The Rant

by Bob Clasen What is the basic intellectual defense of free speech? It is that people are intelligent enough to make the best decision, if they are allowed free access to all of the relevant information. The defense of liberty assumes that it is safer to allow all points of view to battle it out in the marketplace of ideas rather than allow any particular group to enforce its point of view at the point of a gun. This defense of Liberty assumes a rather optimistic opinion about the nature of man. It appears to me that since it has been allowed to dominate in the west, the results have not been so bad; better than in ages when proper opinion was dictated by the Church or State or both. What does it say about a philosophy or religion that believes that any contrary opinion is "evil" and that it is good to throttle any hostile opinion by violence and force? What should we think of any philosophy which has spread itself over the world by force of arms rather than by persuas

I am trying to understand the Islamic frame of mind. If several persons in Denmark publish a cartoon about Mohammad that Muslims find offensive, this means that Muslims all over the world are justified in rioting and random acts of violence: burning down embassies and assaulting and murdering people who had nothing to do with creating or publishing the offensive cartoon. Their only crime is that they are non Moslems; Christians, Jews and secular non believers. This is a very interesting notion of justice, don't you think? So if one western person does something wrong, all western persons are therefore "open season?" Groups are held responsible collectively for the sins of any one member. I have heard of this sort of "justice" being carried out in Iraq. For example, if one person betrayed Saddam Hussein, the Republican Guard would seek out and exterminate all the members of the family of the miscreant, even though none of them had actually broken any law,