scaramouche

Friday, 30 October 2009

Notes from the Resistance: While some Canadian proponents of state thought control--Jennifer, Richard, Bernie etc.--were defending their warped notions about the need to “balance” free speech with offensive speech as a means of sparing “vulnerable” people’s precious feelings (“feelings” and not freedom being these proponents’ be-all and end-all), I was off to Washington to attend the International Legal Conference on Freedom of Speech & Religion. The experience of being in the U.S. capital for the first time (at conference held right inside the U.S. Capitol Building compound, no less), of meeting delegates and speakers from the EU, the U.S. and Canada who are passionate about the cause of free speech, of taking part in an intensive, two-day event, was so heady, so exhilarating, that I’m still reeling from it. What follows are my first thoughts and impressions, which at the moment are still a bit scattered, but which I shall endeavour to collect as I write.

1) Washington

I arrived Monday afternoon, the day before the conference, and had only a few hours to see what sites I could. Luckily, the hotel was but a short hike to Capitol Hill, so that’s where I headed. The day was mild and sunny, and I was warmed--inspired--by sights I had previously seen only in pictures. What struck me right off the bat was the stark contrast between the two landmarks at the opposite ends of the National Mall. At one end: the Capitol building, immense, grand, elegant, elaborately and intricately decorated, a symbol of freedom capped by a dome and splayed out horizontally. At the other end: the Washington Monument: spare, unadorned, a symbol of freedom reaching straight up, up into the sky. (Were I of a Freudian bent, I might remark that the Capitol is female and the Washington Monument is male, an observation which no doubt has occurred to many others. But since I’m not, all I’ll say is: Wow. And Wow.)

On either side of the Mall: the famous museums which, amazingly, one can visit free of charge. Since my time was limited, I picked the one closest to my heart, the National Gallery (bet you didn’t know that in a previous life I was an art history obsessive), and spent a blissful couple of hours examining the masterworks. (To those who may be wondering: no, I did not visit the Holocaust Memorial Museum. With so little time to spare, I opted to take in the best, not the worst, of which mankind is capable.)

By that time, the museums were getting set to close, but because it was such a nice day I decided to take a different, longer route back to the hotel. Suddenly, I happened upon the Newseum, a punningly-named institution whose bailiwick I trust is self-evident. And there it was on the front of the building in big black letters:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Mega-wow. You won’t find words to that effect on the front of any Canadian building--or anywhere else on the planet, for that matter. Once again, I was literally stopped dead in my tracks, gobsmacked this time not by the beauty and immensity of a monument, but by the beauty and immensity of an idea. The idea. The one that underpins and shores up American freedom. The one that’s under assault by Americans (including President Obama) who, for a number of reasons, don’t fully appreciate it, and by those around the world, many of them Islamists and the leftists who are the Islamists’ useful suck-ups, all of whom are doing their damndest to, in effect, squelch free speech and efface those words--from the wall, and from the hearts and minds of freedom-lovers. Which leads me to, and in fact is a perfect segue for…

2) The conference. It was held in the Congressional Auditorium, inside the U.S. Capitol Visitor’s Center. (According to Frank Gaffney, whose organization, the Center for Security Policy, was one of the event’s sponsors, and who writes about the event here, the auditorium is brand new.) It was a large, though not huge, space. And while the subject is so critical the survival of Western civilization that one wishes there had been a warm body in each and every seat, sadly, that was not the case. However, most of those who were there--I didn’t do a head count, but I’d roughly estimate it at between 100 and 125--were true die-hards, individuals from various parts of the world who are so fired up about free speech that it was clear they could almost not not attend. The first day was devoted to free speech; the second to freedom of religion. Both days featured panel discussions and addresses by featured individuals, including several American politicians, a member of the U.K. House of Lords and a Danish representative to the EU Parliament. I won’t go into the ins and outs of each panel, several of which delved into legal minutia (well, it was a legal conference). Suffice it to say (at least for now--I may go into the nitty-gritty later) that one could take away three broad messages:

· In every part of the free world, free speech is under grave threat. In the U.S., blessed by a First Amendment and Founding Fathers who were committed to individual liberty and who knew how, given the opportunity, government would be tempted to trounce on it and/or claw it back, the flame of free speech is flickering: On the domestic front, the grotesquely misnamed “Fairness Doctrine” (dead in the water for now but soon to be revived under a more “palatable” name) and a government regulation calling for “diversity” in radio programming all but means curtains for “rude” right-wing radio; in the international arena, the hopeychangers have signed on to the internationalists’ anti-blasphemy agenda--a freedom killer if there ever was one. Both efforts seek to circumvent--indeed, to subvert--First Amendment protections.

In Canada, which has no First Amendment, but which has a piece of paper outlining our so-called “rights and freedoms”, a document that places an asterisk beside the line about free speech, the flame is even fainter: Our “human rights” system, a true abomination through and through, harasses certain individuals--mostly Christians and “Nazis”--whose words have been deemed “offensive”; and decades of imbibing the multicultural bilge which, since the 1970s our body politic has been awash in, has turned Canadians’ minds to mush. Then there’s that business about “balancing”--as if free expression were a see-saw. As far as I can tell, that’s a purely Canadian construct, since no else even seems to be talking about it.

In Europe, where reveries about how Utopia can come to pass once individual nations devote themselves to self-abnegation and blending in to the Great European Continent, free speech is all but extinguished. It exists in pockets--most notably in Denmark, home of the infamous Motoons, that test-case of Western freedom; in the Netherlands, home of Geert Wilders, who dares to reveal unpleasant truths about Islam; in the ruder ranks of Fleet Street. For the most part, though, Europeans--EUnuchs--have gelded themselves and handed their cojones on a silver platter to the Islamists. It is no exaggeration to say that, once Islam entered the scene, deference to “political correctness” very quickly became deference to Islam--i.e. dhimmitude-- and the continent on which the Magna Carta was written and the Reformation and Renaissance took place is becoming a little darker--Dar al Islam darker--each day.

· In the free world, especially in the EU, religious freedom, especially of Christians but also of Jews and other non-Muslims, is under grave threat. A cautionary tale was offered by Andrea Williams. A barrister in the U.K., Andrea is the director of an organization that offers pro bono legal help for Christians who have gotten into trouble with their employers for daring to empress some aspect, no matter how anodyne, on the job. For instance, it represented a National Health Care nurse who visited people in their homes. During the course of a visit with a patient who was failing, the nurse asked--and this is the sum of what she asked--if the patient would like her to pray for well. That one question, made not with any ulterior motive of “converting” the patient but purely out of compassion, caused the axe to fall on the nurse’s head. She was dismissed from her duties, and even though she has since been reinstated, her co-workers now turn their backs on her, and she is treated like a pariah. This in a country where Muslim women who work for the government are free to wear hijabs, a symbol of their religion, but Christian women cannot, say, wear a small cross, a symbol of their religion. The government has told these women that if they do feel the need to wear a cross, it must be pinned inside their garment, where no one can see it. God Save the Queen? Okey-dokey, but only if that God is Allah.

· The eclipse of free speech and religious freedom and the ascendance of sharia go hand-in-hand. Well, I didn’t have to go to a conference to learn that one. All I had to do was read the collected oeuvre of Robert Spencer and Andrew Bostom, both of whom appeared at the conference. (They were on a panel moderated by blogger Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs fame. The discussion centered around the awful story of Rifqa Bary, a 17-year-old Muslim girl living in Ohio who converted to Christianity. Knowing that the punishment for her apostasy was death, Rifqa fled to Florida. A Florida judge, who knew nothing about sharia, ruled that she should be returned to her home state, and saw no reason why she could not be returned to her parents--a ruling that amounts to a death sentence. Shockingly and disgustingly, the media, which doesn’t much care for Christianity and can’t seem to wrap its collective noggins around the concept of “apostasy” in the sharia sense of the word, have consistently depicted Rifqa as the villain of the piece. Pamela, a force of nature and a chick you do not want to mess with, is trying to rally people to save Rifqa. You can read about it here.)

· Like it or not, the fight to save free speech and religious freedom has become a “right” fight. I don’t like it--since freedom is not a right or a left thing, but a Western civilization thing. And there are some signs in Canada and the U.S. that there are those on the left who do realize this--for example, networks coming to the defence of FOX, under attack by the Obama administration for failing to toe the hopeychange line. Nonetheless and by and large, the people who are on the ramparts fighting for these freedoms come from the right end of the political spectrum. The reason for that is obvious. They are often profoundly religious people whose can see that religious freedom is being imperilled. Because they believe in God, they are highly are unlikely to fall for the secularist/Islamist God--UN Utopianism/internationalism/pacifism and all suchlike feel-good pap that is paving our road to Hell. People on the right also tend to know a lot more about Islam--not the squishy John Esposito/Karen Armstrong-type apologias for Islam, but the rigorous scholarship of Robert Spencer, Bernard Lewis, Andrew Bostom and others. One might also observe that this is a fight of the political right: all the politicians who spoke at the conference were of and on the right --the English Lord, the Dane who’s an EU Parliament member, and the five Republican American politicians (three Congressmen, one Senator, and the majority leader of a state house of representatives--all, as it turns out, from the Southern U.S.) Where were the Lefties? To afraid to stray from the hopeychanger ranks. Sitting in a room somewhere singing “Imagine,” “We Are the World” and “Kumbaya”. “Building bridges” and “reaching out” to people who are laughing--laughing!--at their sheer imbecility.

3) The speakers. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the incredible, remarkable, astonishing, amazing (okay, adjective overload, but that doesn’t mean that every single one isn’t well-deserved) speakers. So smart. So committed to freedom. So, well, nice (and you thought “nice” was a left-wing thing.) Aside from the ones I have already mentioned, there are four I would single out:

· Diana West--a hero of mine. I first met her in the Ladies Room before the conference got underway, and gushed--a bit too much, I fear, with admiration for her work. The first day, she appeared on the Frank Gaffney-moderated panel about limits on free speech the first day. The second, she gave a solo address about how Yale University--her alma mater--had sold its soul and sold out free speech (it refused to print the Danish ‘toons in a book about the Danish ‘toons) when it got in line for some of the Oily sheiks’ shekels. As Diana explained, money corrupts, and Arab oil money corrupts by turning university administrators into dhimmis.

· Morten Messerschmidt. He’s the Dane who sits in the EU parliament. Young, tall, blonde, very good looking (Kathy Shaidle, who I was sitting beside, remarked that he looked like the sort of fellow who would sing “Eidelweiss”), he gave an impassioned address about how Europeans have stupidly handed over their free speech to a cadre of “human rights” apparatchiks based in Strasbourg (the equivalent of Canada’s CHRC, I suppose). They are the ones who are empowered on the continent which gave the world Locke and Voltaire and Kant and Spinoza to decide which speech is and isn’t acceptable. And as in Canada, the speech that is acceptable is sharia-inspired hate speech directed at infidels, and the speech that isn’t acceptable is usually speech by Christians, whose religious beliefs clash with secularist political correctness. (It seems not to penetrate the hyper-saturated brains of these appartatchiks, multiculti relativists the lot of them, that the “victim” group whose “feelings” they are endeavouring so mightily to spare subscribe to some pretty politically incorrect beliefs themselves. Or maybe it has gotten through to some but they are either too scared or too desirous of holding onto their cushy jobs and remaining members in good standing of the “human rights” community to admit it.)

· Lord Malcolm Pearson. Lord Pearson is the peer who tried--but, alas, failed--to get Geert Wilders to speak to the House of Lords. (Here’s the speech he would have given, had he had the chance.)

· Congressman Tom Rooney. A first term congressman from Florida, Rooney has been on the job for only ten months and retains a Mr. Smith Goes to Washington vibe I found particularly engaging. Not that he’s a naïve hick from the sticks or anything, only that because he’s so new he has yet to become entrenched in Congress’s old boy’s/girl’s club, and is therefore willing to speak openly and plainly. It’s because of Congressman Rooney that the conference was held in the Congressional Auditorium, since his signature made it possible.

Posted by: scaramouche at 16:01 | link | comments (5)

Comments:

#1 30 October 2009 - 17:10

Excellent report, Scaramouche! Thanks!

Josephine

Anonymous

#2 30 October 2009 - 19:23

Thanks, Josephine.

scaramouche

#3 31 October 2009 - 18:53

Thanks for posting this!

Sounds like an amazing conference.

The left/liberals have lost their way on this one but they know where we to find us.

We're the ones fighting for real rights, not just some select victim group of the moment.

Regards,

Dave

Anonymous

#4 10 November 2009 - 20:31

Thanks. I feel better after reading this report. Some people get it.

Anonymous

#5 11 November 2009 - 04:31

Wow - wish i had been there - but what a terrific report - bring them all back to Toronto, please!!!!

Anonymous

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Posted by: scaramouche at 16:01 | link | comments (5)