House of Eratosthenes

Cinnamon Stillwell has some criticism for CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Specifically, on CAIR’s latest effort to muzzle talk show host Michael Savage.

CAIR has a rebuttal for Ms. Stillwell. It is rather thin on fact and rather thick on instructions to readers about what-to-think. It accuses her of “cherry-picking,” and then, I notice, proceeds to show us how it is done.

It seems the folks who read CAIR’s rebuttal, at least the ones who were motivated to comment on it, are not entirely convinced.

A central piece of evidence to CAIR’s “you should think the way we think you should think” argument is Hate Hurts America and their web site…that web site’s front page…the articles appearing in that front page.

Conservatarian.net systematically dismantles CAIR’s argument.

Northeast Intelligence Network does more of the same.

The funny thing about our right to supposed “freedom of speech”? That right’s most dangerous enemies, are not the ones who declare an all-and-out frontal assault on it…it’s the ones who want to tailor it to their own private agendas. The ones who say, oh sure, you have a right to speech here…but not there.

CAIR seeks to redefine what America, and its freedom-of-speech, are all about. If they can just do that, they’ll succeed at dismantling this great nation brick-by-brick. If they cannot, they will not.

I’m not sure that this tactic is a winner in this country. Large segments of policy have been branded as “out of bounds” in Europe, but this has not happened here yet, as evidenced by the brouhaha over the comprehensive amnesty bill.

Americans will tolerate quite a bit of this type of manipulation, but when it comes down to it, I sense that we still see it for what it is, and if it becomes blatant, then the backlash comes. I wonder if it isn’t better that these tactics are being tried, so that the debate never closes, and the original “offenses” are still bandied about. At the very least I hope that our enemies are overplaying their hand, as they seem to have done in Iraq, and on 9/11.
- chunt31854 | 01/06/2008 @ 22:00
I think you’re right, but I’m also convinced that wherever there is life, things are in motion. And so you can overplay your hand one year, and in the next year, that very “hand” is well within bounds, and even stylish.

Examples abound. The word “ass,” for example. That was a real swear word at one time. Bill Clinton lying in front of a grand jury and then staying in office…a generation earlier, unthinkable. Hell, that one was unthinkable, just one year earlier, during the “that woman Ms. Lewinsky” speech. Another example — the Che Guevara tee shirts.

And so it bugs me to see our enemies pretending to be engaged in a real debate, wearing such a paper-thin disguise. It bugs me because I know we have a lot of people who wouldn’t know a real debate if it bit ’em square in the…well, in the ass. Yes, we look around and see nobody’s falling for it — today. The hand is being overplayed. But there are no consequences to overplaying that hand. The enemy knows they just come back next year, and try again. Our society worships life, not death, and because of that it is constantly in motion. I think the death-worshippers have figured this out about us. What we’re seeing is an assault on our most vulnerable front, the one bastion in our fortress wherein we apply cognitive thought. A comfortable lifestyle tends to weaken the walls at this very point. And our enemy envisions our cultural lifestyle as so very comfortable.

It is exactly what I would do if I were them, and I’m afraid that in the long term, it will work just fine, silly as it may look in the present tense.
- mkfreeberg | 01/07/2008 @ 09:23
One only has to look north at the flap over Mark Steyn – Maclean’s being hauled in front of not one but three Canadian “Human Rights Commissions” to find a cautionary tale that far exceeds anything CAIR has done. Thank God we don’t have such ~~commissions~~ kangaroo courts in the US…
- Buck | 01/08/2008 @ 14:10

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