And yet the Europeans deny rights we consider basic-- not to illegal combatants and terrorists--but to their own citizens. Freedom of speech itself is under assault in Europe, flowing from misguided attempts to stifle speech that offends:
This swirl of speech-law charges, lawsuits, and investigations is now sustained by an "antiracism" industry. Dozens of antiracism groups and self-appointed representatives of religious and other communities, like France's Movement Against Racism and for Friendship Between Peoples (MRAP) and the Muslim Union of Italy, readily file complaints and suits and sometimes are the direct beneficiaries when fines are imposed. Their complaints provoke investigations by an alphabet soup of government agencies, like Belgium's Center for Equal Opportunities and Opposition to Racism and Britain's Commission for Racial Equality. These in turn feed into the court system. If America had practices like these, the debate over, say, the Dubai ports deal would almost certainly have sparked a shower of civil suits and criminal investigations against elected officials and columnists charged with "anti-Arab . . . anti-Muslim" bigotry (to quote the Council on American-Islamic Relations).
Couldn't a group of well-heeled Americans fund a European Civil Liberties Union to help fight such represssive laws in Europe? Defend the little guys against the stifling of free expression?
Europeans want to interfere in our internal policies from waging war to elections to the death penalty? Fine--fight them on the ground of freedom itself. Strategypage calls it "lawfare" and we should give them some of the same. Considering we may come to rely on the support of Europeans out of power to express their views and reclaim the governing and press centers of power, wouldn't it be good to give those out of power the tool of freedom of speech? The governing class suppresses such speech precisely because it runs against the elite assumptions sometimes imposed on the commoners.
I'll become a card-carrying member of the ECLU if it is ever created.
