Redstate

Posted at 11:06am on May 15, 2008 Islam and Free Speech: Canadian version.

By Paul J Cella

The wisest thing in the world is to cry out before you are hurt. It is no good to cry out after you are hurt; especially after you are mortally hurt. People talk about the impatience of the populace; but sound historians know that most tyrannies have been possible because men moved too late. It is often essential to resist a tyranny before it exists. It is no answer to say, with a distant optimism, that the scheme is only in the air. A blow from a hatchet can only be parried while it is in the air.
— G. K. Chesterton.

Any reader involved in our long-running debate (recapitulated just last week) on Islam and Free Speech, should sit down a read this remarkable statement carefully. It concerns a complaint brought before the Ontario Human Rights Commission against Mcleans magazine, which reprinted a portion of Mark Steyn’s book America Alone. The complaint alleged that Mcleans and Steyn violated the Ontario Human Rights Code by unfairly “targeting Muslims.”

Read the statement, and then read on.

Posted in Canada | free speech | Mark Steyn | sedition | the Jihad | War — Comments (11)/ Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 10:00am on May 8, 2008 Free Speech and Islam.

By Paul J Cella

We must allow for the possibility that Islam as such is a threat to this country. Even more bluntly: The question of the character of Islamic doctrine — whether it can be tolerated without fatal exposure to its war-making titles — must remain an open question if we are to remain a free people.

Here is the enigma with this whole business. Most Americans, Right and Left, will profess belief in a very robust principle of Free Speech. Thus the idea of curbing discussion on an important topic will arouse their repugnance. I have argued in the past for legislation embracing certain aspects of Islamic doctrine — the dogmas, specifically, of Holy War (jihad), Holy Subjugation (dhimma) and perhaps Sharia law itself — into our current sedition law: in other words, outlawing the promulgation of these dogmas. Even among people favorably deposed toward an aggressive posture vis-à-vis Islam, this is met with suspicion and hostility.

Fair enough — but why abandon this Free Speech principle when it comes to the character of the Islamic religion? There is the perplexity and the frustration. People jealous to preserve a “marketplace of ideas,” where true ideas will “out-compete” false ones in the end, while understandably hostile toward my proposal to proscribe certain forms of Islamic speech, yet exhibit an apparent insouciance about proposals (less overt than mine, to be sure) to proscribe certain forms of speech about Islam.

Read on.

Posted in free speech | sedition | the Jihad | War — Comments (214)/ Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 11:15am on Apr. 21, 2008 To alleviate a dilemma.

By Paul J Cella

An article in the Washington Post details the difficulties faced by prosecutors in achieving guilty verdicts in federal terrorism cases. The dilemma, from the prosecutor’s perspective, is simple enough: You have a cell of conspirators plotting murder and mayhem; should you intervene early, with arrests and formal charges before the plot matures, or wait until its maturity virtually insures guilty verdicts? If you choose the former, you indemnify against the possibility that the plot will be carried out under your very nose, that, in fine, the intervention will come to late; but in so doing you may find yourself with a weaker case. If you choose the latter, interdicting the plot in its later stages, your prosecution will be far easier, but you magnify that risk that it will succeed despite your best efforts. Patience may issue in disaster; swift intervention in a failed prosecution.

It seems to me that a possible alleviation of this dilemma lies in new legislation: Let us make the plot itself a more serious offense, one that is easier to prosecute and carries a more onerous penalty. That is to say, let us proscribe the mere preaching or advocacy of jihad against America.

Read on.

Posted in American political tradition | sedition | the Jihad | War — Comments (12)/ Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 2:30pm on Nov. 5, 2007 Hawkish on sedition.

By Paul J Cella

One of the more remarkable ironies of what is infelicitously called the War on Terror is the rigid mental partition we have set up between its foreign policy aspect and its domestic security aspect. The basic way this works is that the domestic aspect is ignored in its specifics, while the foreign policy aspect is exaggerated in generalities. A politician who talks tough on foreign policy, but almost exclusively in the comfortable language of political abstraction, is labeled a Hawk; while a politician (at this point only imaginary) who talks tough about the specific details of the domestic threat, will probably be labeled a bigot.

Now this is all very strange to me. Consider: The only reason the Jihad is a real threat to us is because its agents and propagandists are in our midst. In other words, the Jihad has not the wherewithal (yet) to deliver us blows from without. It must rely on infiltration into, or recruitment in America. That is a fact.

Read on.

Posted in fifth column | sedition | the Jihad | War — Comments (49)/ Email this page » / Read More »