Free Frank Warner

The South Park message: Anti-Mormon bigots, grow up

If you engage in the lazy bigotry of making fun of Mormons, you might ask yourself if, in mixed company, you speak the same way about other religions.

And if there is a religion you don’t make fun of, you might ask yourself why. After all, every religion has at least one fundamental article of faith that defies reason and logic. Then again, if you make fun of all people of faith, if you feel good calling them narrow-minded and stupid, you might look in the mirror for the moron with the narrow mind.

That old South Park cartoon episode, “All About Mormons,” summed up my philosophy toward the people who imagine themselves morally and intellectually superior to Mormons.

High and mighty. In that show, which highlighted the Mormons’ many irrational beliefs, young Stan has fun hanging out with Gary, the new Mormon kid in South Park Elementary School, but Stan still decides to shun Gary because it just isn’t cool to associate with a Mormon.

Gary figures it out. He finally tells Stan:

Look, maybe us Mormons do believe in crazy stories that make absolutely no sense, and maybe Joseph Smith did make it all up, but I have a great life and a great family, and I have the Book of Mormon to thank for that. The truth is, I don’t care if Joseph Smith made it all up, because what the church teaches now is loving your family, being nice and helping people. And even though people in this town might think that’s stupid, I still choose to believe in it. All I ever did was try to be your friend, Stan, but you’re so high and mighty you couldn’t look past my religion and just be my friend back. You’ve got a lot of growing up to do, buddy. Suck my balls.

That says it.

Frank Warner

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Update: CNN's John King calls Romney "Governor Mormon."

61% of Americans believe Osama bin Laden is in Hell

So Osama bin Laden does have a direct link to Saddam Hussein!

Is bin Laden in Hell?

Yes: 61 percent.
No: 10 percent.
Don't believe in Hell. 5 percent.
Not sure: 24 percent.

Frank Warner

Salmon Rushdie to Jon Stewart: You want me dead?

Salmon Rushdie was at least a little surprised that Jon Stewart’s “Rally for Sanity” three days ago gave a prominent role to the former Cat Stevens (Now Yusuf Islam), who has said Rushdie should be killed because he wrote a book that offended Muslims.

Today Rushdie managed to speak with Stewart, and he reported to Nick Cohen on the conversation:

I spoke to Jon Stewart about Yusuf Islam's appearance. He said he was sorry it upset me, but really, it was plain that he was fine with it. Depressing.

I guess it’s “Sanity” to give a stage to the friends of oppression.

Frank Warner

The Sistine Chapel is yours

Click here to see the wonder that Michelangelo left us. I don't think I understood how beautifully he painted the Sistine Chapel until I saw this virtual tour.

Frank Warner

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Canadian-Iranian gets 20 years in prison for blogging his conscience

When a government claims it is guided by God, it tends to be tough on those who challenge its repression. Hossein Derakhshan blogged against Iran’s theocratic dictatorship. For exercising his human right to free expression, the dictators have sentenced the 35-year-old to 20 years in prison.

Derakhshan should be running for office in free elections, and the Iranian regime should be in prison. Punishing Derakhshan is a crime against humanity.

Frank Warner

Burhan Hanif, friend of tyranny, advises Australia to ‘shun democracy’

Burhan Hanif, who apparently is British, today told a conference in Australia that democracy gets in the way of Allah’s will.

“We must adhere to Islam and Islam alone,” Mr Hanif told about 500 participants attending the convention in Lidcombe [western Sydney].

“We should not be conned or succumb to the disingenuous and flawed narrative that the only way to engage politically is through the secular democratic process. It is prohibited and haram.”

He said democracy was incompatible with Islam because the Koran insisted Allah was the sole lawmaker, and Muslim political involvement could not be based on “secular and erroneous concepts such as democracy and freedom.”

Self-appointed despots. And just who would interpret the will of Allah to decide what is acceptable and what is haram? According to Hanif, the decision-making would be by a small, but all-powerful group of unelected men who claim to know everything better than all other people.

That kind of hellish dictatorial thinking got 262 million people killed in the 20th century, and that doesn’t count the wars, most of which were started because totalitarians wanted to snuff out individual freedom.

If Hanif enjoys oppression, perhaps he should hire someone to lock him up. No one would miss his bad ideas.

Frank Warner

‘Islam will dominate’ graffiti closes case: Free speech must not be regulated

Free speech, even offensive free speech, must remain free.

If there was ever any doubt about it, consider the case in Britain in which a man sprayed-painted a war memorial with the words “Islam will dominate the world,” “Osama is on his way,” and “Kill Gordon Brown.”

Tohseef Shah, 21, the criminal who wrote the graffiti in Burton-upon-Trent, was allowed to go free last week after the Crown Prosecution Service’s Counter Terrorism Division in London decided not charge him with a religiously related hate crime because, the CTD said, the act was not religiously motivated.

‘Islam’ not religion? How is spraying graffiti that “Islam will dominate the world” not religiously motivated? Obviously, it is. But under the whim of law enforcers last week, “Islam” has nothing to do with religion. Don’t even try to figure that out.

Nevertheless, it was the right decision for free speech. Tohseef “The Idiot” Shah should not be penalized for the “Islam” words. He should be punished for the paint. (And he was.)

To most reasonable people, free speech refers to all expressions, except for threats (unambiguously saying “I’m going to kill you”) and hazardous hoaxes (yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater that isn’t burning). Free speech must be protected. Without that protection, all freedom ends.

The law as hate. The words “Islam will dominate the world” might offend someone, but they hurt no one in any real sense. Shah should not face a greater punishment for vandalism related to a religious bias than for vandalism related to any other motive.

Unfortunately that’s not the way it is. Britain has laws against hate crimes, and Canada even has tyrannical censor boards to punish free speech that occasionally looks like hate to them.

This case reveals that the real hatred and the real crime are in these totalitarian anti-speech laws. Time after time, Britain and Canada use the courts and “Human Rights Tribunals” to torture once-free people whose only offense is to give harmless offense.

* In Britain last year, a tribunal awarded a Muslim police officer 10,000 pounds (about $15,000) because a West Midlands police recruiter said the officer’s beard reminded him of bin Laden’s and made fun of Islam.

* In Canada in 2008, writer Mark Steyn was put through a costly legal wringer for publishing a article that some Muslims alleged exposed them to hatred and contempt. The Canadian “Human Rights Commission” and the British Columbia “High Rights Tribunal” dismissed the charges, but only after the censor boards were exposed by a free press as tools of despotism.

Double standard. Meanwhile, in Britain and Canada, criminals whose allies cut off the heads of their democratic enemies are shielded from hate-crime laws even when their acts fit even the strictest definition of hatred, bigotry, contempt and malice.

And “Kill Gordon Brown”? Kill the prime minister? How about that idea? The laws and law enforcers of Britain are so perverse that those words weren’t even reviewed as a potential crime.

Frank Warner

Mosab Hassan Yousef: The ultimate iconoclast

You've got to love people who go totally against the grain to do some good. Mosab Hassan Yousef may have taken iconoclasm to the limit.

Now 32, Mosab is the son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef, a founder and leader of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. Throughout the last decade, from the second Intifada to the current stalemate, he worked alongside his father in the West Bank. During that time the younger Mr. Yousef also secretly embraced Christianity. And as he reveals in his book "Son of Hamas," out this week, he became one of the top spies for Israel's internal security arm, the Shin Bet.

The news of this double conversion has sent ripples through the Middle East. ...

Mr. Yousef traces his awakening to his first sustained exposure to Hamas cruelty. In 1996, he was arrested by the Israelis for buying weapons. He says he was beaten and tortured badly in custody. It was then that the Shin Bet approached him. He says he thought about becoming a double agent. "I wanted revenge on Israel," he writes. But when he was sent to serve his term at the Megiddo prison in northern Israel, he says he was more shocked by the way the maj'd, Hamas's security wing, dealt with other prisoners.

"Every day, there was screaming; every night, torture. Hamas was torturing its own people!"

This is an amazing story, starting with its startling title: "They Need to Be Liberated From Their God." Read the whole thing.

Frank Warner

‘Big Love,’ polygamy and politics

“Big Love” is back on HBO, and its first two shows this year have been as good as its earlier seasons. Check it out. It’s about Mormons and Mormon sects, and it focuses on one Utah family led by a man and his three wives.

My prediction: By the end of this “Big Love” season, the legalization of polygamy will be an active political issue in real-life America. In fact, National Geographic already is covering the debate with glorious color pictures.

With “Big Love,” more people will be asking why polygamy is illegal when there is no law against a man having children with several women and abandoning them all.

Free choice. To me, polygamy seems undemocratic. But when adults consent to it, I’m not sure I can make a good case that it should be against the law.

Frank Warner

Pope Pius XII was libeled

If Continental Europe had a hero of human rights against Adolf Hitler in the early 1940s, it was Pope Pius XII. It would be difficult to find another leader who spoke against the Nazis' racist policies so clearly while living within a few hundred yards of the Gestapo.

Yet one intentionally slanderous book, "Hitler's Pope," made its author rich in 1999 by poisoning the memory of this brave man. The controversy has returned, as Pope Benedict XVI considers naming Pius XII a saint.

For a little perspective, I suggest everyone interested go to a library and look up The New York Times microfilm for what Pius XII said publicly on the Christmases of 1941 and 1942.

There was a reason the Nazis called him "the Jews' pope."

Frank Warner