The Battle For Free Speech

In the United States, we are seeing the continued onslaught regarding free speech and the 1st Amendment, the right to express our opinions without fear of government reprisal. The biggest perpetrators these days are on our college campuses in the form of speech codes and of course there is the ongoing attempt to define and legislate "hate speech".

Truly, though, things are not as bad as they could be, as they are in Old Europe. Oriana Fallaci, the Italian accused by her own country of vilipendio, for daring to state the obvious regarding the spread of Islam in Europe and the weak response of the self-loathing European Left at the cultural assault gives a good interview in a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed authored by Tunku Varadarajan.

I won't bore you with the reproduction, but consider her case carefully. While what is happening to her, a charge against her so-called inflammatory speech against Islam, is a result of no real speech freedom enshrined in the annals of Old Europe's governments, and not possible in the current state of affairs in the United States, it gives a chilling window of what can happen if such freedoms are sacrificed at the altars of multiculturalism and cultural relativism.

Her crime is stated thusly:

In her case, the religion deemed vilified is Islam, and the vilification was perpetrated, apparently, in a book she wrote last year--and which has sold many more than a million copies all over Europe--called "The Force of Reason." Its astringent thesis is that the Old Continent is on the verge of becoming a dominion of Islam, and that the people of the West have surrendered themselves fecklessly to the "sons of Allah."

And so it is. Lenient immigration policies for a continent starved for lower-wage workers brought Islamic immigrants in droves and the socialist cultural relativist attitudes of the European governments ensured that those immigrants would not have to assimilate. They were not Turks or Moroccans or Egyptians who had become French or German or Italian. They were Turks, Moroccans and Egyptians living separately and still with their national and cultural identities in a decadent and failing land. To this end, they have begun exploiting it, with honor killings, riots and murder of those critical of Islam a reality.

That such people as Fallaci dare to speak out against it, but are threatened with such immense punishment in the form of legal retribution, uncovers just how sick the society of Europe has become. Hers is a lesson from which we would do well to learn and the lessons of Old Europe should be heeded no less. Although they are not directly applicable to our government or our current crises, they provide eerie clues as to "what may be", which seems to be a popular series of supposition these days.