The Freedom to Speak

Hello audience, today’s podcast features David Gollob who served as CBC, BBC, and Mcleans correspondent in Central America among other key media assignments. We will be speaking about “The Freedom to Speak”. If you enjoy the podcast and article, you may wish to invite your friends and networks to subscribe.

The Freedom to Speak

“You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone”  

Joni Mitchell

Historian Yuval Harari has observed that we fully appreciate our knees only when they stop working. 

In my opinion, this also applies to our freedom of speech.

Still a rarity in a majority of countries, we who enjoy it must constantly be reminded how fragile this right is and how easy it could be to lose it.

I write this article on the 80^th anniversary of D-Day where many sacrificed their lives to defend our values and provide the freedom we enjoy today.

In recent years, we have witnessed how respect and civility are being diminished in modern political discourse.

Listening to opponents and others who may not agree and engaging in dialogue with them is now perceived to be weaknesses rather than strengths. Disagreements make the other an enemy rather than someone who has as an equal right to their opinion as we have to ours.

This not only applies to politics but also to life in general.

Recently, we have seen tens of thousands of highly “educated” students at elite Western universities chanting for Iran and Yemen, for global intifada, jihad, Islamism and Sharia law to conquer the West.

All of this is taking place supposedly in support of Palestinians and in the name of global anti-Zionism which is simply antisemitism under a different name.

How defacing a Jewish business in Montreal or Toronto or attacking Jews on the streets of New York or London is supposed to help Gazans is beyond me.

How “Queers for Palestine” can actually believe that they would be welcome in the Muslim world defies all logic. These ill-informed individuals seem to resemble lemmings, heading headlong to suicide over the cliffs of reality, rather than thinking human beings who are weighing carefully what they have and what they could stand to lose.

What they have is the freedom to assemble, to protest, to speak their minds, and to express their concerns.

They do so completely oblivious to the fact that all these actions would lead them to long prison terms or even execution in the very societies that they claim to support.

What they are creating is a sense in many people who do not support them that freedom of speech is no longer desirable when this freedom endangers the freedoms of others to move, work, worship, or simply live in peace.

The pendulum is swinging from excessive freedom of speech – hate speech on the one hand, imposition of ideas that prevent opponents from speaking on the other – to a desire for peace and the elimination in some way of the noise being produced by the futile shouting of these protestors.

This may sound harsh, but I ask how these students are influencing Israel and Hamas to stop their war that is costing thousands of lives. How do they think that supporting the aims of a global terrorist organization whose aim is to wipe out Jews around the world is going to convince Israelis to support any peace initiative that allows Hamas to survive and prosper?

Their protests also underscore their naivete about geopolitics.

They ignore the massacres of Arabs against Arabs and Muslims against Muslims that are claiming hundreds of thousands of lives and producing tens of millions of refugees and internally displaced millions more around the world.

They are ignoring the fact that Islamists in Europe and the Americas are calling for the Islamization of the world and the destruction of the very values that allow them to protest and live their lives in freedom.

They ignore that, for some weeks now, Hezbollah has turned northern Israel into a massive hell on earth by firebombing thousands of hectares of wooded areas and forcing tens of thousands out of their cities.

None of them are using their freedom of speech to address all these disasters caused by expansionist Islamism that is not aimed only at Israel and Jews, but at Western democracies that now appear to be anathema to these people.

Lenin once wrote that the capitalists would work on the preparation of their own suicide.

While this did not come to pass then, today’s masses of protestors are working knowingly or unknowingly on the suicide of Western values and democracy itself by supporting those who would destroy our values and way of life.

One has only to look at the mayors of major Western cities who have allowed, either out of fear of losing support or fear of attack, Islamists to take over many parts of their cities with limited or no police action, to destroy buildings and infrastructure, while preventing anti-Islamists from protesting, and abusing their right of freedom of speech.

The only result I see from the current situation is that these students, out of ignorance or naiveté, will destroy the very freedoms that allow them to demonstrate, freedoms that have taken thousands of years and tens of millions of lives to achieve.

Podcast: