Orwellian Freedom

Submitted by John Borgman (United States), Feb 11, 2003 at 19:53

Daniel Pipes is one of the few intellectuals to risk the wrath of the politically correct academics who bleat incessantly about their commitment to peace while quite openly advocating violence and personal assault upon any and all who attempt to debate them in a rational, factual manner.

What really grates is the seepage of this oppressive mind-set into the laws of the western nations as evinced by the Canadian police lecturing Prof. Pipes about prison terms for the vaguest reference to clashing cultures and comparative valuations. Should our society continue to ignore these assaults upon simple freedom of expression we will find ourselves under the jackboots of these modern commisars as surely as the Russian people were subjugated. And how ironic that the U.S. won the Cold War yet increasingly finds the traditional founts of freedom---the university, major newspapers, leading policy journals---stifled by 'speech codes' and other rot right out of Putin's KGB playbook.

Pipes is also one of a handful of thinkers who truly sees our current crisis for what it is----a battle of survival of the West vs. the radicalized Islamists. Our president will sooner or later have to get off the fence and see Israel's fight for its very survival our fight; the overwhelming evidence that Arafat and his bloody mafia are as anti-western as Bin Laden must be faced and appropriate retaliatory measures followed. The fact that the U.S. hasn't led a full-fledged assault on idiotic laws outlawing profiling, clamped down on immigration, or launched devastating lightning air attacks on the states sponsoring terrorism after losing over 3000 citizens doesn't bode well for the seemingly inevitable attack on Iraq. The West has forgotten what it takes to conquer a foe in war; the vicious denizens of Arafat, Assad and Khamenei haven't.

---

Note: Opinions expressed in comments are those of the authors alone and not necessarily those of Daniel Pipes. Original writing only, please. Comments are screened and in some cases edited before posting. Reasoned disagreement is welcome but not comments that are scurrilous, off-topic, commercial, disparaging religions, or otherwise inappropriate. For complete regulations, see the "Guidelines for Reader Comments".