What in the hell is the world coming to

when I applaud an essay written by a bunch of fuggin' commies? Seriously, they are commies.

Post of the day is here. Friggin' great.

Excerpts:

Despite the presence of many grievances in the general mobilisation, the focus on the cartoons has made it a single movement with one upfront demand—that the non-Muslim world should obey the prohibition of (the majority of) Muslims against portraying (or against insulting) Muhammad.

That people everywhere should obey a rule of a religion they all reject, and some may abhor. That those who refuse to obey the Islamic edit should be punished and penalised by non-Islamic governments.

Western governments who do not want to have their embassies burned down, or their trade with Islamic countries boycotted and ruined, or the lives of their nationals in Muslim countries placed in jeopardy, had better make themselves enforcers for the rules of a religion which their citizens do not accept. That is the demand.

They must curb free speech and free expression. Curb the freedom to criticism and mock and outspokenly denounce religion—the freedom from which over centuries most of our freedoms have been spun and consolidated.

And how have the bourgeois-democratic governments and liberal newspapers and TV systems responded? In the face of an outcry which—whatever energies other than religious feelings have fuelled it—has been a vast outpouring of religious zealotry and bigotry, they have apologised!

...

In the countries where they are strong or dominant, the political Islamists are the enemies of virtually everything socialists and liberals believe in. They have rooted out liberalism, secularism, and socialism, and persecuted and murdered those who could not be intimidated and cowed.

The craven surrender of the liberals and the liberal left therefore betrays not only themselves, and what people like them used to stand for. It betrays those fighting the bigots in their heartlands - the enemies and too often the victims of the religio-fascists in the Islamic world.

The issue is free speech, but it is not just that. It is not just a matter of finding and adhering to general and universal principles. The right to criticise and mock and denounce religion is not just one right among many similar rights. The freedom to criticise religion is, in history, the root out of which all other such freedoms have developed.

It was a long, slow development from the assertion by heretics and protestants - by Albigenses, Hussites, Wycliffites, Lutherans, Calvinists - of their right to disagree with the Catholic church and with each other, to our erstwhile right to freely express atheistic contempt and condemnation of religion — all religion.

It was not a matter of reaching an amicable agreement with the religious in the time of their strength and predominance. It was a matter of drawing a line between them and us and standing on it, of fighting them tenaciously to win the right to dissent and mock and criticise their entrenched bigotry.

BOLDED is from Protein Wisdom, whence I found the essay. Read the whole thing.

So weird. For what, 80 years, socialists have said the West sucks, and so many in the West BELIEVED them that now the West doesn't love itself enough to defend its central characteristics. Geeze... Is the enemy of my enemy my friend? Is the lesser enemy my ally? Is... 'scuse me while my fuggin' head explodes.