Betraying Free Speech.
By Paul J Cella Posted in Anti-Free Speech Liberals | Archived | free speech | Islam | Liberals | Mark Steyn | the Jihad — Comments (12) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
Canada persecutes Mark Steyn for writing that Islam is a threat to the West. The New York Times, having ignored that drama for months, takes the opportunity to dilate tendentiously on the uniqueness of American tolerance for Free Speech, implicitly comparing Steyn to Nazis, and naturally burying his response in the last two paragraphs of a long article. The few European politicians and thinkers with the guts to stand up to creeping Islamization, find themselves betrayed and denounced in America, and likewise compared to Nazis and fascists, by prominent bloggers. Readers will recall the pitifully tepid response from the West to the beleaguered Danes during the Cartoon Jihad.
And now we have this, as reported by Josh Trevino: In Kuala Lumpar, at the Third International Conference on the Muslim World, three prominent Muslim leaders called on the West to renounce Free Speech in order to accommodate Islamic sensibilities; and the three Westerns who spoke uttered not a word of protest.
Read on.
Now Conservatives have long had an ambiguous relationship with Free Speech; it has usually been Liberals who thrill to the invocation of Voltaire’s famous dictum, or nod sagely at Supreme Court opinions protecting the vilest pornography. But this pattern is eroding rapidly, under various pressures, not the least of which is, indeed, this amalgam of militancy and victimology from so many Muslim spokesmen. Liberals, in the face of these pressures, are prepared to jettison the principle of Free Speech. The Canadian human rights tribunal, before the bar of which Mr. Steyn must make his case that warning of the threats to the West from Islam is not hate speech, has never returned an acquittal. Any court in the world, dealing with actual criminals, which boasted such a conviction rate, would undoubtedly draw the ire of civil liberties Liberals from ‘round the world. This one, since it merely silences disfavored opinion, is uninteresting to them. A man could earn more sympathy from them by taking up arms against America, and being imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay. Indeed, such a man can now, thanks to the despots of our Supreme Court, expect more robust due process rights than a critic of Islam in Canada.
It is a pitiful spectacle to watch Liberals abandon one of their cherished principles under threat from the Jihad. The hectoring of its agitators is often so transparent as to be almost comical. And yet the Liberals (and not a few Conservatives) roll over, suddenly deferential to an alien system, from which has emerged some of the cruelest and most treacherous enemies our country has ever faced.
How often has it been left to Conservatives to preserve what is good in the Liberal tradition?
Betraying Free Speech. 12 Comments (0 topical, 12 editorial, 0 hidden) Post a comment »
May God have mercy on this nation and forgive us for our stupidity.
This is appalling.
And the NYT is now seen clearly as a political organization simply utilizing parts and parcels of our society that benefit its corporate goals, not the health of our society at large.
Where are all the Conservatives who should be red-faced and puffing mad? Where are the peoples voices? Congress has turned a deaf ear to us and are doing as they please. Can you say socialism,marxism,OK here's one the whole world knows communism . Shades of it everywhere and the news has reports of glimmers seeping into our country and our allies. Stop the maddness.
Bush, their majesties on the Supreme Court and our current nominee already put the First Amendment through the shredder...why not put people in jail to appease Islamists.
It's a little late to lament what might happen to the First Amendment...It's already happened!
"A political party cannot be all things to all men."--Ronald Wilson Reagan
It would be in signing McCain-Feingold despite saying something to the effect of "I don't think it's that Constitutional but the Supreme Court will sort it all out".
That would be my guess.
Man is free at the moment he wishes to be. --Voltaire
"A political party cannot be all things to all men."--Ronald Wilson Reagan
is the late Pim Fortuyn. I'd really hate to think he may have died in vain.
And yet, Gore Vidal thinks we're a fascist country where the government controls the media. He actually said this in an interview in Socialist Spain (c.f. Preaching to the Choir):
"We live in a dictatorship. We have a fascist government ...which controls the media," he said.
Meanwhile in this photograph, Gore Vidal ponders his pot-bellied misery while sitting with a sourpuss in an ornate armchair, wearing sweatpants, sipping a drink with a big pussycat on his lap. Fascism has been pretty good to Mr. Vidal: he's living to a ripe old age with beautiful furniture and the most comfortable clothes, a drink in hand, on some of the best real estate in the world. His words are also being directly reported on the most prominent independent website in the world. But he wouldn't know what's going on, because the rest of the time he pontificates from his perch in the Hollywood Hills:
I took a cab high up into the Hollywood Hills. There I spent an enchanted afternoon with writer Gore Vidal, who knew my father in Rome in the late 1960s.
The thick stone and adobe walls of Mr. Vidal's home, built in 1920, block out the sounds of the modern world. Its sights are kept at bay thanks to views of the lush, enclosed grounds outside and the impressive collection of old art and antiques displayed inside.
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I guess it's a good thing for Hunter S. Thompson that he blew his brains out and had his ashes fired out of a cannon, because if the kinds of speech restrictions Steyn is being pilloried for become the law of the land, his career would have been over anyway. And he would have had confront the Left for ending it.
I like to think that might be why he killed himself: maybe in the end he saw the true face of what he helped to create.
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May God have mercy on this nation and forgive us for our stupidity.
This is appalling.