A set of ideas immune from criticism

On 7 2005 Booker Prize winning author, Salman Rushdie, said this in The Los Angeles Times:

"I recently returned from a trip to Britain, where I discovered, to my consternation, that the government is proposing a law to ban what it is calling 'incitement to religious hatred.' This measure, much beloved by liberals, is apparently designed to protect people 'targeted' because of their religious beliefs...

To me it is merely further evidence that in Britain, just as in the United States, we may need to fight the battle for the Enlightenment all over again. That battle, you may remember, was about the church's desire to place limits on thought... We may have thought the battle long since won, if we aren't careful, it is about to be 'un-won'...

The idea that any kind of free society can be constructed in which people will never be offended or insulted, or in which they have the right to call on the law to defend them against being offended or insulted, is absurd.

In the end, a fundamental decision needs to be made: Do we want to live in a free society or not? Democracy is not a tea party where people sit around making polite conversation...

The moment you say that any idea system is sacred, whether it's a belief system or a secular ideology, the moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible...

With its proposed 'incitement to religious hatred' law, Prime Minister Tony Blair's government has set out to create that impossibility. Privately they'll tell you the law is designed to please 'the Muslims'...

Rioting Sikhs already have forced the closure of Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti's play, 'Behzti,' in Birmingham, and the government has said nothing to criticize them for attacking the theatre, breaking windows and issuing death threats...

What this kind of attitude ultimately does, and what the law would do, is undermine a principle of free expression that affects everyone in Britain, religious or not. If we cannot have open discourse about the ideas by which we live, then we are straitjacketing ourselves...

The defence of free speech begins at the point when people say something you can't stand. If you can't defend their right to say it, then you don't believe in free speech. You believe in free speech only as long as it doesn't get up your nose."

The fact that the government said and did nothing about the 'rioting Sikhs' and the whispered admission that 'the law is designed to please the Muslims,' says it all really. The proposed (and now instituted) law wasn't intended for them. It was, along with all the race law introduced before it, designed to subdue and discourage the indigenous British peoples. To keep us mute and passive as the world our ancestors made was taken from us.

As Lee Jasper, Senior Policy Advisor on Equalities to former Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, until he resigned under a cloud on 4 March 2008, is fond of saying:

"Black people cannot be racist." (Click on the Twitter image below to enlarge)

THEY are at war with US. Not them. Sikhs, Muslims, West Indians, Africans and, latterly, east Europeans are THEIR footsoldiers in this war upon the Western man.

Wikipedia tell us this:

"On 14 February 1989, a fatwā requiring Rushdie's execution was proclaimed on Radio Tehran by Ayatollah Khomeini, the spiritual leader of Iran... A bounty was offered for Rushdie's death, and he was thus forced to live under police protection for several years. On 7 March 1989, the United Kingdom and Iran broke diplomatic relations over the Rushdie controversy.

The publication of the book and the fatwā sparked violence around the world, with bookstores firebombed. Muslim communities in several nations in the West held public rallies, burning copies of the book. Several people associated with translating or publishing the book were attacked, seriously injured, and even killed. Many more people died in riots in some countries."

Rushdie is, himself, a Muslim.