When Speech Ain't Free

I just wanted to draw your attention to a worthwhile post by The Anchoress about free speech. It seems some elites think America should be more like Europe. I know, shocking. Don't you just wait for the day when some knobby headed freak from an Ivy League school says that Europe should be more like America? Yeah, right. That will happen. NOT!

Anyway, here's a teaser paragraph (okay, two) from The Anchoress:

Hurt feelings are the price of freedom, and I’d rather have 50 emails calling me all sorts of names because of my Christianity or my classically liberal politics (some call it “conservatism,” but then again today’s “conservatives,” used to be called “liberals,” and today’s “liberals” used to be called “socialists”, so deal) or because of my stance on any given issue, than have everyone moving about the country in a silent agony of self-censorship and repression.

Free speech is part of what makes America great, and singular. It is what leaves America unbent when the rest of the world is cowering. Americans will die for freedom - for the freedom to say what they like, be who they are and to bend the knee only if they choose to do so, and then (usually) before no one but the Creator.

I tried to explain the concept of bowing to no man to my children. They had a hard time understanding why someone would rather die than be a slave. It was a tough sell that to not be free, was to not have life.

In some ways, liberals are perpetual children. As long as they can be the playground police, and can ensure everyone is "nice", they're happy. They never consider how their behavior isn't nice to others. Too much niceness is its own tyranny.

Britain's Civil Liberties

How would you feel about the contents of every website visited, cell phone call and email sent being tracked by the government? This would concern me, obviously:

The Home Office will create a database to store the details of every phone call made, every email sent and every web page visited by British citizens in the previous year under plans currently under discussion, it has emerged.

The Government wants to create the system to fight terrorism and crime. The police and security services believe it will make it easier to access important data as communications become more complex.

Somewhere between being frisked at the airport and water boarding, there has to be a balance.

H/T My little brother

Cross-posted at Right Wing News

Der Commissar

More on the Canadian Human Rights garbage. Mark Steyn says:

I don't have as low an opinion of Canadians as Barbara Hall and Jennifer Lynch do. I don't believe your liberty is the conditional discretionary gift of hack bureaucrats advised by Marxist theorists. You defeat bad ideas — whether Nazism, Marxism, jihadism, Steynism or Trudeaupian pseudo-"human rights" mumbo-jumbo — in the bracing air and light of day, in vigorous open debate, not in the fetid corridors of power policed by ahistorical nitwits.

You know, I feel the same way about this as I feel about the dull-witted security screeners at the airport: There is no way in hell that bureaucrats are keeping the delicate ears and sensibilities of Canadians safe any more than the totalitarian nitwits at the airport keep us safe from terrorists. And they are all just doing their job.

Meanwhile, freedom ebbs away.....

President Bush in Africa

The Anchoress covers President Bush's triumphant African trip. She says:

In places where freedom is taken for granted, our president and our troops are not received with joy. But in places where liberty is still longed for and prized, the story is quite different.

That does seem to be the case, doesn't it?

Giving Away Britain

Gordon Brown just did it. The whole disturbing article here. Here's a taste:

Just as in the 13th century, so in the 21st. Magna Carta has to be defended. Brown and company are destroying Magna Carta. They are continuing in the idiotic and treasonous steps of their political forbears who have made one treaty after another with European leaders and have illegally given away British rights and liberties.

For a mess of pottage they have sold the British birthright.

Why? Why would Brown do it?

One reason is that he is a Socialist and Socialism is a global religion. It hates nation states. It wants one allegiance to one global state in which national politicians such as Master Blair can play lofty roles. Socialism is an ignorant religion that ignores the scientific facts of freedom, the essential connection between a people being free and being prosperous, the indisputable link between a people’s safety and education and happiness and their ability to make local decisions about their police and their schools and their livelihoods.

But there is another reason for Brown and Miliband and Blair and Heath and Clarke and Major and Heseltine and all the rest of them to support the creation of the EU and the destruction of Britain, aside from the obvious reason that they do not like Britain much, do not understand or love her history, do not forgive her imperfections and seek to support her real goodness, and do not understand political or economic science, and that reason is this –

They want to be part of the inner circle. They want to be in the circle for exactly the same reason that there are circles of girls and boys in schools and circles of men and women in clubs and at work . They want to feel that they are in a special circle and you and most other people are outside it. They think that they are something because they are in the circle. They think the circle is superb.

Let's hope we don't elect a President who wants to be part of the world clique. Just imagine Al Gore running things. See how much fun he has being the doyenne of world high society? It's a little creepy and a lot of bad news for anyone who loves freedom.

H/T Instapundit

French Style Justice

A friend is raped and murdered by a recidivist Turkish immigrant in France where self-defense is frowned upon even by Sarkozy. Paul Belian relays this story:

Shocked by the savage murder of our dear Anne-Lorraine [Schmitt, a journalism student who worked as an intern at the Valeurs Actuelles magazine], aged 23, a friend rang me: “We should demonstrate, burn down Turkish mosques…”

Maybe Paul should get that rocking and rolling. Burning things seems to be a language the French government understands.

Governments embrace anarchy and invite vigilantism when justice is deferred or never comes. I fear this backlash in Europe. The populace, weary at the effects of multiculturalism may solve their problems in their own way. Mark Steyn obliquely refers to this possibility but Claire Berlinski actually lays out the risk.

Restricting speech and denying justice (like sefl-defense) won't stop a swing of the pendulum. It will accelerate it.

The Best Day In Iraq Ever

Read the whole thing. I cried.

Freedom Between Two Rivers

PHOTO: Michael Yon captures Christian and Muslim people restoring a cross to the top of a church in Iraq. “All the people, all the people in Iraq, Muslim and Christian, is brother.”
[Thanks, Michael, for all your hard work. I hope this gets you a Pulitzer. Note: Michael Yon works by donations. Please help him stay as an independent voice in Iraq free to follow the stories.]

I have been relentlessly optimistic about Iraq, much to the bemusement of nearly everyone I know. The educated, sophisticated positions fall in these categories notes The Anchoress:

It’s one of those photographs that takes the breath - there is a feeling of cognitive dissonance. Some of us on one side - who perhaps have never understood why we went to Iraq in the first place - may look at this picture and say, “but…but…Iraq is a hell-hole, an unmanageable, unwinnable, place of civil strife, death and occupied people who hate us!”

Some on the other side, who - overwhelmed with images of burned flags and screaming mobs - may have forgotten the humanity of the Iraqi people (people we let down once before, and who had reason to distrust us and our commitment) may see these Muslims and Christians raising a cross together, in a language of brotherhood and gratitude, and say, “but…but…all those people are bad people…”

Some of us will discover that we have said or thought both things at one time or another. It’s not important which one of those people you are. It’s important, though, to get a sense of what is going on over there, where our people are serving, living and dying. It’s important to realize that where there is danger and tragedy, there is also progress and hope. In the major media outlets, we get big servings of the first two and very niggardly helpings of the latter. We need a more balanced diet of information.

I'm naive and idealistic. My opinion has always been that the Iraqis are people, people like any other, who suffered under the thumb of tyrany, who only ever saw excessive force achieve ends, who ruled by domination, who wished for a peace they thought impossible, who saw family murdered and yearned for vengeance, who were disoriented once faced with choices again and needed time to learn to trust.

In a government governed by themselves, they'd have to learn to trust themselves to choose wisely and then they'd have to learn to trust those chosen. In short, they were people like you or I who needed time to let their wings dry and learn to fly. Again, this is what The Anchoress says she sees:

What I see in this picture is something more than a historic moment - I don’t even know if that’s what we should call it - I see the sort of thing people do when they are neighbors, when they are working together for their neighborhood, for the good of all who live there, and that makes it seem less “historic” than calmly, wonderfully normal, ordinary, wholesome and sane. I see tolerance, which so many are so certain cannot exist in Iraq - or anywhere in the Middle East. Tolerance in the best sense of the word - converting no one, insisting on nothing beyond ordinary acceptance; tolerance that gives people room to live their lives.

Sometimes hope has felt foolish. Was it ignorance not idealism, that had my heart soar when President Bush waxed eloquent about the desire of all people to live free? Maybe. But I don't care. It seems better to be hopeful than cynical. Wretchtard over at Belmont Club says:

It is strange that in history every true victory is about the same thing -- not territorial expansion or power -- but the affirmation of the essential equality and brotherhood of man. [Emphasis on the whole thing, admin.]

Iraq may still yet fall into the dark. The people may choose war over reconciliation. The Middle East may yet be thrown into despair by an unstable Pakistani or Iranian regime. The Iraqis themselves, may trigger these happenings. Rest assured, all eyes are on Iraq as this phoenix rises from the sandy ashes of suicide bombers in the desert. Freedom for Iraq strikes fear into the heart of every other despot and it should.

It only takes one to make freedom ring. Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Gandhi, Mandela, Reagan, King. But those men were nothing without the individuals to take a chance on that vision. It started with the soldiers willing to fight for it. It started with the people willing to sacrifice blood and fortune for it. The Iraqi people are doing this. They exhibit extraordinary courage. These are people who have never seen this freedom and still believe.

Speaking of big ideas that too many Americans take for granted and some have seemed to forgotten entirely, Nickolas Sarkozy gave a breath-taking speech before Congress. It moved me to tears to watch it last night with my husband.

Summing up, as always, Glenn Reynolds says of Iraq (and I add, of Europe, too): "Let's hope these sentiments continue to spread."

Indeed.