POOR CUSTODIANS OF FREE SPEECH

Virginian Pilot, VA
Oct 19 2006

Last week in Baghdad, dozens of heavily armed Shiite terrorists stormed
the offices of Shaabiya, a new television station, suspected of Sunni
sympathies, which had run nothing more controversial than a few songs
to test its broadcasting equipment.

That the freedoms to speak, publish and broadcast have not taken
hold in Iraq shouldn’t come as a big surprise. In a region dominated
by dictators, petty monarchs, official state media and the brutal
repression of dissidents, the Middle East was always going to be a
stony soil for Western ideals.

But before judging the Iraqis too harshly for failing to accept one
of our better ideas, or beating on President Bush for acting like the
Federalist Papers might be a best-seller if translated into Arabic,
it is worth remembering what a hard sell real free speech is even in
the places where it should be safest:

The University. Last week, the president of Columbia University in New
York announced an investigation into the circumstances surrounding
several pro-immigration student groups’ decision to storm the stage
and unfurl a banner rather than let a leader of the Minuteman Project
give a speech.

The Internet. Over the past two weeks, YouTube has been purging
its site of politically incorrect videos, arrogating to itself
the authority to remove videos based on such a vaguely worded
user agreement that Saturday-morning cartoons easily violate its
"standards."

France. If there is a birthplace for the Jeffersonian ideals embodied
in our Bill of Rights, France is one of two contenders. Last week,
the lower house of parliament there decided that anyone who disagrees
with historical accounts of the Armenian genocide should go to jail
for a year.

With American and NATO troops in harm’s way in Iraq and Afghanistan,
trying to bring a bit of freedom to places it has never been known,
it is profoundly sad that we practice that freedom so poorly here.