Richard Littlejohn, in the Daily Mail, points out how Islamicists are successfully exploiting the liberal establishment’s Pavlovian cringe in the direction of any alleged victim group to step-by-step move back the limits of free speech.

Islam is just one of the New Establishment’s favoured client groups. Exciting ‘hate crime’ laws have been invented to grant them special privileges and punish their critics.

So mad mullahs in Midlands madrassas can call for homosexuals to be stoned to death. But a Christian preacher who objects to gay marriage can expect to be arrested and given a criminal record.

We have also created a ‘victim’ culture, which allows minority groups to justify any kind of bad behaviour on the grounds that they are being oppressed.

You didn’t have to look far yesterday to find allegedly ‘respected’ voices prepared to blame the staff of Charlie Hebdo for bringing the wrath of the Islamists down on themselves. They shouldn’t have been so ‘provocative’.

Sky News gave house-room to one of the Islamist apologists from central casting who — while condemning the Paris massacre, natch — then went on to claim that Muslims in Britain were treated like blacks in Thirties America.

Oh, for heaven’s sake.

We’re celebrating 800 years of Magna Carta, which may not have mentioned free speech specifically but laid the foundations for the liberties we are supposed to enjoy today – the idea that no one is above the law and we should be spared the excesses of an overbearing state.

Yet free speech is being eroded in the name of ‘celebrating diversity’ and the overbearing state is on the march, often under the guise of keeping us ‘safe’.
Free speech is being eroded in the name of ‘celebrating diversity’

You may not like to hear this, but the Paris massacre is another victory for the terrorists. Ever since 9/11, the State has seized upon ‘security’ as an excuse to accrue more powers and impede our liberty.

This is much bigger than the current argument about free speech, even though in a truly democratic society the right to take offence must co-exist with the right to cause offence.

There’s talk about a ‘war on terror’ when really we should be discussing the war on Western civilisation being waged by medieval madmen in the name of Islam.

The politicians posture and say the men of violence can’t win. But they are winning – in Africa, in the Middle East, in Pakistan.

They have set their sights on extending their bloodthirsty caliphate throughout Europe and even though they have no prospect of immediate triumph, they’re in it for the long run.

In return, the West wrings its hands and offers knee-jerk assurances that this butchery is nothing to do with Islam.

Every time there’s another atrocity, the authorities cede more ground to the terrorists. After 9/11 it was by criminalising airline passengers. After the recent Toronto parliament killings, it was relocating guardsmen behind the gates.

In the Seventies, the State responded to IRA bombings by removing all the litter bins from railway stations. Most of them have never been put back.

After Paris, who knows what they’ll come up with. But, rest assured, they’ll think of something. This is how freedom dies. Little by little, piece by piece.

Today, there’s outrage and introspection, just as there has been in the wake of every other major terrorist incident.

After a week or two, it will all be forgotten and we can get back to squabbling about Ched Evans or which party is to blame for Mr Bert Jones’s lumbago operation being cancelled.

Meanwhile, our enemies bide their time and another notch of the ratchet moves inexorably in their favour.

Hopefully she will be allowed to speak this evening at Yale, but you shouldn’t count on that.

The Muslim Student Association at Yale and 35 other groups signed a letter objecting to Ayan Hirsi Ali being invited to speak at Yale tonight. Truthrevolt.org:

The Muslim Students Association at Yale University has written a letter expressing concern that the William F. Buckley, Jr. Program on campus is hosting women’s rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali to speak about Islam. The Somali-born Hirsi Ali is an outspoken critic of organized religion, specifically Islam, which was used as justification for genital mutilation and attempting forced marriage.

In an email obtained exclusively by TruthRevolt, Abrar Omeish, an MSA board member, asks for campus organizations to stand against Hirsi Ali’s proposed talk. Hirsi Ali is “a speaker who is very well known for her hateful comments towards marginalized groups, especially the Muslim community. It is making many Muslims on campus feel unwelcome and uncomfortable,” she wrote.

“We would like to point out though that her main source of fame – or, rather, infamy – has been her inflammatory comments about Islam and its followers. Not only are these comments hateful, but they are also very hurtful to the Muslim community, particularly to Muslim students at Yale,” she continued.

Through its efforts, the MSA managed to recruit 35 other campus groups and student organizations to stand against Hirsi Ali’s talk because she “is being invited to speak as an authority on Islam despite the fact that she does not hold the credentials to do so.” Hirsi Ali is scheduled to to give a lecture titled “Clash of Civilizations: Islam and the West” on Monday September 15th. …

In the letter, the groups wrote that “The comments Ms. Hirsi Ali has made on Islam have been classified as hate speech and have been considered unprotected libel and slander. She has been condemned for them by national organizations and universities. The Muslim community and its allies are disappointed that our own fellow Yalies would invite such a speaker knowingly and that she would have such a platform in our home.”

Cosigners to the letter include: Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), J Street U, The Arab Students Association (ASA), Women’s Leadership Initative (WLI), The Women’s Center, Asian American Student Alliance (AASA), Black Church at Yale (BCAY), The Slifka Center, Council on Middle Eastern Studies (CMES), and the Yale Atheists, Humanists, and Agnostics (AHA).

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The Yale Daily News reports that Mr. Omeish and the AMA were demanding to limit the topics Hirsi Ali could address and wanted their own speaker included in the program to rebut her remarks.

[Abrar] Omeish [’17] said that the group and their Islamic values uphold freedom of speech.

“The difference here is that it’s hate speech, [which] under the law would be classified as libel or slander and is not protected by the First Amendment. That’s what we’re trying to condemn here.”

After becoming aware of the Buckley Program’s plan to bring Hirsi Ali to campus, Omeish met with [Buckley Program president Rich] Lizardo [’15] last week to discuss Hirsi Ali’s speaking engagement and the MSA’s requests. According to Omeish, the MSA never intended to disinvite Hirsi Ali, but instead requested the invitation of a second speaker with academic credentials on the subject. The MSA also asked that Hirsi Ali’s speech be limited to her personal experience and professional expertise.

But Lizardo responded that the Buckley Program would not adopt the MSA’s requests and would not change the format or content of the lecture.

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David Gelernter (who was persuaded by the Unibomber to become openly conservative) responded yesterday with some nifty sarcasm to the Muslim students’ demands.

Your inspired suggestion, having Official Correctors speak right after Ali to remind students of the authorized view of Muslim society, is the most exciting new development in Free Speech since the Inquisition — everyone will be talking about it! You have written, with great restraint, about “how uncomfortable it will be” for your friends if this woman is allowed to speak. Uncomfortable nothing. The genital mutilation of young girls is downright revolting! Who ever authorized this topic in a speech to innocent Yale undergraduates? Next thing you know, people will be saying that some orthodox Muslim societies are the most cruel and benighted on earth and that Western societies are better than they are (better!) merely because they don’t sexually mutilate young girls! Or force them into polygamous marriages, countenance honor killings, treat women as the property of their male relations, and all that. Can’t they give it a rest? You’d think someone was genitally mutilating them.

We all know that Free Speech doesn’t mean that just anyone can stand up and start spouting. Would you let your dog talk for an hour to a Yale student audience? What’s next, inviting Dick Cheney? Careful study of contemporary documents makes it perfectly clear that when the Bill of Rights mentions Free Speech, it is alluding to Freedom of Speech for the Muslim Students Association at Yale. We all know that true free speech means freedom to shut up, especially if you disagree with your betters. And true free thought means freedom to stop thinking as soon as the official truth is announced by the proper Authorities — and freedom to wait patiently until then.

Read the whole thing.

Helen Price’s Twitter page

Yale’s William F. Buckley Jr. Speaker Program announced recently that, in its third year of operation, it would be expanding its speaker program to host 8 speakers in the Fall semester. The most interesting guest speaker scheduled this Fall will probably be Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born victim of genital mutilation famous for her public criticism of certain Muslim practices.

The Oldest College Daily’s article, however, noted that not everyone approved of the speaker program.

Students who are not involved in the program have mixed feelings about its presence on campus — especially its conservative bent.

Helen Price ’18 said that although she appreciates the effort the program makes to promote intellectual diversity, in practice such an effort can be problematic.

“When you invite very conservative speakers here who perhaps have controversial views on Islam or homosexuality, you essentially make Yale a very uncomfortable place for a large percentage of the people here on campus, and everyone should feel at home at college,” Price said.

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The freshman Ms. Price received national attention for her expressed discomfort at the airing of controversial, i.e. politically incorrect, views.

Eric Owens, at the Daily Caller, pounced all over her.

Who is Helen Price? According to her Twitter profile, she’s quite a ritzy, jet-setting princess. She describes herself as a “Yale student, leftie, Berliner, Brit, blogger” with not one and not two but three locations: ”Berlin, New Haven, England.”

She thinks incredibly highly of herself, too, let her just tell you:

Since my last birthday I’ve got into Yale, Oxford etc, been published in the Guardian, captained my national debating team & moved to Berlin

— Helen Price (@HelenPrice1994) November 5, 2013

Her Twitter profile also includes language from a May 17, 2014 tweet she composed:

And I’m wearing a tee that says “My Marxist Feminist Dialectic Brings All The Boys to the Yard”, so that isn’t going down well.

— Helen Price (@HelenPrice1994) May 17, 2014

It’s not clear if Price understands how such casual mentions of Marxism might make someone — from, say, Cambodia, or North Korea, or Ukraine — “very uncomfortable.”

The young Marxist’s 15-minutes-of-fame has clearly occasioned some further discomfort as the young lady’s Twitter feed has since become “Protected,” meaning that access to her current and older tweets is now specifically limited to followers she approves.

Mark Steyn identifies recent landmarks in the International Left’s gradual elimination of free speech.

These days, pretty much every story is really the same story:

In Galway, at the National University of Ireland, a speaker who attempts to argue against the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) programme against Israel is shouted down with cries of ‘Fucking Zionist, fucking pricks… Get the fuck off our campus.’

In California, Mozilla’s chief executive is forced to resign because he once made a political donation in support of the pre-revisionist definition of marriage.

At Westminster, the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee declares that the BBC should seek ‘special clearance’ before it interviews climate sceptics, such as fringe wacko extremists like former Chancellor Nigel Lawson.

In Massachusetts, Brandeis University withdraws its offer of an honorary degree to a black feminist atheist human rights campaigner from Somalia.

In London, a multitude of liberal journalists and artists responsible for everything from Monty Python to Downton Abbey sign an open letter in favour of the first state restraints on the British press in three and a quarter centuries.

And in Canberra the government is planning to repeal Section 18C — whoa, don’t worry, not all of it, just three or four adjectives; or maybe only two, or whatever it’s down to by now, after what Gay Alcorn in the Age described as the ongoing debate about ‘where to strike the balance between free speech in a democracy and protection against racial abuse in a multicultural society’.

I heard a lot of that kind of talk during my battles with the Canadian ‘human rights’ commissions a few years ago: of course, we all believe in free speech, but it’s a question of how you ‘strike the balance’, where you ‘draw the line’… which all sounds terribly reasonable and Canadian, and apparently Australian, too. But in reality the point of free speech is for the stuff that’s over the line, and strikingly unbalanced. If free speech is only for polite persons of mild temperament within government-policed parameters, it isn’t free at all. So screw that.

But I don’t really think that many people these days are genuinely interested in ‘striking the balance’; they’ve drawn the line and they’re increasingly unashamed about which side of it they stand. What all the above stories have in common, whether nominally about Israel, gay marriage, climate change, Islam, or even freedom of the press, is that one side has cheerfully swapped that apocryphal Voltaire quote about disagreeing with what you say but defending to the death your right to say it for the pithier Ring Lardner line: ‘“Shut up,” he explained.’

Read the whole thing.

Rod Dreher learns that Free Speech at Stanford is pretty darn expensive.

[L]ast week… the student government at Stanford refused to commit funds for a one-day conference run by the Stanford Anscombe Society, an organization named for the prominent 20th century British philosopher. Why the stinginess? Because the Anscombe Society stands, in part, for defending traditional teachings about sexual morality and the family. Their conference will bring to campus Ryan T. Anderson, … a Princeton-trained political philosopher best known for making a natural law case for privileging traditional marriage. That cannot happen on the campus of Stanford University, it seems; one student said that the presence — the mere presence! — of Anderson would make her feel “unsafe.” Thus does one of the world’s great universities appear as the Palo Alto School For Tots. …

[A]s was pointed out, correctly, refusing to fund a conference isn’t the same thing as suppressing it.

The SAS found other sources of funding for its conference, and all was well. Until this week. From an SAS news release:

The Stanford Anscombe Society (SAS) is requesting that Stanford University remove a burdensome $5,600 security fee it imposed on the conference organizers following the Graduate Student Council’s revocation of funding for its April Communicating Values conference.

“This fee is a tax on free speech,” said Judy Romea, SAS co-president. …

The fee is intended to pay for the presence of ten event security personnel, including four police officers, at the single-day conference. Approximately, 120 participants are expected, making the ratio of participants to security personnel 12 to 1. The administration only insisted on the added security after a vocal group of LGBTQ activists announced their opposition to the event. …

[T]he Grad Student Council’s decision to revoke the previously-granted $600 of funding was because of this same pressure from LGBTQ activists. …

This is jaw-dropping. The only danger on campus is to the 120 participants in this conference, who will no doubt face heckling and possibly worse from gay activists and their allies, trying to disrupt the meeting. And the university — an actual American university! — is requiring them to pay nearly $6,000 to guarantee their right to lawfully assemble and practice free speech. On a campus. Of an American university.

Sandra Y.L. Korn, no liberal she, (who is already contributing to the Nation, as an undergraduate at Harvard) editorialized recently in the Harvard Crimson against academic freedom.

[T]he liberal obsession with “academic freedom” seems a bit misplaced to me. After all, no one ever has “full freedom” in research and publication. Which research proposals receive funding and what papers are accepted for publication are always contingent on political priorities. The words used to articulate a research question can have implications for its outcome. No academic question is ever “free” from political realities. If our university community opposes racism, sexism, and heterosexism, why should we put up with research that counters our goals simply in the name of “academic freedom”?

Instead, I would like to propose a more rigorous standard: one of “academic justice.” When an academic community observes research promoting or justifying oppression, it should ensure that this research does not continue.

The power to enforce academic justice comes from students, faculty, and workers organizing together to make our universities look as we want them to do.

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Meanwhile at Swarthmore:

Robert George ‘77 and Cornel West’s [appearance] on Monday, hosted by the Institute for the Liberal Arts, culminated a campus-wide discussion on the meaning of discourse at Swarthmore. The Princeton professors, known for their friendship despite of their strongly opposing viewpoints, intended to build community and discuss questions like “What does it mean to communicate across differences regarding what is ‘right’ or ‘wrong?’”

The event was expected by many to be controversial, with rumors of student-led protest in the form of a boycott of the event or a rally after the collection, but no such protest occurred during the collection. Prior to the event, many students voiced concerns with the College’s choice of speaker in George, who is known for his strong opposition to abortion, stem cell research, and gay marriage. Some queer students attended the event wearing shirts that read “Beneath Human Dignity,” a reference to a George quote in National Review magazine about the New York gay marriage decision in June 2011. Students also created a zine which opposed tolerance of George’s viewpoints, stating that by doing so, we would be “condoning homophobia.”

After the talk, many students expressed dissatisfaction with the event, saying it did not accomplish any meaningful community-building or address substantive issues.

“What really bothered me is, the whole idea is that at a liberal arts college, we need to be hearing a diversity of opinion. I don’t think we should be tolerating [George’s] conservative views because that dominant culture embeds these deep inequalities in our society. We should not be conceding to the dominant culture by saying that the so-called “progressive left” is marginalizing the conservative,” Erin Ching ‘16 said.

Really old people like myself can remember the radical left’s adroit use of the so-called Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in the early 1960s. Allowing outside agitators representing the extreme left to recruit, propagandize, and proselytize on campus was, way back then, a vital issue of “free speech.”

Now, fifty years and a Gramscian long march later, the radical left effectively controls all our elite universities and the discussion of whether there is any real value in free speech, academic freedom, or diversity of opinion is now on the table.

Harvey Silverglate gave a speech to the 55th reunion of the Harvard Law School class of 1958, October 26, 2013, entitled “The Slow Death of Free Speech at Harvard.”

Some people evidently believed that you could concede domination of the culture of a great university to the radical left and retain liberal values like free inquiry and free speech. They were obviously sadly mistaken.

Drudge headlines yesterday(click on picture for larger image)

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The Washington Times reported:

The fallout from a Missouri rodeo clown’s mockery of President Obama continued as the Missouri State Fair said it will force all clowns to undergo sensitivity training and the head of the state rodeo-clown organization resigned.

The state fair commission voted Monday to ratify its decision to ban for life the clown in question who wore an Obama mask. The rodeo announcer and a second clown wearing a microphone asked whether the crowd wanted to see him get run down by a bull.

The crowd enthusiastically approved, according to spectators, one of whom compared it to a Ku Klux Klan rally and said his mixed-race family felt threatened.

But the state commission went further Monday, saying it will require that before the Missouri Rodeo Cowboy Association can take part in any future state fair, “they must provide evidence to the director of the Missouri State Fair that they have proof that all officials and subcontractors of the MRCA have successfully participated in sensitivity training.”

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I live far from urban American decadence, way out in the boondocks. The main drawback of which is crappy Internet delivered via satellite. For some time now, I had been noticing that one of the major advertising blocks in my sidebar was missing, but I just figured that particular item had taken to loading slowly, and I was too busy to sit around waiting for it.

Technical savant that I am, it has taken me a mere six months to take the time to delve deeper into what was going on. I finally yesterday identified what was not coming up, and then logged into Google Adsense to investigate.

What do you know! I had no ads.

And why was that? Maybe there was a message somewhere… I looked and found this message from “The Google AdSense Team:”

Hello,

The Google AdSense Team

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So I was banned by Google Adsense, back in last November, which I did not realize since the notice was (narcissistically) sent to my Google email address (which I never actually use).

The reason was my publication of “sensitive, tragic or hurtful content,” identified as a posting from 19 September 2012 reporting that France closed 20 of its embassies after the (vulgar and sophomoric) French satire magazine Charlie Hebdo, for the second time, had published crude cartoons mocking Mohammed.

My posting made a point of publishing images of the actual cartoons, which at the time many news organizations refrained from making available to their readers for fear of Muslim retaliation. I thought the cartoons were trivial in content and in poor taste, but I did also think that Islamic threats, violence, and intimidation challenging free speech in Western countries, and the cowardice of the establishment media, were quite serious issues and well worthy of attention.

So, Google Adsense, I find, is, in essence, enforcing Islamic prohibitions against even publishing, in the context of news reporting, cartoons insulting the Prophet Mohammed.

I was invited “to appeal.” Google absolutely refuses to enter into any other kind of communication with as insignificant a former business partner as myself.

When I clicked my way through the “appeal” on-line forms, I found that an appeal really consisted of a form begging Google to re-instate one’s advertising account and swearing that one had removed whatever it was that Google didn’t like.

Well, I have edited my sidebar code. Good-bye, Google Adsense. That space block is now dedicated to Amazon Associates advertising.

As for the Google Adsense team: “Ich heisse Götz von Berlichingen”

Personally, I think it is disgraceful that an American company is taking it upon itself to define and punish so-called “hurtful content,” even when the quotation objectionable to the camel-fornicating community was made specifically for news reporting purposes. But Google is, we must recall, located in California, land of left-wing bedwetters, where the eucalyptus trees exude so much self-entitlement, sanctimoniousness, and political correctness that the entire atmosphere is full of the stuff. What can one expect from a bunch of metrosexual millennials who go to work in Bermuda shorts and hoodies?

If anyone doubted that the regime of political correctness in Great Britain, there is this story in the Telegraph to change his mind.

A Welsh woman has been made to pay compensation for using a racist slur against an English woman after calling her “an English cow”.

len Humphreys, 25, of Garndolbenmaen, near Porthmadog, pleaded guilty to racially aggravated harassment, after she branded Angela Payne, who had an affair with her father, an “English cow.”

The court in Prestatyn in North Wales heard that Humphreys levelled the insult at Ms Payne when she went to her house in Rhyl to collect some of her father’s property and told her : “Leave well alone, you English cow”.

For Angela Payne it was the final straw, said prosecutor James Neary, as Humphreys’s mother had previously been warned by the police about her conduct. The court heard Humphreys had also called the victim other names previously.

Andrew Hutchinson, defending, said that Humphreys’s parents had been married for 32 years but her father had then started the other relationship, going “backwards and forwards” between the two women. “Emotions were running high,” he explained.

Humphreys was given a 12-month conditional discharge and ordered to pay Angela Payne £50 in compensation.

Someone is seriously supposed to be injured by the application of the term “English” as a pejorative? Absurd.