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Weather: Sunny. A chance of showers and thunderstorms in the afternoon. Highs in the mid 90s. South winds 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 50 percent. Heat index values up to 107. Friday Night: Mostly clear. A slight chance of showers and thunderstorms in the evening. Lows in the mid 70s. Southeast winds 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 20 percent.
- Daily weather briefing from the National Weather Service in Jacksonville here.
- Drought conditions here. (What is the Keetch-Byram drought index?).
- Check today’s tides in Daytona Beach (a few minutes off from Flagler Beach) here.
- Tropical cyclone activity here, and even more details here.
Today at a Glance:
Free For All Fridays with Host David Ayres, an hour-long public affairs radio show featuring local newsmakers, personalities, public health updates and the occasional surprise guest, starts a little after 9 a.m. after FlaglerLive Editor Pierre Tristam’s Reality Check. Today, Superintendent LaShakia Moore discusses the state’s school voucher system and the people who double-dip–taking voucher money while attending public school. See previous podcasts here. On WNZF at 94.9 FM, 1550 AM, and live at Flagler Broadcasting’s YouTube channel.
The Friday Blue Forum, a discussion group organized by local Democrats, meets at 12:15 p.m. at the Flagler Democratic Office at 160 Cypress Point Parkway, Suite C214 (above Cue Note) at City Marketplace. Come and add your voice to local, state and national political issues.
Notably: One of the arguments against the publication of the infamous “Muhammad Cartoons” of 2005, or against the Islamohilarious humor of Charlie Hebdo, the scene of the 2015 massacre (12 lives lost, not including the two brothers who provoked the massacre, because it is the brothers who provoked, not Charlie Hebdo), is that a society must be respectful of its believers’ religions. In case of Islam, a society must respect Islamic tenets that, in the case of the cartoons, forbids the facial depiction of the prophet (peace be upon him, perhaps, but peace obviously not sought by his followers), let alone the ridiculing of the prophet, Charlie Hebdo’s specialty. But what right has a set of believers to impose its dogmas on an entire, open, secular society? In mid-February 1945 FDR and Churchill, three days apart, met with Ibn Saud, the Saudi king, FDR on a ship in the Red Sea, Churchill in the Egyptian desert. Ibn Saud, that old Wahhabi, would not allow smoking and drinking in his presence. FDR respected the prohibition, catching cigarettes like a fugitive between moments with the king, on his own ship, the USS Murphy. Churchill was not so accommodating. “I was the host,” he said (according to Daniel Yergin’s The Prize, the history of oil) “and I said if it was his religion that made him say such things, my religion prescribed as an absolute sacred rite smoking cigars and drinking alcohol before, after, and if need be during, all meals and the intervals between them.” I sympathize. But what gave Churchill the illusion he was the host? He was in the Egyptian desert. Only his imperious, colonial dickishness allowed him to imagine himself the host, when clearly Ibn Saud was far more on his own terrain, Aab to Arab, than Churchill was on his imaginary Egyptian Chartwell. If Churchill had been on English soil, his irritation would have been justifiable and defensible. It would apply to the publication of the Muhammad Cartoons or of Charlie Hebdo as it might not had Charlie Hebdo been attempting to have, say, a Jiddah edition. But there’s a caveat. If we are to be a pluralist society, religious minorities’ sensibilities cannot be ignored outright. Nor can they dictate. Where’s the just middle? I think the question is superfluous once we have decided to have a secular society, even if the majority of the population were Muslim, assuming we equate free expression with the tenets of secularism, which is not necessarily inevitable: we can have free expression in a non-secular society, too. The override here is free expression (the First Amendment approach), not secularism. Magazines that run tasteless cartoons and material that some may see as Islamophobic (as Charlie Hebdo’s humor is not) may lose their shit, and should be free to do so. They may boycott, demonstrate, picket. But kill? Prohibit? Banish? No. The Churchill approach prevails.
—P.T.
Now this:
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In the immediate aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo murders, I wrote this: “Religion, an ancient form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms. Religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today. I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity. ‘Respect for religion’ has become a code phrase meaning ‘fear of religion.’ Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect.”
–From Salman Rushdie, from Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (2024).
The Cartoon and Live Briefing Archive.
