent Van Gogh was admirably “transgressive.”

Van Gogh had, however, become increasingly concerned that the range of subjects one could safely transgress was narrowing, and it was not Christians or Jews who were doing the narrowing.

Rather, a growing and increasingly vocal Muslim population was turning “the most tolerant country in Europe” into something considerably less.

Van Gogh was not the first to register his concern publicly. That honor belonged to an openly gay university professor and former member of the left wing Dutch Labor Party, the fearless and flamboyant politico Pim Fortuyn.

Fortuyn attacked multiculturalism, the welfare state, and the “backward culture” of Islam. This did not set well in certain quarters, Islamic and progressive.

In May 2002, for instance, the editors of the Arab News denounced Fortuyn as a “bigot” and “an unashamed Islamophobe.” They did so on the occasion of Fortuyn’s assassination at the hands of Volkert van der Graaf, a Dutch animal rights activist who shared their opinion.

According to van der Graaf, a good progressive himself, he shot Fortuyn to “prevent much harm to vulnerable groups such as Muslims and illegal aliens.”

A friend of Fortuyn’s, Van Gogh teamed up with a brave young Somali immigrant named Ayaan Hirsi Ali to make a short film about the plight of Muslim women called Submission.

Hirsi Ali wrote the script. She knew her subject well. As a five year-old in Somalia she had been made “pure” by having her genitals cut out, a practice that was “always justified in the name of Islam.”

Also justified in the name of Islam were forced marriages and the complete submission of women to the will of their husbands. “I could never become an adult,” Hirsi Ali said of her life as a Muslim.

Even in the Netherlands, however, most Muslim women remained as trapped and as terrorized as they had been in their home countries.

Immigrant men and women tended to blame their plight on the Dutch. As Hirsi Ali saw it, the accusation of racism was a “strategic” gambit designed “to externalize the cause of their unhappiness.”

When she voiced these concerns to her friends on the left, however, they did not want to hear them. As in America, they were “blinded by multiculturalism.”

The events of September 11, 2001, failed to shake her leftist colleagues from their perverse faith. Like the MSNBC panelists, they refused to concede that the attack on America and the ensuing celebrations were intrinsic to Islam.

The more Hirsi Ali spoke about Islam, especially its ritualized abuse of women, the more threats she received from her co-religionists and the less support she got from her friends on the left.

In making Submission, Part 1 with Hirsi Ali, Van Gogh muted his urge to shock and stuck to the sobering script Hirsi Ali provided.

The artfully shot, ten-minute video tells the story of four young women, one flogged for committing adultery, another forced into a marriage with a loathsome man, a third beaten regularly by her husband, a fourth shunned by her family after her uncle rapes her—all of them abused according to the dictates of the Quran.

“The verdict that has killed my faith and love is in your holy book,” the narrator despairs as the sound of a whip is heard in the background. “Faith in you, submission to you, feels like self-betrayal.”

There would be no Submission, Part II. As Van Gogh bicycled to work on a November 2004 morning, a Dutch Muslim of Moroccan origin named Muhammad Bouyeri approached on a bicycle and shot him in broad daylight on an Amsterdam street.

Van Gogh fell off his bike and collapsed on the roadway. “Can’t we talk about this?” he asked his assassin as he lay wounded. He asked in vain. Bouyeri shot him four more times.

He then took out a butcher’s knife, slashed Van Gogh’s throat, and tried to sever his head. With a separate knife, he jammed a five-page letter onto Van Gogh’s chest.

The letter was addressed to Hirsi Ali. In it, Bouyeri lamented that Jews controlled the Netherlands and demanded jihad against the nation’s non-Muslims.

At the top of his hit list was Hirsi Ali. Her progressive friends having abandoned her, Hirsi Ali shucked what was left of her progressive beliefs and fled to America.

I would love to watch Harris-Perry try to convince Muhammad Bouyeri that gay marriage is cool or to convince Hirsi Ali that Muslims are amusing. Now that would be funny.

Webmaster's Note:  Jack Cashill’s newest book, You Lie!: The Evasions, Omissions, Fabrications, Frauds and Outright Falsehoods of Barack Obama, will be published next week.