Easier to Be a Radical Than a Moderate? In a PC World It Is!

It can't be easy being a moderate Muslim when the Politically Correct authorities and media treat YOU like the bad guys while using Jihadists as Liasons.
Unfortunately this piece is only a LITTLE satirical; mostly it is just sadly true.

Source:
H/T:

UK Teacher fired for complaints against students who praised 9/11 bombers

As a teacher myself, I found the following news story disconcerting (emphasis added):

Christian teacher 'forced out' after complaining Muslim pupils praised 9/11 hijackers as 'heroes'

A Christian teacher yesterday claimed he was forced out of his job after complaining that Muslim pupils as young as eight hailed the September 11 hijackers as heroes.

Nicholas Kafouris, 52, is suing his former school for racial discrimination.

He told a tribunal that he had to leave his £30,000-a-year post because he would not tolerate the 'racist' and 'anti-Semitic' behaviour of Year 4 pupils.

The predominantly Muslim youngsters openly praised Islamic extremists in class and described the September 11 terrorists as 'heroes and martyrs'.

One pupil said: 'Don't touch me, you're a Christian' when he brushed against him.

Others said: 'We want to be Islamic bombers when we grow up', and 'The Christians and Jews are our enemies - you too because you're a Christian'.

Mr Kafouris, a Greek Cypriot, taught for 12 years at Bigland Green Primary School in Tower Hamlets, East London.

According to Ofsted 'almost all' its 465 pupils are from ethnic minorities and a vast proportion do not speak English as a first language.

The teacher claims racial discrimination by the school, its headmistress and her assistant head after they failed to take action about the comments made by pupils to him.

He said there was a change in attitude of the pupils after the atrocities of September 11, 2001. They told him: 'We hate the Christians' and 'We hate the Jews', despite his attempts to stop them.

He said he filled out a Racist Incident Reporting Sheet but claimed headmistress Jill Hankey dismissed his concerns.

In a statement submitted to the Central London Employment Tribunal he said: 'Miss Hankey proceeded to excuse and justify the pupil's behaviour, conduct and remarks to me as if I had no right to be offended by the child's remarks and conduct.

'Amongst Miss Hankey's justifications for the child's remarks, she said, "If the child was older, say 15, I might take it more seriously. He's only nine - he's only doing it to wind you up".'

He added: 'I felt the head's behaviour and conduct towards me amounted to direct religious discrimination. I was intimidated in the way she spoke to me which indicated "Don't come back with such issues again".'

Mr Kafouris, a bachelor, said the comments became more frequent after the head did nothing about the initial incidents.

...

There are several factors here to consider: With Kafouris being a Greek Cypriot, could that trigger ethnic discrimination?  If Kafouris' claims are, indeed, truthful, how can the school and its administrators not act?  What if the situation involved White students harassing a Black teacher, or vice versa?  Would the administration also just say the problem is due to the students' young age and should, therefore, not be taken seriously?

Source: UK's Mail Online
H/T: Hummers & Cigarettes

Stifling free speech is not really free, by Salim Mansur

Free speech is not merely an ornamental bauble found in liberal democratic societies. It is the well-fought ground upon which the structures of such societies have been constructed.

It is free speech in practice, or its ideal subscribed to, that has distinguished Europe and western civilization from all others past and present. Its absence or suppression is the main feature of totalitarian culture.

Yet free speech has never been entirely free from siege by special interests.

Except for the United States where free speech is constitutionally protected by the first amendment, the exercise of free speech can still be constrained by the guardians of public interests as we see in the case of the Dutch MP Geert Wilders, indicted and brought to court for offending Muslims in Holland.

The trial of Wilders is as much a step backward from the ideal of free speech as it is indicative of how free people willingly compromise their freedom by forgetting their history.

In indicting Wilders for hate speech, the Dutch, and their Western supporters, have turned their backs to the long line of defenders of free speech as the cornerstone of liberty, from Spinoza and Voltaire to Emile Zola.

Mere footnotes

No modern thinker has written as clearly and forcefully on liberty, and what it means in the most fundamental sense of freedom of conscience and freedom of speech, as did John Stuart Mill.

All subsequent writings on the subject are mere footnotes or parenthetical circumlocutions of those who have not abandoned the quest of abridging free speech — even as they present themselves as defenders of freedom — by claiming to protect the rights of others.

Mill contended it would be wrong any time for a government, even if it represented completely the will and opinion of the entire people under its rule, to control or suppress the opinion of an individual. Such coercion, in Mill’s view, was illegitimate.

He wrote: “The best government has no more title to it than the worst. It is as noxious, or more noxious, when exercised in accordance with public opinion than when in opposition to it. If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.”

Western societies in general have fallen short of Mill’s expressed ideal of liberty, but any infringement of that ideal has smacked of bad faith. In recent years, multiculturalism was propounded as if to ease the conscience of liberals — those who believe in liberty as Mill wrote about — when they do illiberal things such as penalizing free speech.

Solvent

The irony lost upon those eager to protect others from being offended by the exercise of free speech, particularly when it comes to the subject of religion, is that such offence was the necessary solvent for the reform of Christianity and the church — reforms that contributed to the making of the modern, secular, liberal and democratic West.

In protecting Muslims from those who offend them, the West ill-serves Islam and those Muslims who seek its reform. Muslims need untrammelled free speech to awaken to the awareness of how totalitarian and comatose is their culture.

Source: Toronto Sun
H/T: Poste de veille

Étouffer la liberté n’est pas une liberté, par Salim Mansur

La liberté d’expression n’est pas simplement un colifichet décoratif des sociétés démocratiques libres. C’est le fondement durement acquis sur lequel ont été érigées les structures de ces sociétés. C’est la pratique de la liberté de parole, ou l’accord avec cette idée, qui distinguent l’Europe et la civilisation occidentale de toutes les autres civilisations, passées et présentes. Son absence, ou sa limitation, sont le trait majeur des cultures totalitaires.

Pourtant, la liberté d’expression n’a jamais été complètement exempte des assauts que lui livrent des intérêts particuliers.

Sauf aux États-Unis, où elle bénéficie de la protection constitutionnelle du premier amendement, l’exercice de la liberté de parole peut toujours être limité par les gardiens des intérêts publics, comme on le voit avec le cas du député hollandais Geert Wilders, inculpé et traîné en justice pour avoir offensé les musulmans en Hollande.

Le procès de Wilders représente tout à la fois un pas en arrière par rapport à l’idéal de liberté d’expression et une illustration de la manière dont des peuples libres laissent sans s’y opposer remettre en cause leur liberté en oubliant leur propre histoire. Lire la suite...

Source: Toronto Sun (Traduction par Poste de veille)