Freedom Of Speech In Your Hole

Tony Fucking Blair:

Tony Blair's controversial plan for a new law to stop people "glorifying" terrorism has been backed by MPs.

The prime minister said the law would allow action to be taken against people with placards glorifying the 7 July bombers - which were seen in London during protests against cartoons satirising the Prophet Muhammad.

Placards. Fucking placards. Lordy, what brave defenders of our Western enlightenment values we’ve turned out to be. Let’s recap: gratuitously insulting and provocative cartoons characterizing Muslims as a pack of shifty, swarthy suicide bombers are published by a right-wing Danish newspaper, very possibly in cahoots with notorious racist neo-con asshole Daniel Pipes, generally adding insult to injury for a community of people being shit on from all angles. The reasonable complaints of Muslim leaders are ignored and dismissed for months while the offending cartoons are reprinted all over the fucking planet. A spate of tiny protests, some of which turn ugly, and every shitheel with a voicebox takes a break from yoo-hooing the PATRIOT Act or chuckling about Cindy Sheehan being manhandled over a fucking T-Shirt and instead gets all watery-eyed about his precious freedoms all of a fucking sudden. All of this despite the fact that not once in the whole case did anyone ever threaten censorship; despite the fact the cartoons in question have been more widely distributed than Charlie Sheen’s STDs and have been seen by nearly every PC-owning cunt on the fucking globe. We will never sacrifice our freedom of speech! We shall not relinquish the right to offend!

But oh, lord save us from the big scary fucking placards. Bunch of fucking pussies. If these guys with their new-found freedom-boners have any stones at all there’ll be a spate of sympathy placard posting all over the blog-o-place within hours, just like there was with the fucking stupid cartoons. After all, doesn’t that freedom extend to speech that one finds objectionable? Isn’t that what you all have been gasbagging about all fucking fortnight?

Man, I just saw the fucking megalomaniac on the TV just now, rictus grin in place. The new laws will send a message to those who wave big scary fucking placards all over the place, says Tony, and at this point I swear I heard a pause, a brief acknowledgement of the soupy irony of his next words. "We have free speech in this country", he says, "but don’t abuse it." Well I guess that's sound advice.

Free press? How come we hear so little from the same free press about European governments helping the US ferry people - on no fewer than 800 flights over four years, according to Amnesty International - to be tortured in places where it is legal to do so? How is it that nobody in the European free press is talking much about the fact that Iran stopped any further discussion of its nuclear program because the three EU leaders who were parleying with them reneged on their side of the bargain, by not ensuring Iran security in the event of a foreign invasion?

We hear nothing from the free press about the fact that the success of Hamas in the recent elections may have more to do with its schools and health clinics for beleaguered Palestinian communities (while the generous "international community" has abandoned them) than with its purported Islamic fundamentalism.

The "free" media in the West do not bother to investigate the events of September 11, 2001, or allegations that the Central Intelligence Agency itself may have been involved in the Bali bombings of 2002. It does not make any demands of the Bush administration to release the more than 1,700 pictures and videos of tortures and humiliations at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo that the Pentagon has kept away from the public eye.

We have to hear from bloggers on the Internet about the US forces in Iraq kidnapping women and girls related to suspected insurgents. Needless to mention, no dead American soldiers are shown on the TV screens of the Western media (though there is no bar on showing those killed by suicide bombers in Baghdad). How often is it remembered, not to speak of responsibility taken for the fact, that genocidal UN sanctions prosecuted by the West killed more than a million innocent people in Iraq in the 1990s? The free media in the West keep secret from the public the fact that the US has for years given asylum to proven terrorists such as Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada, wanted by Latin American governments for blowing up planes and suchlike. They are exempt from the "war on terror".

Above all, the media do little to ask for the impeachment of the consummate liars and mass-murderers who occupy elected positions in more than one Western democracy today, even as they pretend to teach lessons in political morals to less fortunate countries.

Free press? Or cowardly media eager to please the wealthy masters?

If any of you chest-beating chunderheads really give a shit about your freedoms, I reckon now would be the time to start making a proper fucking fuss.