I got off the phone a little while ago with one of the student organizers of my address tonight at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He told me that I would be led to and from the stage via secret passageway; that thirty security personnel would be on hand (in addition to my own); that attendees would have to pass through metal detectors; and that a bomb-sniffing dog would also be on hand.
It is rather amazing to me that all this would be necessary anywhere in America today -- and all because I am saying things they don't like. MSA students have been accusing me this week of fostering an atmosphere of hate that leads to innocent Muslims being victimized. This is a preposterous charge to make to anyone who is trying to defend human rights, but it is also a noteworthy case of projection: it is they who are fostering an atmosphere of hate and thuggery, with all their lies, smears, and hysterical rhetoric, which combined with the way they and their allies have behaved at talks by previous speakers they disliked has made all this security necessary.
The Left and the MSA's on campuses all across the country are fostering a very dangerous atmosphere that is completely opposed to the classic spirit of the university. The increasingly apparent fact that all too many universities have become nasty little propaganda camps suggests that the principles of free inquiry, of honest and open discussion and dissent, and of the old adage, "I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it," are far more endangered than most people realize.
The fairy tale doesn't tell us what happened to the little boy who declared "the Emperor doesn't have any clothes on!"
The kid was probably convicted of a "hate crime".
The Administration, backed by the state of Wisconsin, and behind it the people of Wisconsin, should have met any threats, any displays of violent talk, threats, any intimidation, with prompt arrests, and -- in the case of students -- immediate and permanent expulsion. This has to be done over and over again. The First Amendment is not something to allow to be whittled away by unofficial Storm Troopers of the Jihad, intent on silencing the most reasonable and well-informed of critics.
Stay safe! More of the same:
Germany: No Muhammad Look-Alike Contest
http://sheikyermami.com/2008/10/16/germany-no-muhammad-look-alike-contest/
Were there any explicit threats or is this just precautionary, ebven as surreal as it all seems?
If the former, I am with Hugh.
Stay safe.
Yea, what Hugh said.
Keep your stick on the ice, Robert.
Pen-ah, intellectual envy... Being an alum of uwm I can testify to the very real chip on the faculty's shoulder. All this from a university in a city with a black holocaust museum?
Lan astalem,
Goingthere
be safe Mr. Spencer
t sounds like you are venturing into a war zone instead of an American college campus. How sad that millions of American college students have been brainwashed into believing that free speech is politically correct speech and anything else is "hate speech". Truth is totally irrelevant, so irrelevant that they cannot bear to be confronted with it. They're afraid of the truth; it will only complicate their lives and burst the bubble they float around in for four years while attending our diverse, multicultural, politically correct colleges and universities.
They're so predictable, like programmed robots. They carry the same stupid signs, scream the same stupid epithets, and march in lockstep to the drum of their Marxist professors. If the entire college experience consists of trying to out shout everyone who doesn't tow the left-wing line, these students have no conception of what freedom or freedom of speech means.
God bless and protect you and your family.
tanstaafl:
I believe the way the fairy tale ends is that once the young boy who is without guile speaks the truth, those around him are too finally able to see the truth.
I saw a great cartoon of the emperors new clothes once. The king was standing in front of a tailors mirror wearing only his crown and surrounded by the tailors. The caption was "Cool, I dig them. I want you to make the same outfit for every chick in the kingdom."
Unfortunately in this sad real world, it takes much much more than one who is without guile speaking the truth to enable those around him to see it also.
We had the muslim population on my university campus agitating back in the 80's, but I'm sure they've grown much bolder.
Stay safe, Robert.
MR spencer you never heard of the dem group shout down like 1932 storm troopers shout down others views often useing violance listen bro very careful.
"It is rather amazing to me that all this would be necessary anywhere in America today"
-RS
How many of those making threats weren't even born in these United States? There's one possible part of the problem.
People who make such threats, if they are found to be foreign-born, should be expelled from the United States, with a "do not return" stamp on their passport.
When the Obama administration takes control it will be all straightened out.
/BS
with a "do not return" stamp on their passport.
Posted by: PMK at October 16, 2008 4:18 PM
Or better yet, consicate and shred it upon expulsion.
err... confiscate.
"It is rather amazing to me that all this would be necessary anywhere in America today -- "
Robert, your secure, undisclosed headquarters must be in a very unusual part of America if you find this amazing. Metal detectors and armed guards are s.o.p. at virtually every public building I've been to in the last several years: city halls, county courthouses, high schools, post offices, etc. Even my public library has an armed cop on duty. When I go to pay my property taxes at the county building, I have to pass thru a metal detector and state my business to an armed deputy.
What is amazing is that the general public stands for all this. We should be demanding that the police be allowed to do their job, and to concentrate on the most likely suspects. But no, we all must suffer so that we don't offend a few by "profiling" or "stereotyping".
Or better yet, consicate and shred it upon expulsion.
Posted by: awake
Can you confiscate a passport issued by another government?
I read this and said a prayer for you. Take care.
And once again, thanks to you and everyone at JW for your hard - and often dangerous - work.
The fairy tale doesn't tell us what happened to the little boy who declared "the Emperor doesn't have any clothes on!"
The kid was probably convicted of a "hate crime".
Posted by: tanstaafl at October 16, 2008 2:15 PM
Yes, it does, tanstaafl. In the original by Hans Christian Anderson, the little boy (Truth-Teller) is set upon by the crowd and killed.
Modern times have "cleaned up" the story.
This is why RS and others like him must have security and be protected - they are Truth-Tellers. And the last thing the masses of people want to hear is the Truth.
Thus, this proverb:
"The Truth-Teller must have one foot in the stirrup."
(Armenian proverb)
i agree with Mo.
Well, darcy, since the Armenians have managed to survive well past the massacre in Turkey, I guess they must know something.
Milwaukee? Milwaukee??!! First Chicago, now the other city of my youthful geography. Damn! I'm going to go bury my head in the John Adams biography I'm reading now, so that I can be surrounded by ideas of the real America for awhile.
No taking chances please, and do take full advantage of whatever security detail is supplied by the university. We don't want any biers to make Milwaukee famous.
While reading this post, I teased my memory for the name of a documentary film I watched a few years ago. Coincidentally, I recently received an update about this documentary in my e-mail . . . voila, it is called, Indoctrinate U .
If at all possible, this entire week's confrontations should be documented on film as well. Events as described on these pages provide an amazing teaching moment - if it can be done without additional risk.
My prayers go out for continued success and safety.
You are my hero.
Darcy -- I've looked all over and not found an alternate ending to the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale. The boy never bites it in the end as far as I can tell.
Andersen adapted the story from Don Manuel, a Spanish prince from the 1300s. He wrote a book called "El Conde Lucanor" and Cuento XXXII is where you'll find the original story, although the Don Juan Manuel probably got his idea from somewhere, too. In the Spanish story, anyone who can't see the material is actually the son of someone other than his or her known father. In Spanish culture there seems to be no worse possibility than being a cuckold or the son (oops, not really) of one. The truthteller in Don Manuel's version is a black servant who has no honor and doesn't mind what others think of his parentage.
"[in the original story] anyone who can't see the material is actually the son of someone other than his or her known father"
-- from a posting above, quoting from Andersen's source in "El Conde Lucanor"
So the moral of the story is:
Not just any Hidalgo will do. It takes a Fulano de Tal, one with possibly even a bend sinister on his heraldic crest, to fully annotate the tale.
OK, I'll admit it...about half of my memory of The Emporer's New Clothes comes from the Fractured Fairy Tales cartoon version from the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.
Couldn't find Emperor's New Clothes, but here's Rapunzel:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nea6Azgh1Pk
France's Chirac lead the way, others follow:
http://sheikyermami.com/wp-content/uploads/selvcensur-chirac.gif
Real scary stuff from France:
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/3591
OK, I'll admit it...about half of my memory of The Emporer's New Clothes comes from the Fractured Fairy Tales cartoon version from the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show."
-- from a levelling-with-the-world poster above
Of course it does. For you and many others less candid. But not for me. No, I'm of an old and much more bookish generation. Everything I know about world literature I have obtained not from cartoons on television, but from those old comic books known as Classics Illustrated. Everything.
It seems to me the University is all to well aware of the problem they have on Campus. It must be one really large Cat they wish not to let out of the bag.
The portion of the Left responsible for this atmosphere should be ashamed, but won't be. That more than thirty security people are needed for a speaker at a university is shameful.
The very fact the University acknowledges the threat and is implementing security measures is a back handed admission to the rabid environment that they themselves have fostered with their own policies of enablement.
Projection is the right word. Listen to Muslims carefully, their accusations against the West. What they accuse us of is what they intend.
Hugh -
Here's my two cents In Praise of Reading.
I distinctly remember a very beautiful old book that my grandmother had, with colour illustrations, featuring Hans Christian Andersen stories, not watered-down at all. I particularly remember his version of the haunting story of 'Elsa and the Swans'.
And 'The Water Babies', by Charles Kingsley - which I had read, in its entirety, before I turned 11, and from which I retain, to this day, the account of the protagonist's painfully educational encounter with Mrs Be-Done-By-As-You-Did, followed by the encounter with Mrs Do-As-You-Would-Be-Done-By. I think of Kingsley's stern Mrs Bedonebyasyoudid, every time I encounter people agonising over what to do with the supremacist jihadists.
I remember many happy hours, steadily absorbing anything and everything from 'The Richards' Childrens Encyclopedia', and another such, the title of which escapes me, but which included accounts of Greek and Roman mythology. Oh, and Grolier's 'Lands and Peoples', ca 1949; it has its flaws, but it included facts now conveniently forgotten, such as how many people perished in Lebanon when the Turkish Muslim rulers blockaded and starved the place during WWI.
I read the complete Brothers Grimm, and the complete Hans Andersen, and when I got to University and encountered a truly comprehensive and enormous library, I waded into Burton's translation of the 1001 Nights (just imagine an innocent Christian 18 year old encountering Burton's scandalous footnotes!) and joined the Classical Society and took part in performances of, inter alia, Aristophanes' Lysistrata.
While I was doing my second degree someone introduced me to the writing of Jacques Ellul - and, fortunately, that particular university library contained everything he had ever written, so I got to work and read the lot, most of it in translation but some of it in the original, where there was no translation.
I had read the Divine Comedy, in translation, before I left high school; and learned Italian, with the Dante Alighieri Society, primarily in order to be able to hear what the Commedia sounded like in the original. And thus...equipped myself to be able to enjoy Oriana Fallaci, 'straight'.
Mum gave me my first 'real' Bible (as opposed to 'children's story bibles') when I turned 12. The King James Version, no less; a beautiful edition with lots of useful notes and maps. Again: by the time I'd left High School I'd read the whole thing; learning off by heart, along the way, quite a few of the Psalms.
Words, words, words...I get drunk on words. Your writing, Hugh, is now a daily pleasure: you have terrible warnings to make, solemn counsels to give, but you express them so exquisitely. Mr Spencer's style, too, so different from yours, is also sheer bliss to read.
And I can only say to anyone here like 'richard' - *never* allow yourself to remain content only with the parodies, the 'fractured fairy tales', the movie version, the cartoon version. If you've watched 'the BBC version' or 'the Hollywood version' of this or that, 'Pride and Prejudice' or 'Hornblower' or Tolkien's 'Lord of the Rings' - but haven't bothered to read the book/s because you've seen the movie - you're depriving yourself of so much. Go to the library. Read!! *This stuff* - these books, this wit, romance, wisdom, imagination, knowledge - *this* is what we are fighting for, against the Nothing that is sharia, Islam, the Ummah.
In Ayaan Hirsi Ali's 'Infidel' she describes the experience of entering the library of the English-medium school in Kenya, and immersing herself in the children's literature of the English-speaking West, from the English versions of Hans Andersen and the Brothers Grimm, to Enid Blyton and Nancy Drew. It laid the foundations for the liberation of her soul.
I think one of the most important comments on this thread, says that all these meetingS should be filmed.
I agree absolutely.
And preferably it should be filmed with multiple cameras so the action can be caught from various angles.
Robert and Hugh. If this is not being done it should be a priority. I wish I was near so I could bring my four cameras and record it all and post it up on youtube for the world to see within a day or two.
Do you guys and associates have any camera savvy guys who are committed to the cause, and know about filming? If not you should find them, or learn how to yourself. It's possible. I went from never having held a camera to being proficient in about a year and half.
YOU ABSOLUTELY MUST MULTIPLY YOURSELF BY THIS MEANS, IF YOU ARE NOT DOING IT ALREADY.
I should have added that I can advise on information that would help you be able to set up really good looking interviews etc. While the recent Gert Wilder interviews are good content, the filming is not well done. Improving the filming could hugely improve the impact of such interviews.
But...at the end of the day, better something than nothing.
Just wondering, do people have to pay to hear you speak at these meetings Robert? I am only wondering that if they are free then it is easier for troublemakers to come, and by forcing you to spend on security, their threats help to impoverish the organisers.
Robert wrote:
He told me that I would be led to and from the stage via secret passageway; that thirty security personnel would be on hand (in addition to my own); that attendees would have to pass through metal detectors; and that a bomb-sniffing dog would also be on hand.
It is rather amazing to me that all this would be necessary anywhere in America today --
Does the above not make you livid? I'm not an American, as the name implies, but we are only different in name, as we share the same ancestry.
A man, speaking freely, about something that is a great danger to us all and he needs to be hushed in and out, under cover, via secret passageways, in learning establishments that house the adults of tomorrow?
What is happening to the West? It is seriously imploding and the left wing, YES, the left wing are successfully undermining and destroying years of hard work by our ancestors(and theirs) who created such a free society through their own blood.
What amazes me the most is that it seems all common sense has gone out of the window. You speak out about Islam and what happens? Racist, Nazi, Islamaphobe, fascist, bigot......it goes on and on.
Had we not had people like Spencer and Wilders then Europe would have become overrun by Nazis. Had it not been for Mitchell(created the spitfire) and his anxieties on Germany, pre WW2, then we would not have had a great man who invented an aircraft that almost single handedly won the Battle of Britain. He was ignored, like Wilders, by his government, when he stated that Nationalism had risen again in Germany and the anger of their oppression too.
I know of Universities in the UK, whose lecturers have to be very careful what they say about Islam, for fear of being attacked.
I despise Islam. If you removed the religion from the people then I'd have no problem with them, but while they are Muslim, I will never, ever trust them.
I hate to say it but what America and the West needs is chaos. I know this may anger many, but it makes sense. I really, truly feel that the West needs an oppressive cult like Islam to control it, just to show many how oppressive it is and how their life before was far better and their culture far superior.
In the meantime, the Muslims will still have their protectors in the Liberals and the Socialists. They will still ignore the attempts of those with common sense to do something about the growth of Islam. Until the Liberals/Socialists actually experience Islamic oppression first hand, they will continue to support them and defend them from the right AND the right.
Out of War comes peace and out of peace comes war and it's been far too peaceful in the West for too long. People have become complacent and forget that many of their ancestors fought and died so that they could have freedom today. They forget that their ancestors, led similar lives as they and the last thing they wanted to do was to pick up a gun and fight in foreign lands.
They say a liberal is a conservative who hasn't been mugged and how true is that. Until those in our society actually face the real dangers posed by those they protect will the West continue sleep walking into ultimate oppression from Islam.
Some also say as well that they would rather fight for freedom while they still have it and I couldn't agree more but then many people do not realise that freedom comes at a price many are not willing to pay.
I say bring on the chaos, so that those who protect their assassins can have first hand experience of the their blatant stupidity.
I know many will disagree with what I've written but if our politicians continue to look at Islam as our friends, then the story of the scorpion and frog continues to spring to mind. Islam despises the west, its culture and its freedoms. It can never ever co-exist with us, for as it grows, so will it segregate and destroy. I'm just amazed that many people are so blatantly ignorant to this.