Images of the satirical Islamic cartoons that triggered the executions of 12 people at a Paris magazine Charlie Hebdo must be displayed all over the world — or the terrorists will achieve victory, says Dr. Andrew Bostom, a Middle East expert and professor of medicine at Brown University.
"Thus far, they have won. Everyone gets emotionally drawn to these candlelight vigils … 'Je Suis Charlie,' etc. etc. That's not what these people should be holding up. They should be holding up the cartoons," Bostom said Thursday on "The Steve Malzberg Show" on
Newsmax TV.
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"The cartoons should be on television, if not, running along a crawl, at least, every time that the issue is discussed. Fox News as well, they should be holding up the cartoons. It's not enough to just show them on Fox News's website, let alone the mainstream media networks."
Bostom — author of
"Iran's Final Solution for Israel: The Legacy of Jihad and Shi'ite Islamic Jew-Hatred in Iran" — said that until the cartoons saturate the media, the world has "capitulated."
He said the bloodbath, which occurred Wednesday, is the consequence of the Sharia blasphemy law, which calls for death to those who mock the Muslim prophet Muhammad — something the staff Charlie Hebdo did in its cartoons from time to time. The office was firebombed in 2011.
"Notice, for example, that we didn't see any Hasidic rabbis etc. loaded up with Kalashnikovs attacking Charlie Hebdo — and they were mocked by Charlie Hebdo, too," Bostom said.
"Blasphemy like this, particularly an egregious kind of blasphemy — a Brigitte Bardot pose of Muhammad — is universally decreed to be punishable by death, according to the Sharia."
But Bostom added that Sharia law is not supposed to be carried out in Western society.
"This kind of application of the law is 80 percent amongst Muslim countries in the Middle East and North Africa. These are the legal codes. They may not always be exercised, but these laws remain on the books across a large swath of Islamdom," he said.
"And alarmingly, even in this country, there is now polling data available from 2012 which show 58 percent of U.S. Muslims don’t agree with the First Amendment protections when it comes to criticism of Islam or Muhammad.
"Forty-six percent actually want people prosecuted, and even more alarming is 12 percent actually admitted that the draconian death penalty should be applied to blasphemers in the West, in the United States. These are alarming data."
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