When the Euroweenies Attack...

Michelle Malkin via HotAir:

The European Union is launching a bid to make big government even bigger by requiring internet blog sites that ustilize video to conform to broadcasting standards, ostensibly to protect children from 'hate speech.' Considering the continuing trend on the left to classify basic conservative ideology as hateful and advocacy for conservative ideals as 'hate speech', this kind of censorship is definitely something to be avoided. Even recent trends in political correctness show us that this kind of thing is dangerous: earlier this month, a teenage girl who refused to work on an in-class school project in a group with several Asian students was suspended for racism. The problem? These were foreign exchange students from China who were speaking to each other in Mandarin, a language she didn't understand! Only one of the foreign exchange students spoke English, so the girl wanted to work with other students with whom she shared a common language, so she could understand what was going on. For that, she was suspended.

As Americans, and indeed, as humans, we need to be extremely wary of arbitrarily classifying ideas we don't agree with as racist or hate speech. Yesterday on her radio show, Laura Ingraham played clips from a debate between Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and the head of the ACLU. In this debate, Scalia warned against the prominent liberal view of the Constitution as a "living, evolving document", because in doing so, we run the risk that it will "evolve" in a way that makes our own views or ideologies illegal. Modern American liberals seek to use the judiciary to accomplish what they cannot accomplish through the elections process, whether it be maintaining a 'right' to abortion, instituting homosexual marriage, or even removing the words 'under God' from the Pledge of Allegiance. They worry about the structure of the Supreme Court, especially after President Bush's two new appointments, but what if the SC were truly a conservative court that bought in to this same method of operating? How would liberals like it if a conservative SC took it upon itself to legislate conservative ideals from the bench?

We face the same dangers from political correctness and definitions of 'hate speech.' Such ideas are double-edged blades, and a good analogy is to picture such a blade swinging as a pendulum, because this is how history shows that the political process tends to go: swinging back and forth, liberal, then conservative, then back to liberalism, then back to conservatism. What liberals are today using to cut off conservative arguments and ideas may very well come back to cut them, and liberals who would wish to restrict speech based on political correctness should remain aware of that.

Some EU leaders want to exempt Google and YouTube as a "concession," but considering the flak Michelle Malkin and others have taken when trying to post anti-jihad videos on YouTube (which hosts a multitude of pro-jihad videos), and the attitude Google has taken toward oppressive regimes such as communist China, this is hardly a "concession."

As Malkin says, "the price of internet freedom is eternal vigilance." This arena, the internet, is one of the last places where speech is truly free, and it is paramountly important that it stay that way, for the sake of both sides of the ideological spectrum.