Tim Sumner

free speech, Political wind

One playwright’s perspective of cultural revolutions

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Sir Tom Stoppard is a British Academy Award winning screenwriter and Tony Award winning playwright. In the TimesOnline, he recently described his 1968 view of the cultural revolution in England:

A small incident which must have confirmed some people’s worst suspicions about me occurred when I was asked to sign a protest against “censorship” after a newspaper declined to publish somebody’s manifesto. “But that isn’t censorship,” I said. “That’s editing. In Russia you go to prison for possessing a copy of Animal Farm. That’s censorship.”

In that same piece, Stoppard added:

In 2005 I interviewed a film-maker in Belarus who had been beaten up by state security for the usual reasons and he said a few things which were remarkably like a speech I had just written for a Czech Anglophile in Rock’n’Roll. What the film-maker in Minsk told me was this: “The fact that you can call your prime minister a liar and a criminal is not [an attack on] his virtue, it is your virtue.”

Editor’s note: ‘Rock’n’Roll’ is a play by Stoppard about the significance of rock and roll in the emergence of the democratic movement in Eastern Bloc Czechoslovakia.

CAIR, free speech

If you do not like the values of the West

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Updated.

At the American Thinker, Joseph Crowley tells of an email:

“The story begins at Michigan State University with a mechanical engineering professor named Indrek Wichman. Wichman sent an he-mail to the Muslim Student Association. The e-mail was in response to the students’ protest of the Danish cartoons that portrayed the Prophet Muhammad as a terrorist. The group had complained the cartoons were ‘hate speech.’ Enter Professor Wichman. In his e-mail, he said the following: “Dear Moslem Association…” [Ed. — More about the content of the email in a moment.]… “Now the local chapter of CAIR has jumped into the fray. CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, apparently doesn’t believe that the good professor had the right to express his opinion…” Click here to read the rest.

Sharia law has yet to supersede our Constitution despite CAIR’s seditious efforts.

Updated, 3:30 PM: Joseph Crowley wrote us to say:

I did not write this piece. Long story short, the credit for this belongs to Spencer Collins, see this.

Editor — Thank you, Mr. Crowley, for the correction.