Category Archives: Free Speech

Updated: Farewell Freedom Of Speech

Free Speech, Islam, Jihad, Justice, Natural Law, The West

Writes the Brussels Journal:

“The Dutch judicial authorities are going to prosecute Geert Wilders, one of the 150 members of the Dutch Parliament, for making the movie Fitna. In this short documentary, which explains what happens if a number of verses of the Koran are taken seriously, Mr Wilders compares the Muslims’ holy book to Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. He claims the Koran calls for violence against Jews and other non-Muslims. Fitna can be seen here.”

Hate speech laws are inimical to a free society. All speech, truthful and untruthful, ought to be free in a free society. The verbiage of liars and holocaust deniers too.

American jurisprudence allows the regulation of speech only under very limited circumstances. If speech poses a “Clear and Present Danger,” it can be censored. While the Supreme Court has ruled that the First Amendment doesn’t protect words that are likely to cause violence, the required threshold is extremely high. As it should be.

In this context, my preferred course of action against imams, for example, who publicly preach and incite violence against Americans on American soil is deportation, not censorship. The Netherlands ought to make sure that their courageous son, Wilders, is free to live in his homeland without fear. Instead, the Dutch state has joined the enemies of civilization in terrorizing a true hero.

Too few libertarians have been vocal about this defining issue of our time.

In case you think we in the US are protected by the Constitution, think again. Obama, as I pointed out in “Uncivil Agenda,” intends to expand hate crimes statutes and prosecutions.

Update (Jan. 26): Myron: why must “the man,” Wilders, be tried at all, by jurors or by a justice? He is innocent in the natural law; what he has done–speak his mind–is naturally licit.

Update V: Sarah Who?

Conservatism, Elections 2008, Free Speech, John McCain, Sarah Palin, War

Well, John McCain’s VP pick is certainly pretty.

Alaska’s Gov. Sarah Palin is an outsider alright. Liberals, to whom beauty is a liability (unless it’s Michelle Obama’s kind of Amazon-Woman appeal), are already making light of her beauty-queen pedigree. Check this condescending Newsweek article title: “Pageants and Politics.” Isn’t this an attempt to diminish the woman?

Palin is a hunter and a strong supporter of the Second Amendment. Unlike her boss, she favors drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. But, and as Obama intends to do, she already has raised taxes on oil company profits.

She’s from Idaho, which, I am told, is where extremely conservative Real America escapes the depredations of the creeping left.

A nickname that has stuck with Palin is “Sarah Barracuda”—all good—and she worked as a commercial fisherman. Her husband, a handsome, some-time commercial fisherman (one of the most dangerous jobs), is a Yup’ik Eskimo. I say that the Moron McCain has hit a home run. This family is a nice counterweight to the Obama family exotica.

On the issue of experience, McCain has knocked the stuffing out of Obama in as much as the latter has made all the winning arguments for judgment and wisdom over experience.

From the gushing Republicans are doing over Palin, however, it is clear that it doesn’t take much to please these party loyalists. Republicans are nowhere near a eureka moment—recognizing that without Ron-Paul type fiscal leadership, the US is going down the economic toilet, with a national debt half as large as the GDP.

For that, a pretty face and a feel for fetuses are not enough. Salvaging the country is something only a Paul, perhaps a Bob Barr, could do, with a willing Congress. And here the reader is encouraged to fill in all the clichés of improbability he can conjure. For example: And Britney Spears will grow a voice. Or wear underwear.

Update I (September 1, 2008): Sarah Palin’s unmarried daughter, aged 17, is expecting a baby. I disagree with all the Republicans and “conservatives” who’ve suddenly detected in this event another sign of Palin’s conservative bona fides. Palin’s press release reveals the woman’s liberal parenting style with respect to an issue her conservative cohorts are helping to normalize:

“Our beautiful daughter Bristol came to us with news that as parents we knew would make her grow up faster than we had ever planned. We’re proud of Bristol’s decision to have her baby and even prouder to become grandparents. As Bristol faces the responsibilities of adulthood, she knows that she has our unconditional love and support.”

Spoken like a true liberal, who supports and, no doubt, will subsidize irresponsible—some conservatives would say immoral—conduct.

Update II: cultural conservatism has become an unknown quantity in fin de siècle America, in which a conservative candidate for office publishes a letter practically celebrating her unwed daughter’s pregnancy. There is not a hint of disapproval in the Palin press release. A reader has asked what I think Palin ought to have said about the affair. Apparently that’s a mystery. So here’s the conservative version of Palin’s press release:

“As conservatives can imagine, my husband and I are deeply disappointed in our beautiful daughter, Bristol. Her actions flout the upbringing and the values we thought we had instilled in her. Our daughter is well aware of our disappointment. In addition to the enormous responsibilities she will be forced to shoulder due to her reckless behavior, she has her parents’ disapproval to deal with. As this is a private and very difficult matter for our family, we ask that the media respect our privacy and keep its distance.”

Update III: From ABC News: “A meme is developing out there among liberals that Gov. Sarah Palin was a supporter of Pat Buchanan in the 1990s, a charge that the McCain-Palin campaign strongly denies.”

Why deny? So a pregnant daughter is not a liability, but supporting Pat Buchanan is?

Update IV (September 2): The responses so far to my comment about Gov. Palin’s perfectly liberal parenting style is to point out that getting knocked up and having bastards is simply the way of the world.

I see moral and cultural relativism is another twisted tenet conservatives have adopted. For that is what this mounts to: because everyone does it, certain conduct becomes part of the cultural repertoire. Judgment is suspended. Understanding extended, and the undesirable behavior then multiplies.

Furthermore, my comment pertained not to what the girl intends to do—or will be compelled to do—but to the lack of any opprobrium in Palin’s gushing press release. As I say, her daughter’s conduct is depicted rather positively, even praised.

Actually, when my girl was a little younger than Bristol, I had The Talk with her. Let me put it this way, the options I presented her with should she conceive were not as appealing as the Palin plan for unwed mothers. Nowhere did “pride and support” feature in our little conversation. It broke my heart to be so harsh, but it worked, to the benefit of my daughter’s wellbeing. Young girls are not ready physically or mentally to have babies. Babies born to young girls, moreover, are not as healthy. In fact, complications and abnormalities abound in the young cohort as they do in the older age group.

Question: Palin’s kid is five months into her pregnancy. Why on earth did she not get married earlier?

Naturally, this is an interesting conversation in itself. Note: nowhere have I intimated that this matter should–or does–have any bearing on Gov. Palin’s abilities.

Update V: Lew Rockwell on what’s in the offing for this feisty woman:

It is perhaps possible to be the governor of a small state such as Alaska and not be part of the machine. It is not possible to be vice president of the United States and not enter into the deeply immoral arena that values the burying of all principle, and saying and doing whatever is necessary to bolster power.

Part of the purpose of campaigns is to socialize the candidates in this mold. Sarah will be slapped around if and when she openly disagrees with McCain’s politics. When they win the election, she will immediately be required to take on the role of an apologist for all that the administration does.

Updated: Judenräte Turns on Geert Wilders

Free Speech, Islam, Judaism & Jews, libertarianism, The West

In “Nitwork Solutions Suspends Wilders Site,” you read about a heroic Dutchman by the name of Geert Wilders who is fighting Islam’s suffocating strictures. In a country of dhimmis, this Dutchman is a rare breed (so is Ayaan Hirsi Ali); he is trying to reclaim his country.

When the self-anointed Jewish leadership is not reaching out to libertines and left-liberals, it is siding with Jew haters. Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League is still mum about the dangers to the American Jewish community of Muslim immigration.

On the other hand, Foxman had a fit over Mel Gibson, a man who has never hurt a Jew (unless hurt feelings count—and they don’t; sticks and stones and all that). But when a Seattle Jihadist murdered a Jewish woman and critically injured five other women at the downtown Jewish Federation building, our defender issued only the tersest of statements, making no mention of the dead, the injured, and the Muslim.

By the ADL’s telling, this was a random killing.

Now the Dutch Judenräte has turned its back on a friend of the Jews, Geert Wilders:

“In a statement following the film’s online release, the board said that Wilders – the leader of the Party for Freedom – was guilty of serious generalizations. ‘Wilders presented demographics on the increase of Muslims in Europe with pictures from scenes of terrorist attacks, suggesting all Muslims are potential terrorists,’ head of the Hague-based Center for Information and Documentation on Israel, Dr. Ronny Naftaniel, Saturday told Haaretz.”

Dr. Ronny Naftaniel’s incorrect deduction aside, Jews who side with him and his ilk ought not to complain when increased Muslim immigration coincides with more hate crimes against them. Nor should they be surprised when the many Dutch who secretly consider Wilders a patriot think of Jewish representatives as unpatriotic, and worse.

By the way, the response of the Muslim world and its representatives to “Fitna,” the Wilders film, proves irrefutably that Wilders is right about Islam. To deny that he is correct about the dangerous, dampening effects of Islam on a free society is to deny reality.

Wilders would have been shown to be wrong had the Muslim world and its proxies refused to bring pressure to bear on organizations that screened “Fitna,” and adopted a western live-and-let-live stance toward this form of speech.

Had Wilders not been subjected to death threats for his speech; and had the Dutch government not been pressured by Muslim leaders to denounce Wilders—I’d have been the first to concede that the Muslim Ummah is indeed benign, peaceful, and presents no threat to the West.

Speaking of the Ummah; where is my libertarian community on this? Have those few errant folks repented yet?

Update (April 1): “LiveLeak restores Fitna. Score one for freedom,” reports the intrepid Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch. LiveLeak had previously removed the piece.

Update 3: Nitwork Solutions Suspends Wilders Site

Free Speech, Islam, libertarianism, Media, Morality, The West

A hosting service has suspended the site erected by the heroic Geert Wilders to popularize his film about the Quran. Wilders is the only politician I know of, aside Ayaan Hirsi Ali, to speak truth to power about Islam.

We all recall the tragic fate another brave Dutch film maker met. Vincent van Gogh’s great-great-grandson—more authentically Dutch you cannot get—was “stuck like a pig” on an Amsterdam street by a Muslim immigrant.

So who has curtailed Wilders in his heroic efforts? An American company, of course:

“Network Solutions has received a number of complaints regarding this site that are under investigation … The company could not immediately be reached for comment. Its terms of service contain a sweeping prohibition against ‘objectionable material of any kind or nature.’”

(I’ve just asked the designer of our new fabulous website under construction to check up that the server to which we will be migrating tolerates speech. American companies are becoming oppressive.)

The Herald Tribune has characterized Wilders as heading “a reactionary party with 9 seats in the 150-member Dutch Parliament, which was elected on an anti-immigration platform. He lives under police protection because of death threats.”

If by reactionary the Tribune means that Wilders would dearly like to prevent Sharia from becoming the law of the land in his beloved homeland, and that he doesn’t rah-rah for Muslim rioters, then yes, I guess he could be called a “reactionary.”

The fact that a man who voices unpopular opinion is required to “live under police protection” in a western, liberal society—this, the Herald Tribune doesn’t find the least bit “reactionary.”

Update (March 25): Posted over at Jihad Watch is an interview with “Nitworks Solutions.” That is if long pauses and pregnant silences from the company’s representative constitute an exchange.

My contact for all things webular tells me that “Network Solutions has a long history of screwing people. They were the first—and for a long time the only—people who registered domain names for the Internet in the early years.” They had a government granted franchise or monopoly [like Comcast in certain regions] and, consequently, charged very high fees. “Down the road, when people became savvier and other high-tech companies wanted the ability to sell domains as well, the latter had to go to court to get the ability but they won. Today Network Solutions still sells domain names and they are about a tenth of what they used to charge but they still cost more than most everywhere else. The markup is ridiculous.”

In any event, if Mr. Wilders contacts us, we’ll put him in touch with someone who’ll fix him up in no time with a reliable, willing host.

Libertarians who fail to protest such intimidation are a sad joke. Sure, a host is a private company and ought to be able to host or not host at will. However, this is an example of intimidation at the threat of death. (By the same token, neither did the ousting of Imus have anything to do with private property or market forces. Rather, mob forces shaped that event.)

In “Those Cartoons: A Reply To Walter Block,” I addressed the moral confusion that led some libertarians to shirk the responsibility to defend the great Danes in what I termed “one of the defining libertarian issues of our times,” and that is:

“Speaking and publishing under the threat of injury or death … what is becoming a matter of life and death for writers, filmmakers, comics, and caricaturists in the West.”

Update 2 (March 27): I am disappointed that some libertarians construed the protest on this post as a call for censorship. You really have to develop the ability to distinguish between a debate about libertarian law vs. one about morality and ethics. Or values, as an Objectivist would put it. Objectivists often complain that libertarians are incapable of bridging this void. I can see the merits of their complaint.

I believe I’ve done this exercise once before, but here goes again: It has to be manifestly clear that no one on this blog has called on the state to intervene with Nitwork Solutions, which, by the way, was operating by grant of a government privilege when it monopolized domain licensing; that’s another problem some correspondents clearly struggle with: telling the free from the fettered market.

In any event, the debate here is about this new phenomenon we in the West are subjected to, and that is publishing under the threat of death. What Nitwork did to the heroic Wilders is perfectly licit in libertarian law. Some libertarians, however, go so far and say it is moral; they even lend their imprimatur to Muslims in terrorizing writers for doing no more than “hoisting their epistolary pitchforks.” For this perspective, I have nothing but contempt.

That said, let’s move on to a letter from my mother, our correspondent in The Netherlands:

Wilders: A Principled Man

Holland has a hero. Geert Wilders represents many Dutch people who are anxious about the growing power of Islam in Holland. He is a member of the Dutch Parliament and has won 9 seats in the parliament.

The parliament members have done everything to stop Wilders legitimate objection to the growing power of Muslims in all spheres in this country. The government is terrified that the Arab states will object and will take measures to decrease monetary gains. This terrifies all Dutch parliamentarians and, as a result, they have done everything to stop Wilders from speaking out about this Islamization, have tried to stop him from releasing the film he has made about Islam; and have done all in their power to intimidate him into silence and threaten him to keep his mouth shut.

And this in the “Great democratic Holland,” where, supposedly, “Freedom of Speech” is a holy right of all. It is clear to all of us who support this brave man that freedom of speech in Holland is only allowed to those who agree with government policy—their fear of reprisal from Arabs, in the manner used against Denmark, is the only thing they can think about.

Wilders holds onto his principles, even though his life is threatened—he is indeed a man who is prepared to sacrifice himself for his principles—and for his country.

—Ann

Update 3 (March 29): ACCEPTING THE TERMS OF SURRENDER. As I’ve said, we’ve arrived at a stage in the West’s demise where we are publishing under duress—under the threat of death, to be precise. This state of affairs has arisen due to our welcoming into our midst a culture and faith that doesn’t comport with life and liberty. Philosophical disagreements will henceforth be settled by the kafia-clad hit squad, or their proxies, CAIR and their ilk.

LiveLeak.com has folded. Here you can find a statement of cowardice and capitulation from this outfit as to why they’ll not be honoring the courage of Geert Wilders, and posting his film, Fitna (Fatwa).

Those who threatened LiveLeak.com have rejected the way philosophical battles are fought by westerners (to distinguish from their governments). What they’re doing is laying down the law under Islam. Each capitulation brings us closer to a time when this space, and spaces as outspoken, will cease to exist.

What’s worse; westerners, with few exceptions, are accepting the terms of surrender.