Steyn is right. May claims to be working for the public good and trying to quell violence, but by closing off legitimate debate about jihad and Islamic supremacism, she is inciting violence: the jihadists will see that they can act with impunity, and frustration will increase among those few who are standing against them. Meanwhile, those putative opponents of jihad and “Islamic extremism” in the UK who have remained silent about this probably think they are avoiding being sullied by the taint of association with us — as the defamation and libel to which we have been relentlessly subjected has undoubtedly had its effect. What they do not realize, however, is that the same attack will eventually be directed at them, and all their efforts to keep their hands clean will turn out to have been in vain. The Left and the Islamic supremacists will brook no opposition whatsoever to the jihad. No one will ultimately be spared or excused from their campaigns of personal destruction — even (and perhaps especially) those who think they have found the perfect formula of words and actions to satisfy the demands of politically correct dogma.
Sign the petition asking that we be allowed into the country here.
“One Step Forward, Two Steps Back,” by Mark Steyn at NR’s The Corner, June 26 (thanks to Pamela Geller):
Three snapshots of western liberty:
1) A few weeks ago, I wrote about a Canadian police department’s diversity enforcer attempt to shut down a Pamela Geller speech by getting her bounced from a Toronto synagogue. In Britain, the shut-up-he-explained crowd cut to the chase: They went to the (supposedly Conservative) Home Secretary, the ghastly Theresa May, and got Miss Geller and Robert Spencer banned from the entire country on the grounds that their presence in the United Kingdom would not be “conducive to the public good“.
By contrast, the presence of, say, Anjem Choudary, philosophical mentor of the Woolwich head hackers and a man who calls for the murder of the Prime Minister, is so “conducive to the public good” that British taxpayers subsidize him generously and provide a half-million-dollar home for him to live on. Mrs May”s Home Office has just admitted to the UK Muhhamed al-Arefe who advocates wife-beating. Perhaps Mr [sic] May will try out Imam al-Arefe’s expert advice on the beneficial effects of “light beating” on Theresa this weekend — or is spousal abuse only “conducive to the public good” of Muslim women?
The reflexive illiberalism of Britain’s so-called liberals — the urge to ban the debate rather than win it — is now so deeply ingrained they will soon be hungry for new victories. Nearly four centuries after Milton’s Areopagitica, freedom of speech is dead in England. In denying her charges access to dissenting ideas, Mrs May is inviting them to find alternative means of expression. No good will come from this.