To nye artikler af Mark Steyn « Veritas Universalis

- om bla. Jyllands-Postens tegninger, De Tre Små Grise, bamser i Afrika, Ezra Levant og ytringsfrihed i Canada:

It’s all very odd, ‘that’s for sure’

Why should Richard Warman be the only citizen to have his own personal inquisition?

MARK STEYN | January 17, 2008 |

Our lesson for today comes from Shirlene McGovern:”You’re entitled to your opinions, that’s for sure.”

Clichés are the reflex mechanisms of speech — “Yeah, sure, it’s a free country. Everyone’s entitled to his opinion, right?” And we get so careless with them that we don’t even notice when they become obsolescent.

But Shirlene McGovern should. Because it’s her job to determine whether you — yes, you, Gordy Schmoe of 37b Hoser Crescent — are entitled to your opinions. Miss McGovern is a “human rights agent” with Alberta’s “human rights” commission, and she was officially interrogating Ezra Levant as to why, in his capacity as publisher of the Western Standard, he had reproduced in his magazine the so-called “Danish cartoons.” As you’ll recall from a year or so back, these were representations of the Prophet Muhammad published in the widely unread newspaper Jyllands-Posten, but which nevertheless prompted the usual surprisingly coordinated campaign of vandalism, death threats, mayhem and murder by the more excitable Muslims in various parts of the world. I doubt, had I been the editor of Jyllands-Posten, I would have published the original cartoons, because most of them weren’t terribly good. But once the drawings became an international news story it seems absurd to publish reports on the controversy without also showing what all the fuss is about. CNN did show the cartoons, but with the Prophet’s face all blurry and pixilated — the first time, I believe, that this familiar technique of investigative TV journalism has been applied not to a human being but to a, er, drawing, as if the cartoon Muhammad had entered the witness protection program.

Læs det hele HER i Macleans. Reservelink HER.

First They Came for Piglet

Excessive deference to Islam.

By Mark Steyn

y favorite headline of the year so far comes from The Daily Mail in Britain: “Government Renames Islamic Terrorism As ‘Anti-Islamic Activity’ To Woo Muslims.”

Her Majesty’s government is not alone in feeling it’s not always helpful to link Islam and the, ah, various unpleasantnesses with suicide bombers and whatnot. Even in his cowboy Crusader heyday, President Bush liked to cool down the crowd with a lot of religion-of-peace stuff. But the British have now decided that kind of mealy-mouthed “respect” is no longer sufficient. So, henceforth, any terrorism perpetrated by persons of an Islamic persuasion will be designated “anti-Islamic activity” Britain’s home secretary, Jacqui Smith, unveiled the new brand name in a speech a few days ago. “There is nothing Islamic about the wish to terrorize, nothing Islamic about plotting murder, pain and grief,” she told her audience. “Indeed, if anything, these actions are anti-Islamic.”

Well, yes, one sort of sees what she means. Killing thousands of people in Manhattan skyscrapers in the name of Islam does, among a certain narrow-minded type of person, give Islam a bad name, and thus could be said to be “anti-Islamic” — in the same way that the Luftwaffe raining down death and destruction on Londoners during the Blitz was an “anti-German activity.” But I don’t recall even Neville Chamberlain explaining, as if to a five-year-old, that there is nothing German about the wish to terrorize and invade, and that this is entirely at odds with the core German values of sitting around eating huge sausages in beer gardens while wearing lederhosen.