Free Speechifying Part Deux

The fight for free speech has a very real and measurable impact. I'll let Christopher Hitchens take over:

"two decades ago the theocratic head of a foreign state offered a large sum of money, in his own name, in public, to suborn the murder of a writer of fiction who was not himself an Iranian."

Three people died as a result of this and Salmon Rushdie had to spend the good part of 20 years under police protection. Note the importance of this. Some dude, in another country, not known to you, decides that what you say or write about is unacceptable, and commands his followers to hunt you down and kill you if they can. They then make life so difficult for you and anyone involved with you that the ideas you speak of are no longer spoken of because you know, who the hell wants to be on the end of a credible death threat?

The ever so notorious Mohammed cartoons, that caused so much trouble, riots, property damage and death, that no sane publisher in the West is going to attempt the same. The media is constantly pushing our leaders to enter into "dialogue" with Muslims, to see if we can resolve the differences. Interfaith leaders (read: religious leaders from different denominations) keep telling us we must keep open a dialogue with our "Muslim brothers" so that such terrible things as the current Pope quoting an Emperor from the middle ages does not happen, or Burger King stops making blasphemous sunday cup lids, or any other multitude of evil offensive things the West generally does to offend Muslims.

“Where does [the dialogue] start? Would it start, for instance, with making a joke? Contra Mr Khomeini – not a funny man. Or, would it start with an article, perhaps? Would it start, perhaps, with a film? It did, a few years ago, with Submission, and Theo van Gogh was killed. Could it start with making a joke, perhaps? A joke in a cartoon? Well, apparently not, because we know there were burnings and killings and lootings and rioting across the globe in reaction to those cartoons. If you’re going to start a dialogue, what could you do that would be smaller than drawing a cartoon? This dialogue which we keep on being offered is not reciprocated.”
--Douglas Murray, 9th Oct 2007, Debate topic:
We should not be reluctant to assert the superiority of Western values

Another dread cartoon that offended the "wrong" people (notwithstanding their deliberate misunderstanding of the image)