Inciting to violence

Bookworm Room on the Cartoon Network Mohammed fiasco.

In the old days, the notion of incitement to violence examined whether the speaker literally incited violence.  For example, the speaker might say to the crowd "Kill the President" or "Kill the Congress person" or "Kill all the meter maids" or something equally incendiary.  The threat of violence wasn't implicit in the speech; it was explicit.  No civilized society could countenance speech that simply and directly inflamed blood lust.  We in America have always been willing to trade in the world of ideas, but the civil contract demands that we stop short of demanding someone's head on a pike.

We've now entered a brave new world that redefines "incitement to violence" away from its traditional meaning of explicit demands for blood, death or revolution.  Now, "incitement to violence" includes speech or images that hurt someone's feelings or offend their sensibilities.  As a society, we used to say that it was just tough if someone's sensitivities were roughed up by speech that falls far short of calling for that person's (or someone else's) blood.  We recognized that our civil contract — our constitutional contract — requires for its health resilient people who can deal with hurt feelings.

Now, however, we see our media and political outlets repeatedly defining as incitement speech that lacks any calls for violence but that merely makes the crazy man angry.  Where we would once police the crazy man, we now police ourselves.  Everything we say must be run through the filter of "will it make the crazy man angry?"

What's even worse (I'm at my second point, now), is that we're out-sharia-ing sharia, and caving, not to the demands of the moderates, but to the extremists.  (Frankly, we've become such a PC, identity-politics obsessed culture that we'd cave to moderates too if we felt it would spare the feelings of someone defined as a victim in the PC lexicon.)  The wholesale ban on any Mohamed images whatsoever is an extremist ban.  Take for example this truly beautiful medieval painting, which I got from a pre-911 book...

...Not only is it beautiful, it's also a picture of Mohamed.  The swaddled little baby in the far left corner, with his face fully revealed, cradled in the arms of two loving angels, is Mohamed himself.  Some medieval Muslim, inspired by Christian iconography surrounding the birth of Christ, painted this reverential scene of Mohamed's birth.