Stand with South Park

The group’s homepage—which is now down—featured the “warning” over audio from radical clerics and also showed the picture of the author Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who was threatened alongside Van Gogh. I contacted Ayaan to get her take on the incident.

“It is obviously a very clear threat and it echoes the same threats that were used against Theo van Gogh and me when he was alive,” Ayaan said. “It is an invitation to murder, a way of inspiring other people to kill. And how disgusting that they are using the image of an innocent man who was killed—he has a son and a mom and dad and friends. When you grieve, you get closure. For them, there’s no closure this way. I don’t know if I can legally stop them from using my image, but I feel threatened by them and, according to the Netherland’s Radio 4, the Dutch Secret Service say they are concerned for my safety. The images and audio on their website make it clear that they are in cahoots with [Al Qaeda cleric and propagandist] Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen and consider the Fort Hood shooter—Nidal Malik Hasan—a hero.”…

“Trey Parker and Matt Stone are the great satirists of our time—and satire is comedy as a moral weapon, bound to offend,” Brian C. Anderson, author of “South Park Conservatives” and editor of City Journal, told me. “South Park has been an equal-opportunity offender: conservatives, liberals (nobody has mocked the Left more successfully), pompous and idiotic celebrities, religious institutions, animal-rights zealots, on and on. In a free society, offense is something everyone has to deal with. Unfortunately, some Muslims have shown themselves incapable of this basic rule of democratic life.”