Heck, I was vaguely waiting for there to be a big “gotcha!” reveal in which it turns out the costume was Zombie Jesus, not Muhammad, albeit with similar results.
I mean seriously, Zombie Muhammad? I don’t get it.
I didn’t realize that you think that most Christians in the US aren’t “particularly good at being” Christians.
That’s some fairly odd reasoning.
Would you mind explaining it.
That’s one way of looking at it.
Another way of looking at it is to say a member of group that often feels persecuted and vulnerable in America and are often reminded that they’re viewed as alien saw one of there more beloved historical figures being mocked in about the most vicious way possible.
Let’s pretend that rather than this being a case of a Muslim who tried to rip away the sign from a guy claiming to be “Zombie Muhammad” who had “come back to rape America” the case involved a white guy who decided to walk through Harlem dressed up as a Zombie Martin Luther King holding aloft a sign declaring “WHERE THE WHITE WOMEN AT” and shouting loudly “I want to rape white women! I want to rape white women! And I want watermelon, lots and lots of watermelon!”
Now, I could be wrong, but I suspect that the white guy might receive a vastly worse reception than the atheist did and might, depending on who he ran into even have put his life in jeopardy.
That aside, let’s pretend that some family man upon seeing this got angry and decided to try and rip away the sign from Zombie Martin Luther King and was arrested for “harassing” the Zombie Martin Luther King.
Would anyone really get upset about charges being dismissed against a black man who’d only pulled the sign away from the Zombie Martin Luther King and would anyone be upset about the judge referring to the supposed victim as “a dufus”.
Again, maybe I’m naive, but I seriously doubt that a black man who had been so severely provoked would be put in jail for merely pulling a racist sign out of someone’s hand. Even a fine, probation or community service would probably be a real stretch.
I have no interest in playing “Let’s pretend.” I can understand the judge throwing out the assault charge if the assault was minor enough. That’s probably not uncommon. I don’t know that it was that minor, but it’s possible. The judge not only threw out the charge, he laid the blame at the feet of the guy who was assaulted while ignoring the culpability of the person who committed the assault, and did so while bloviating about his knowledge of Islam and the seriousness of the blasphemy in other countries. While it’s punishable blasphemy elsewhere - something I am sure the zombie guy already knew because that’s pretty much the reason for his choice of costume - it’s most certainly protected speech in the U.S., and assault is illegal. Since I don’t think anyone else in the parade was lectured by the judge about their choice of costume, we’re left with a situation in which a guy was exercising his First Amendment rights, was assaulted by a passer-by, and was rewarded with a lecture on sensitivity only because he had the bad luck of being assaulted. And to top that off, the guy who attacked him wasn’t prosecuted.
Again, that’s if everything in this case was presented accurately.
It’s not “let’s pretend”.
It was a fairly apt analogy.
He grabbed the guy’s sign.
In fact, he wasn’t even charged with assault. He was charged with harassment.
And yes, if I decided to march through the South Side of Chicago holding aloft a sign that said “Fuck Niggers” and someone tried to pull the sign out of my hands, I doubt they’d wind up facing serious charges. Moreover, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if the judge in such a case decided to rip into me for carrying around the sign.
Except he wasn’t assaulted and Talaag wasn’t even charged with assault.
As for “exercising his First Amendment Rights”, correct, he was exercising them just as I’d be exercising them if I walked through the South Side of Chicago holding aloft a sign that proclaimed “fuck niggers”. And if someone yanked away the sign from me I doubt they’d wind up being prosecuted. In fact, I suspect they could do a lot more than just yank the sign out of my hand without getting prosecuted.
The guy would be an asshole and if he was attacked (with no permanent harm done), my sympathies would be with the attacker. The judgment should be against the attacker. Period.
Do you think a judge would actually sentence a black man who ripped such a sign out of Zombie Martin Luther King’s hand or do you think it’s more likely the case would simply be dismissed?
If ripping the sign away legally qualifies as assault, and I’ve no idea if it does or not, then he should be found guilty. Whether he would be depends on the judge. I would say the same if a gay or a family member of a dead U.S. soldier being laid to rest did this to a Phelps- if ripping the sign is illegal, it’s illegal. My guess would be that if he were found guilty, he’d get the lightest possible penalty.
Judges have to give penalties they don’t feel like giving all the time. Some even enter their “I wish I had a choice on this, but the law is the law” statement into the verdict.
Anyway…
The problem with the analogy is that it sucks: it departs from reality in ways that are intended to make the act look even more provocative and the harassment more understandable. The hypothetical sign would probably qualify as fighting words or hate speech, and dressing as Muhammad does not. And they didn’t march through the Muslim equivalent of the South Side of Chicago either. They were in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. The costume wasn’t hate speech or a slur on anyone, it just violated a teaching of a religion Perce doesn’t belong to and feels no obligation to observe. I see no evidence the paraders sought out Muslims, and I’m guessing there aren’t many Muslims in Mechanicsburg, an almost entirely white town. In fact it sounds like Talaag Elbayomy just happened to find himself at the parade route, and then decided he had to do something about the guy dressed as Muhammad. So that provocative aspect of your analogy also doesn’t apply to the real world situation.
Meanwhile it sounds like Perce has gotten himself into more trouble by releasing audio from the trial. So it remains a distinct possibility that he’s a confrontational asshole.
Hate speech is protected by the First Amendment and fighting words have to be directed an individual. Beyond that, Chaplinsky V. New Hampshire aside, the concept of punishing people for “fighting words” seems to be dead law though SCOTUS hasn’t overruled it.
The closest I’ve seen to anything like that is that people who are provoked are usually given dramatically more latitude when charged with assault or something similar than those who aren’t.
Once again, hate speech is protect and beyond that the same could be said for someone who decided to walk around dressed up as a Zombie Martin Luther King shouting aloud about how he’d come back for the purpose of raping white women.
If no depictions of Muhammad are allowed under Islam, how did the Muslim guy even know that Zombie M. got it right? Judge should have asked him how accurately he portrayed Muhammad, and how he knew it was accurate, seems to me. If the Muslim guy didn’t know, and he couldn’t have, then the judge should have told him “You could have let it go, then. Maybe the guy looked nothing like Muhammad.”
Here is an account that purports to have been written by the judge in the case. As far as I know, it has not been independently verified, but it offers a different perspective on the matter.
So, we start with a lame attempt at “humor.”
We next get a guy who really does need to be educated in American pluralism.
Then we get a rather stupid court case in which a guy who is pretty clearly guilty of assault is charged, instead, with harrassment.
It goes to a judge who looks over the evidence and decides that the harrassment charge is mostly a “he said vs he said” claim and dismisses the charge.
The judge then decides to lecture the victim of the assault, (for reasons known only to the judge).
The assault victim then decides to play a tape of the court case while proclaiming that the judge “did this” or “said that” when a playing of the (tedious and often muffled) tape demonstrates that much of what he claims the judge said is only in his imagination. (It was pretty amazing, to me, how much of Perce V’s commentary on what was being said was in remarkable disagreement from the voices actually playing in the recording. He seemed to make up a lot of what he was claiming was on the tape.)
Suddenly, we have a war by or against Islam.
I’m not buying it.
Talaag Elbayomy definitely needs to learn that he now lives in a pluralistic society and that he is going to encounter insults to his religion to which he may not respond except in kind. Attacking people is illegal, regardless of one’s hurt feelings.
The Mechanicsburg police (or the local prosecutor) need to figure out how to bring a charge of simple assault when that occurs, rather than trying to come up with a charge of “harrassment” when there is insufficient evidence to support it.
Ernest Perce V needs to stop pretending that he is the victim of some major Muslim conspiracy and stop twisting and misrepresenting the words of other people. (It is possible that he might also want to get permission to tape trial proceedings–something that is extremely rare–before he actually does it rather than lying about it afterward.)
That’s a nicely worded and reasoned response from the Judge. I’d have to go back to the video but I thought I heard the arresting officer state that the defendant admitted the assault so I’m confused as to the legal argument here.
The charge brought was harrassment, not assault.
We’d need to know the wording of the law on harrassment in PA to know whether testimony of assault covers it. The judge specifically mentions that there was no evidence or testimony that the assaulter was following the victim around, so that might play a part in his decision.
Talaag admitted to trying to pull the sign away from him. Whether that legally constitutes assault or not in the State of Pennsylvania I don’t know.
The DA, who is in a vastly better position than us and has access to far more information than we do didn’t think it constituted assault.
I’m reminded of another thread from several months ago where Dio was screaming about a Catholic girl “assaulting” a student who was trying to remove the Eucharist. It turns out she’d merely grabbed him by the wrist as he’d started to rush out of there and said “no, you have to consume it here or leave.”
Virtually everybody on the thread, myself included, ridiculed Dio’s argument and pointed out that campus security and the police determined no assault took place. Dio became increasingly hysterical and several people repeated invoke “the Dio show” mocking his arguments that the girl should have been arrested for assault.
Hopefully none of the people complaining about the Muslim family man getting away with assault were ridiculing Dio for his ideas regarding the girl “assaulting” the student trying to leave with what Dio colorfully termed “the magic Jesus cracker”.
Considering the foam sign wasn’t damaged it seems like the carrier was making a lot out of nothing. There was some mention about both of them seeking out the police so it may have been a matter of getting the upper hand over the “assaulter”.
Enough of this amazingly ridiculous attempt to confuse the issue. No one is questioning if there are assholes in the world, nor if some asshole might be so offensive as to get an deserved (even if illegal) beating. Nope. No one is arguing that. Got that, Inbred. Good.
Now, people are criticizing the fact that there’s one religion that thinks that the slightest insult of the subject of their justifies violence. I don’t know how you or anyone can defend that stupidity. I’m offended by a friggin’costume: I must beat someone. The Koran was burned: Christians must be killed. Muhammad was drawn in cartoon form. DEATH to the infidels! I know this sound like a Southpark episode, but it’s not. It’s ten times more absurd than that. What’s next, killing someone for thinking bad thought about their precious prophet? Well, I’m thinking some outrageous shit right now—HA. And Muhammad seems to be really enjoying it!
So, at the very least, try to stay on point and compare religious assholes to religious assholes who kill at the slightest imagined provocation. If you think there’s parity, please provide a scorecard. Otherwise, embrace reality and accept that the way many embrace Islam clashes with the beliefs of the civilized.
This seems right. It is not a case of some individual asshole, there appears to be a real phenomenon in which certain subsections of the Islamic population react to religious insults with violence. (Nobody is making some ridiculous claim about all Muslims.) I’m a pretty tolerant dude, but this is a line-in-the-sand issue. Blasphemy is not a crime here and people should absolutely not be any more cautious about insulting Islam than any other religion.
However, this case is quite different from the one in Afghanistan. There, an occupying force did something extremely culturally offensive. If some primarily-Muslim force were occupying some part of the US and started burning Bibles, I’d imagine there would be a pretty strong reaction.
So don’t question the courts because they know better?
That sounds like assault to me. It’s not based on who would win if it was a full-out fistfight.