The Abandonment Of Molly Norris

“There is no more Molly.”

I think that was one of the more depressing news headlines I’ve ever read. There’s a very good chance that you don’t know who Molly Norris is. That’s because it is part of our mainstream news media culture that people like imam Faisal Abdul Rauf are painted as victims because a large majority of Americans oppose his Ground Zero mosque. But few people know who Molly Norris is because her story doesn’t fit the preferred narrative.

Molly Norris is a Seattle area artist and the creative mind behind “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day.” After a few artists were threatened with death for daring to draw caricatures of the Islamic prophet Mohammed, and after Comedy Central censored its own programming so as not to run afoul of Islam, she proposed that everybody should create and publish their own interpretations of Mohammed, reasoning that if death threats created more blasphemers than they managed to frighten away, the threats would lose their power and the imams behind them would be left impotent. As demonstrated by Comedy Central and just about every newspaper and broadcast news outlet, nothing gains respect for a religion better than a credible threat of violence. Molly Norris sought to disarm the terrorists.

But today, Molly Norris is in hiding because imam Anwar al-Awlak, an American born Muslim who now operates his own terror network out of Yemen, pronounced a death penalty upon Ms. Norris for her own “Everybody draw Mohammed Day” cartoon, which she drew to show that she was willing to put her own cajones where her mouth was.

It’s worth taking a trip down memory lane to learn who imam Anwar al-Awlak is. All you need to know can be found in the New York Times. The New York Times is widely considered the voice of our self-anointed cognitive elites. The Times editorial board views itself as America’s scold in chief, forever pointing its bony finger of indignation at American commoners for relying upon their common sense. In October 2001, shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the New York Times described imam Anwar al-Awlak as part of “a new generation of Muslim leader capable of merging East and West."

That miscalculation hasn’t stopped the Times from bestowing their most recent endorsement for that honor upon imam Faisal Abdul Rauf this summer. Imam Rauf is better known as the guiding light behind the Ground Zero mosque.

Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf has had the Times, Barack Hussein Obama, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and the rest of the Democratic Party standing shoulder to shoulder defending his First Amendment right to offend American sensibilities. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi even threatened critics of the mosque with a star chamber-like Congressional investigation for daring to exercise their own First Amendment rights in a manner that she found distasteful.

Does it seem the least bit odd that imam Rauf is more deserving of public defense than Molly Norris? The most likely explanation is that our leftist elite have all bought into the proposition, composed by imam Rauf and published on the New York Times’ opinion page that, if America wants to avoid future terrorist attacks, then she needs to give in to the demands of imam Rauf.

Based upon this reasoning, the primary difference between a radical Muslim and a “moderate” Muslim, such as Rauf, is that the radicals commit the acts of terrorism, while the moderates follow along like ambulance chasers to exploit the environment of fear that follows. And as imam Anwar al-Awlak has shown, there’s not much of a firewall between the two.

Rather than step up for Molly Norris and pound their hairy chests in outrage as they did for imam Rauf, all that the government has done for Ms Norris is to help her get a new identity and go into hiding, possibly for the rest of her life. She is, “going ghost,” in the words of the FBI specialists handling her case.

How is it that our elite can throw their considerable weight behind the oafish, ham-handed Faisal Abdul Rauf and ignore the plight of an American who exhibited a creativity and courage beyond any of their aptitudes? A woman who stands up to bullies and upholds the finest principles of Jeffersonian liberalism should not now find herself isolated. The silence of the leftist elite is disgraceful and says far more about them than their defense of the Ground Zero mosque.