God help us, but this is could be the future of Tea-Bagging.
Via Talking Points Memo: Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard’s home was invaded by a 28-year old Somali man armed with an axe and a knife last Friday. Westergaard’s grandson was spending the night and the two fled to a purpose-built safe room and were not harmed. Aarhus police responded and ended up shooting the attacker through the knee and hand. Officially, Danish police are calling the assault a terrorist attack, due to the assailant’s ties to the Somali group al-Shabaab, which is thought to be affiliated with al-Qaida.
Westergaard was a target because he created an infamous political cartoon depicting Muhammed with a bomb-turban. Well, more sucinctly, Westergaard was a target because he drew a picture. His picture was actually one of twelve depictions of Muhammed, published on same page of the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten on September 30, 2005, specifically to address the taboos surrounding the criticism of Islam in the media and media self-censorship, in general. Visual depictions of Muhammaded are typically considered blasphemous by devout Muslims and the publication of the editorial cartoon resulted in death threats against the cartoonists, rewards for the heads of the cartoonists, torched embassies, and protests with three-digit body-counts.
And now one of the cartoonists is attacked with an axe in his home — five years later. I remember when I was in high school and Salman Rushdie was hiding from the fatwah issued by the Ayatollah Kohmeni over his novel, The Satanic Verses. My plan at the time was to become a novelist and I found this situation both surreal and terrifying — a guy had a significant portion of the world’s population out to kill him because he wrote a book they didn’t like. But time passed and Rushdie eventually emerged into daylight again and most people (including me) basically forgot all about it.
It definitely didn’t go away, though. If anything, things have become much, much worse over the last two decades. The type of people who are most likely to actually murder people who disagree with them are more radicalized than ever. Case in point, Dutch director (and great-great grandson of Vincent van Gogh’s brother Theo) Theo van Gogh was asassinated in 2004 — literally shot off his bicycle, stabbed, then nearly decapitated by an attacker allegedly motivated by the remarks of a Dutch Imam — all over a ten-minute film which addressed the abuse of Muslim women.
This kind of craziness begins with a difference of opinion, is exploited by demagogues, and eventually results in armed psychotics hurting real people. It’s impossible for me to consider this situation without thinking of the Teabag Crazies. These nutbags are whipped into a frenzy by the screamers at Fox and AM radio, then strap on their guns to protest healthcare for kids who live in different zip codes and might be a different color. These are people who consistently vote against their own self-interest and consider themselves morally superior for doing so. That is a pretty good working definition for insanity. Eventually one of these freaks is going to absorb one Glenn Beck rant too many and start shooting. Oh, wait that already happened.
