Front Page Magazine is running an article by Bruce Thornton in today’s edition of the online magazine, concerning the attacks on free speech by the those who deem the supposed ill-defined right not to be offended, outweighs the well known ancient concept of the right to offend.It’s a fact that we in the West are offended day in and day out by the edicts and mutterings emanating from the Islamic world, as well as by its insane notions of what a society in the modern age should look like and how it should be governed.
That desert ideology called Islam, founded by a man who embodied bizarre and disgusting traits that no sane person living in the West today, would want to see emulated by his or her neighbor, is demanding that the West cease from criticizing its core beliefs. For a person to speak out loud of what Islam really says and stands for -while reading from Islamic texts- is to invite the label of “racist” or “hate monger”, solely because its a non-Muslim doing the reading.
These texts are full of the most hateful diatribes against Jews, Christians and other non-believers, which are then promulgated to the Islamic masses by their supreme religious leaders like Grand Sheik Sayed Tantawi. Yet nonetheless, we Westerners look at such offensive utterings as a part of free speech, and therefore protected, no matter how distasteful.
The threat the Organization of the Islamic Conference poses to our Western notions of freedom is real, and thankfully we Europeans have not yet completely caved in, and are mounting a concerted offencive to protect, that, which most of us in the West have long considered a settled issue. KGS
One of the most potent weapons in the jihadist arsenal is the failure of nerve that has afflicted the West for the last forty years. Our own doubts about the core values of Western civilization have hamstrung us in defending these goods against those who want to destroy them. Whether the source of this self-loathing is Marxism, postmodernism, or multicultural noble-savage delusions, our failure to acknowledge the superiority of our own way of life, to teach our children the history of the West and its singular achievements, and to fight against the erosion of those defining beliefs has emboldened the jihadists and confirmed them in their belief that we are decadent and doomed.In Europe, this pathology has advanced far beyond what we see in the United States, bad as that is. Faced with a sullen, unassimilated, underemployed, welfare-subsidized, and growing population of Muslim immigrants, many Europeans have responded to this challenge with one Munich after another, compromising, if not abandoning outright, core Western beliefs in an attempt to appease an alien culture that has nothing but contempt for the nations that have taken them in. Europe is in the midst of an unprecedented historical experiment: whether a civilization can survive when a critical mass of its own people no longer have faith in the rightness and goodness of their own way of life.[…]Given these numerous enemies, free speech needs defenders if it is to resist its gradual diminishment. David Horowitz’s campaign for an Academic Bill of Rights, and the efforts of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education are leading the fight to defend the right to free speech in universities and colleges. Now an international organization has been created to coordinate this struggle throughout the West: the International Free Press Society. As put in its policy statement, “It is time to confront and reverse the forces, both internal and external, that are now arrayed against free speech, time to organize not just locally and nationally, but also globally in recognition of the common danger imperiling all free societies. The sole purpose of The International Free Press Society (IFPS) is to defend freedom of expression wherever and by whomever it is threatened.”One of the IFPS’s current causes is the defense of Geert Wilders. Such support is particularly important for Europe, for there are still many Europeans who recognize the threat to their freedoms represented by creeping Islamization. Public intellectuals like Bart Jan Spruyt, the Dutch journalist and historian who helped create the Edmund Burke Foundation in the Netherlands, and many others take great personal risks to protest publicly against the erosion of their political values at the hands of jihadist fellow-travelers and their European enablers. Americans who likewise are concerned about the decay of our foundational political goods like free speech need to find common cause with these Europeans who refuse to accept that the West––the freest, most prosperous, and most dynamic civilization in history–– must give way to the Koran and sharia law.
