A monumental event occurred on April 14th of this year. The first public showing of Edison’s kinetoscope, the moving picture ‘machine’ (1894)?
No, that was not monumental enough.
How about the anniversary of the shooting of President Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth?
Close, but sorry Lincoln, this one trumps it. On April 14th, 2010, free speech got on its knees and surrendered to fear and intimidation. It perished at the hands of Comedy Central.
That day marked the 200th episode of one of televisions most controversial shows, South Park. Created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone in 1997, South Park has had a reputation for pushing the boundary of what may be said on TV and who can be poked fun at. One episode features the word “sh*t” 162 times (and includes a counter at the corner of the screen for those counting along at home). In fact, a season 11 episode entitled “With Apologies to Jesse Jackson” used the n-word 43 times, uncensored.
Many may think this would lead to an outcry against the creators (who are white). However, the NAACP applauded South Park. Kovon and Jill Flowers, who started the NAACP-supported group “Abolish the N-Word”, defended the show. “This show, in its own comedic way, is helping people to educate the power of this word, and how it can feel to have hate language directed at you.”
There’s no doubt that South Park continues to be the pest of the politically correct. For the 200th episode, all the celebrities and international figures who they had made fun of over the past 14 seasons (from Tom Cruise to Barbara Streisand, to Mel Gibson and Paris Hilton) returned to exact revenge against the fictional town of South Park, Colorado.
To summarize, Tom Cruise is tired of being made fun of, so he wants to get the only person in the world who is invincible to ridicule: the Prophet Muhammad. He threatens to sue South Park unless they bring him Muhammad. The town is reluctant to bring in Muhammad out of fear of being bombed.
Now, I must mention that in a season five episode, Muhammad was shown, in cartoon form. However, this occurred long before the Danish cartoon controversy. So for this episode, a blacked out box represented Mohammed with “CENSORED” written across it. The other religious figures of the episode (Jesus Christ, Buddha, Krishna, Lao Tzu and Joseph Smith) are shown in full form.
The main characters of South Park ask this group of “Super Best Friends” to let them bring Muhammad to their town so they wont get sued by Tom Cruise. Buddha replies, “We simply cannot risk any violence from the Muslim people.” They agree on one solution. They will put Muhammad into a U-Haul truck, so as to not let anyone see him and still prove he is there, wearing a bear costume.
This episode ends with a cliffhanger. Muhammad is about to step out of the bear costume and show himself.
All this ridiculousness is par for the course for South Park. However, an ugly turn is taken for the conclusion of the episode. In the week following the first part, a radical Islamic website called Revolution Muslim posted a note claiming that Parker and Stone “will probably wind up like Theo van Gogh for airing this show”. Van Gogh was a Dutch filmmaker who was shot and stabbed to death in 2004 for a film he created that was critical of Islam. “This is not a threat but a warning of the reality of what will likely happen to them.”
Sounds like a threat to me.
Due in part to this response, Comedy Central replaced every mention of the word “Muhammad” with a bleep. Since when did Muhammad become a taboo word? For a show that had no problem in saying “sh*t” hundreds of times, bleeping “Muhammad” is mind-boggling. Comedy Central responded claiming that it was to protect the safety of its employees, which is a rational response.
But what most media is not covering when reporting on this story is what else Comedy Central censored out.
At the end of the episode, one character makes a speech, which according to Parker and Stone, was concerning “intimidation and fear”. Comedy Central bleeped out every single word of the 16-second monologue! Not only did this word not contain the word “Muhammad”, it also did not contain any of the usual bleeped out words: curse words.
For Comedy Central to not show Muhammad (despite doing so previously) is low. To bleep the word “Muhammad”, bowing to threats from a radical group, is lower. To censor a speech, about intimidation and fear, after doing the previous acts, is not only immoral and unconstitutional, it is painfully ironic.
Free speech must be protected. If Revolution Muslim can threaten (yes, it was a threat, no matter what they may claim) the creators and then stand behind the Second Amendment, then it should be no problem for those very same creators to say what they please. At least in their case, there is no potential for harm.
At one point during the show, a citizen of South Park stands up and says, “Maybe enough time has passed that now its ok to show Muhammad.”
Guess not.
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