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| Toon by Bosch Fawstin |
STAY QUIET AND YOU’LL BE OKAY: Mark Steyn defends free speech by calling out the “I love free speech as much as anyone, but” crowd, which includes all progressives, and some prominent self-proclaimed conservatives like Bill O’Reilly. Steyn observes:
Mark Steyn
. . . " It'll be a long time before you see "Washington Post Offers No Apology for Attacking Target of Thwarted Attack" or "AP Says It Has No Regrets After Blaming The Victim". The respectable class in the American media share the same goal as the Islamic fanatics: They want to silence Pam Geller. To be sure, they have a mild disagreement about the means to that end - although even then you get the feeling, as with Garry Trudeau and those dozens of PEN novelists' reaction to
Charlie Hebdo, that the "narrative" wouldn't change very much if the jihad boys had got luckier and Pam, Geert Wilders, Robert Spencer and a dozen others were all piled up in the Garland morgue." . . .
. . .
"Free speech is necessary to free society for all the stuff after the "but", after the "however". There's no fine line between "free speech" and "hate speech": Free speech
is hate speech; it's for the speech you hate - and for all your speech that the other guy hates. If you don't have free speech, then you can't have an honest discussion. All you can do is what those stunted moronic boobs in Paris and Copenhagen and Garland did: grab a gun and open fire. What Miliband and Cotler propose will, if enacted, reduce us all to the level of the inarticulate halfwits who think the only dispositive argument is "Allahu Akbar".
"Alas, we have raised a generation of But boys." . . .
. . .
". . . when violent Muslims stage their first explicit anti-free-speech attack on American soil, everyone thinks the mouthy free-speech broad is the problem. This soft jihad goes on every day of the week, and Bill O'Reilly doesn't even seem to be aware that it exists.
Steyn's bottom line, to which I add emphasis:
But Islam is telling you that subject's closed off. Not long after 9/11, some theatre group in Cincinnati announced a play contrasting a Palestinian suicide bomber and the American Jewish girl she killed. Local Muslims complained, and so the production was immediately canceled - because all the arty types who say we need "artists" with the "courage" to "explore" "transgressive" "ideas" fold like a cheap Bedouin tent when it comes to Islam. The Muslim community complained not because the play was anti-Muslim: au contraire, it was almost laughably pro-Palestinian, and the playwright considered the suicide bomber a far more sensitive sympathetic character than her dead Jewish victim.
But that wasn't the point: the Muslim leaders didn't care whether the play was pro- or anti-Islam: for them, Islam is beyond discussion. End of subject. And so it was.
ISIS threatens controversial blogger Pamela Geller in message boasting of '71 trained soldiers in 15 different states' . . . "Our aim was the khanzeer (pig) Pamela Geller and to show her that we don't care what land she hides in or what sky shields her; we will send all our Lions to achieve her slaughter."
"It says the militants will target Geller and anyone who hides or hosts her.Another high-profile target of terrorists, controversial Dutch lawmaker Geert Wilders, made a brief appearance at the contest, where he spoke to the 200 attendees before leaving with his security team." . . .
Who is Pamela Geller?
Would these same critics have told MLK to be quiet and he'd be OK?
I suppose their logic would say that all this was the fault of Dr. Martin Luther King:
