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Don't get me wrong - I do NOT think that Pat Robertson should be denied the right to express his views. As a staunch advocate of complete freedom of expression, I think that his speech is as protected as any sane individual (ignore for the moment that his brand of Christianity is a perversion that only the mentally feeble would endorse... and since he endorses it, he is a fortiori mentally feeble).
However if he is entitled to make statements like that, then Abu Bakr Bashir is entitled to call for global jihad. Radical imams are entitled to denounce western foreign policy in the Fertile Cresent, and to enjoin young men to join thes truggle to boot our troops out of Islamic countries.
Nobody MAKES anyone dedicate their lives to an idea; the Islamic community never had a draft to dragoon its youth into fighting its leaders' wars.
But no - we have laws that say that you can't even question the 'official version' of some events, we have laws that prevent the use of perfectly good words (like nigger, coon, abo, chink and wog) but don't prohibit the use of equally-useful terms like loh faan, faan gwai loh, iteki, gaijin and so on.
It's something you would normally associate with Stalin's regime, or Mao's, or Ceaucescu's - this idea that by using the machinery of state to repress dissent, you can actually control thought. Not gonna happen.
So if that half-chimp little fuckwit in Canberra wants to avoid being an obvious hypocrite, he ought to get the fuck in front of a camera and denounce pat Robertson. He has done so about Abu Bakr Bashir. (Who am I kidding - Howard doesn't give a rat's arse about credibility. He would eat a live baby if George Bush told him to, and then give a speech on child protection).
