Outside the U.N. General Assembly, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was asked if Salmon Rushdie remained under a death sentence. Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, had issued a fatwā for the author’s fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, in 1989. Though that specific death sentence was rescinded a decade later, others have renewed the call for Mr. Rushdie to be killed.
Ahmadinejad responded jokingly, “Is he here in the United States? . . . If he is . . . you shouldn’t broadcast it for his own safety.”
Clearly, Mahmoud never completed a Dale Carnegie course.
On the bright side, nothing so clearly articulates the superiority of our system of government over Iran’s as does our embrace of free speech and their rejection of it.
Tragically, political leaders in the West often fail to stand up for this freedom. The Iranian leader cited a German law to claim the West has a double standard. He argued that Germany’s prohibition on publicly denying that the Nazi Holocaust ever happened makes it a criminal offense to “embark on historical research.”
Now, Mr. Ahmadinejad is a Holocaust denier, his point about historical research is moronic, and the tyrannical government he figure-heads would really, really like nuclear weapons, making him extremely dangerous, to boot. But, more tragically, he has a point here.
He’s half as good as a stopped clock.
Germany’s abridgment of freedom in this instance doesn’t help battle Nazism, much less Islamofascism; it hurts by undercutting a key value. We have nothing to fear from free speech. Indeed, it’s important to hear fully what both our friends and our enemies are thinking.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
4 replies on “Half Clocked”
Those who would do evil have much to fear from free speech.
“He argued that Germany’s prohibition on publicly denying that the Nazi Holocaust ever happened makes it a criminal offense to “embark on historical research.””
Perhaps calling (manmade) Global Warming skeptics “deniers” is not such a neutral term after all.
Paulina — No, it’s not neutral at all. It is scientifically inaccurate and historically disgusting.
Once again so astutely on the mark, dear Mr Jacob.
But in a world in which the “leadership,” of the “free world” is vested in an at best definitively murtadd Muslim, who, in his mentored-by-Frank-Marshall-Davis infancy, youth and adolescence attended grade school, visited Pakistan and it is alleged dropped by various American institutions of higher learning as an Indonesian — and who sat in Jerimiah Wright’s Marxist, Moscow-oriented, self-styled “Black-theology’ ” premises for, he tells us, twenty years — and was and is the intimate of such luminaries as Bill Ayres, Bernardine Dohrn and Calypso Louis Farakhan?
The surely it’s time to remember the admonition of that later in his life very well known anglo-American, Winston Leonard Spencer Jerome Churchill.
Who, in his 1899 work: The River War; warned:
QUOTE:
“How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property — either as a child, a wife, or a concubine — must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.
“Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen: all know how to die. But the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science — the science against which it had vainly struggled — the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.”
END QUOTE.
European civilization is already demographically doomed and Pakistan has already stolen the means to arm itself from the strong arms of science.
And now, helped. however haplessly, along the way the Carter “administration” and by (particularly) that of the Clinton Crime Family — and aided and abetted by Pakistan’s perilously perfidious predators and by Peking’s, Pyongyang’s and Moscow’s — the Mad Mullah’s are on the verge of so arming.
And both our beloved fraternal republic and the very Judeo-Christian/Western/Human Civilization our blood and treasure has both long vanguarded — and guarded — has at its helm a criminal gang lead by a platitudinously TelePromTered intellectually and morally insolvent street punk.
God save us — and let’s pray and trust that before it’s too late and/or the Trojan Horsed savages already among us tear them down, some read and digest the courageous Ms Pamela Geller’s admonitions as to backing Civilization against the savage.
Brian Richard Allen
Lost Angels — Califobamacated 90028
And The Very Far Abroad