Free-speech hypocrisy knows no bounds

...In France and across Europe this past week we witnessed a display of public outrage against the jihadists’ murder of 10 journalists at the Charlie Hebdo magazine offices. “We are Charlie” placards and banners were carried by thousands of marchers in an effort to send a message to Islamic terrorists that Frenchmen will not be intimidated into silence.

Yet, the huge “unity march” in Paris was compromised by the president of France declaring that the terrorist attack on the Paris magazine editors “had nothing to do with Islam.” None is so blind as he who will not see.

...The progressive left is having a hard time defending Western values and institutions against the Islamist threat because the left does not believe in those institutions. When Obama spoke of the need to “transform America,” he wasn’t talking about raising the minimum wage.

In both Europe and the United States, indeed on every continent, silencing dissent and criticism has been the goal of the left every time they have come to power – whether an Ivy League university, the local PTA, the American Historical Association, or CBS News...

Journalism, of course, is not what it used to be. There is a reason why the Associated Press banned the term “illegal alien” from its style manual, even though it is a term found throughout U.S. immigration law. It was to stifle dissent: You can’t debate a proposition if you can’t even speak its name. The same speech code is enforced on nearly every American college campus. George Orwell would be proud...

Those Charlie Hebdo magazine cartoons that brought on the Islamist retaliation in Paris would never have been allowed to be published in a student newspaper at UC Berkeley, Swarthmore, or even the University of Texas at Austin. They would have been labeled “hate speech”...

The conflict between radical Islam and the West is not about freedom of speech or journalists’ right to publish insulting cartoons about religious leaders. That is a small subset of a far larger problem. The conflict is over Islam’s doctrinal intolerance of all dissent of any kind, which raises the fundamental question whether orthodox Muslims who try to follow the Quran’s teachings can coexist in modern society without waging war against non-believers.

The answer to that fundamental question determines what other questions need to be asked. For example, if fundamentalist Islam and its legal extension, Shariah law, are incompatible with the freedoms enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, then Islamic immigration into the U.S. must be halted and all proponents and adherents of Shariah should be deported because their oath of fidelity to the Constitution cannot be fulfilled.

At its core, this is a conflict of civilizations. Imagining that this conflict will go away if only our writers and cartoonists will show sensible restraint and respect for Islam’s icons is a fantasy that is already having deadly consequences.