Mark Steyn and Canadian Freedom of Expression.

In the West, increasingly comfortable with the regulation of opinion, Canada has been leading the way in the systematic assault on what can and cannot be said. A kangaroo court there that goes by the grandiose name of the Human Rights Tribunal is about to decide that those like Mark Steyn who describe Islam as it is should be fined, gagged and made to apologise. Although the " Tribunal " has not yet ruled on Steyn's"case", it has not in all its sorry history failed to find for plaintiffs. In this case the plaintiffs are Canadian Muslims who object to an excerpt from Steyn's book America Alone that was published in Maclean's magazine. America Alone is an excellent description of the Islamic birth rate time bomb and Islam's petro-dollar funded attack on Western values. He makes the point that while most of the West succumbs to censorship and self loathing, the US with its robust Freedom of Expression Laws stands alone in protecting progress and the civilised future. Lets hear it again. What does progress and civilisation depend on? Freedom of Expression. Its as simple as that.

There are of course even in the Land of the Free some who argue that the US should follow Canada and other Western nations down the path to limited freedom of expression. A wonderful example of these is the legal philosopher Jeremy Waldron. " It is not " he writes in last month's New York Review of Books " clear to me that the Europeans are mistaken when they say that a liberal democracy must take affirmative responsibility for protecting the atmosphere of mutual respect against certain forms of vicious attack". What Waldron is in fact championing is an" atmosphere of mutual respect" where non-Muslims  refrain, in a proper observance of dhimmitude, from saying anything critical of Islam. Waldron should be awarded a prize for circumlocution but lets hope that the Americans don't take him and his mates too seriously. Oh, and here's a helpful idea in these difficult times; given Waldron's views with regard to freedom of expression, I am sure that if he applied for research monies to Gulf fund providers they would listen sympathetically. Research, any kind of research is freedom of expression. Go for it Jeremy!

Obama Lies. Stupid!

The US should be able to elect a President who is an Atheist, a Muslim or a Donut Worshipper. What it should avoid is electing one who lies. Obama was brought up a Muslim and then converted to Christianity twenty years ago. What's the problem with that? His website blandly declares that he never was a Muslim.  This is a stupid lie that Obama and his crew will live to regret. Really Dumb.

Turkey, the EU, the Secularists and the Islamists.

Today, Tayip Erdogan and his ruling AK party got a well deserved slap down from Turkey's Constitutional Court. The AKP had wanted to reverse a law that forbade women from wearing head scarves at university, a law that was a core component of the heritage left by modern Turkey's founding secularist father Kemal Ataturk. So far only the AKP's Bekir Bozdag has dared to protest saying " This is interfering with both democracy and parliament's legislative authority ". Although this protest will be echoed in the West, it will not help the AKP which may in fact well be banned for its creeping Islamisation program by a second ruling to be delivered this autumn. There are enough urban Turks who are justly proud of Ataturk's secularist legacy and they with the Armed Forces and the Judiciary will no doubt check the Islamists for a while.

But for how long for? That question brings us to the interesting dependence of Turkish Islamism on Turkish membership of the EU. Erdogan's AKP has boasted that democracy is the bus to Islam. It is a sort of one person, one vote, once only take on democracy. You have a democratic election, you vote in an Islamist party and, hey presto, the Islamists ban the democracy that got them in. If you have heaven's rule on earth, who needs democracy? This irony is a serious problem throughout the Islamic world; if they were allowed to hold truly democratic elections, most Muslim countries would, with Gulf money greasing the process, let the nutters in. Algeria held relatively free elections and the Islamists won. The Algerian secularists and Army saw what was next on the menu and promptly " annulled " the election results. Erdogan and the AKP, no fools they, realised that if Turkey is admitted into the EU, the EU would not tolerate the Turkish Armed Forces's " interference in the democratic process". This means that Turkey in Europe would be as Islamic as the AKP wants. With its Anatolian retrogrades it would be a majority, as it is now, able to democratically do whatever it wants in Turkey. All our women in burkhas? Sure! Sharia with some nice televised stonings? You got it! None of the numpties running Europe would object. How could they? It would have been after all the will of the Turkish people. More subtely, the Islamists might get Turkey into the EU, behave long enough to purge the secularists under Brussel's approving wing and then secede to set up the beloved Caliphate of old. Either way, the bus would have served its purpose.
So, in conclusion, for our's and Turkey's sake it is best that Turkey remain outside the EU. Outside, Turkey would remain safe under the undemocratic but benevolent tutelage of its secularists. Hey, in 50 years or so even the Anatolians might mellow out. Who knows?