Athens and Jerusalem

Insanity Has Overtaken the Texas Supreme Court

R.D. Gold, Editor

The Texas Supreme Court recently threw out an injury award granted by a jury to a young woman who sustained serious physical and emotional injuries in the course of undergoing an exorcism.  Just 17 when it happened, the young lady received carpet burns during the exorcism.  Years later, she experienced hallucinations, engaged in self-mutilation, and even tried to kill herself.  The court was unimpressed with her plea for damages, and decided that if left undisturbed, the trial court’s award of $300,000 would violate the religious rights of the girl’s parents.  According to the court, the injury award was unconstitutional because allowing the award to stand would unnecessarily entangle the Texas judiciary in religious matters. 

          The problem with this loony analysis is that it gets the separation of church and state completely wrong.  The Establishment Clause of the Constitution does prevent the state from endorsing or taking steps to lend support to particular religious traditions.   It does so in two ways.  First, under the Establishment prong, Congress is not allowed to pass laws that respect “an establishment of religion.”  And second, under the Free Exercise prong, Congress may not “prohibit the free exercise of” religion.  In short, the U.S. Constitution envisions a neutral approach to religion, one that neither encourages the development of a particular religion nor hinders the religious practices of ordinary Americans.

          The Establishment Clause separates church and state in a very careful way.  But the Texas Supreme Court’s tortured and unjustifiable reading of that clause implies that a wide range of physical and psychological harm can lawfully be inflicted on human beings in religion’s name.  In the words of Justice David Medina, finding the church liable “would have an unconstitutional ‘chilling effect’ by compelling the church to abandon core principles of its own religious beliefs.”  Justice Medina’s argument is nonsense on stilts:  The Pleasant Glade Assembly of God is free to believe whatever it likes.  But this church is not free to do whatever it likes.  Nowhere does the Constitution give religious folk carte blanche to mistreat its members, regardless of the religious “reasons” offered to justify maltreatment.

          That’s how we see it.  What do you think?

Should Religion Matter in the Upcoming Presidential Race?

R.D. Gold, Editor

          The common wisdom these days is that religion matters to presidential elections.  A recent article published by U.S. News & World Report argues that religion is a central force driving presidential politics, albeit a complex one.  Religion may not decide the upcoming battle between John McCain and Barack Obama, but it probably will play a significant role for many American voters.  And this raises a critical question:  Are the religious views of either of these men really relevant to their fitness to be the President of the United States?

          The answer to this simple question is that, well, sometimes religious views are relevant.  Imagine for example that a fictional presidential candidate – Richard Smith – believes that angels sometimes give messages to human beings.  These messages often warn of future dangers, counseling Mr. Smith to take one course of action over another alternative.  And, from his public pronouncements about his own faith, we know that Mr. Smith sometimes acts on these “messages” from angels when he makes important decisions.  The dulcet whispers of angels guide Mr. Smith, even though he is the only one who can hear them.   

It’s easy to see that Mr. Smith isn’t fit to be the Commander in Chief of the U.S. for one simple reason:  He is apt to make critical decisions on the basis of information (messages from angels) to which only he has access and that therefore cannot be publicly evaluated and scrutinized.  If our democratic tradition demands anything of public officials, it demands that they explain and justify their public policy choices by reference to reasons and evidence that are subject to open, transparent public debate.   

Of course, our hypothetical about Mr. Smith only shows that there are some unusual scenarios in which an individual’s religious views are so extreme that he (or she) is not fit for public office.  Ordinarily, the specific religious doctrines a candidate holds dear are really rather irrelevant.  As we have pointed out before, religion is “a private affair, and, in virtue of being a private affair, religiosity cannot be a requisite for political office or meaningful citizenship.”  This doesn’t imply that religion won’t influence the upcoming presidential race.  After all, voters are naturally drawn to candidates that share their own views.  But make no mistake, wise voters will place their confidence in a candidate that has a defensible policy platform, one that enhances the welfare of our entire nation – regardless of where that candidate stands on religion.

That’s how we see it.  What do you think? 

Religious Fanaticism

R.D. Gold, Editor

          John Freshwater, the science teacher accused of burning crucifixes into the skin of at least two of his students, has been fired by the school board of Mount Vernon, Ohio.  We think this is welcome news.  A high school instructor has no business physically assaulting students in the service of promoting his own religious views. 

It is noteworthy that one of Mr. Freshwater’s friends, Dave Daubenmire, defended him, claiming that “apart from the cross-burning episode,” Mr. Freshwater was actually “teaching the values of the parents in the Mount Vernon school district.”  Ahah, everyone in Mount Vernon wants science teachers to brand their students with crosses.   

Read literally, Daubenmire’s defense is absurd.  For branding the flesh of young people in an attempt to impose religious sentiments upon them probably doesn’t embody or reflect the values of Mount Vernon's residents.  But maybe Daubenmire meant something different, you know, something to the effect that Mr. Freshwater is a stand up guy – apart from the flesh burning and bullying tactics he uses in the classroom against young, impressionable students!  If that’s what Daubenmire really meant, well, dear friends, this is just nonsense on stilts.  You can’t be a morally upright human being if you use your authority as a teacher to intimidate and manipulate your students.     

          That’s how we see it.  What do you think?

You're Not Going to Believe This

R.D. Gold, Editor

          Have you ever heard of John Freshwater?  Probably not.  Mr. Freshwater is an eighth-grade science teacher in the Mount Vernon City School District in Ohio who burned a crucifix into the flesh of at least two of his students.  Hard to believe, but true – and that’s just the beginning of this dark tale of religious fanaticism.  Mr. Freshwater, now the defendant in a federal lawsuit (along with his school’s principal and the district’s superintendent), has apparently been imposing his religious views on his science students for over a decade.   

            How in the world could Mr. Freshwater get away with this kind of behavior in a publicly funded school district?  Though he was denied permission to teach intelligent design (“ID”) to his science class in 2003, he has not only been teaching ID anyway, he is well-known for subjecting his students to a wide variety of religious propaganda.  His classroom is decorated with religious posters; he refers to science textbooks only to claim that their theories of the origin of humankind are clearly false in the light of biblical teachings; and he publicly warns that non-Christian students “are going to Hell.”  When numerous parents complained to William White, Mount Vernon Middle School’s Principal, about Mr. Freshwater’s conduct, nothing was done.  After the first flesh burning incident, a letter of warning issued to Mr. Freshwater was not even placed in his permanent teaching file.

          There’s really not much to debate about Mr. Freshwater’s behavior.  As a science teacher, Mr. Freshwater’s decision to teach ID is not only out of line.  It is also almost certainly unconstitutional.   As a pedagogue, the man is untrustworthy.  He has clearly violated the trust that teachers must cultivate with students in order to effectively teach them.  And finally, as a human being, Mr. Freshwater is an unmitigated disgrace.  What kind of human being would brand a youngster with anything, let alone a religious symbol? 

Mr. Freshwater’s penchant for burning the flesh of his students serves as a chilling reminder of an important truism:  When human beings fall prey to the conceit of having special knowledge of God and exclusive access to the one and only spiritual Truth, they treat those who see the world differently with contempt and, as we have seen in this case, cruelty.  There is no room in the public school system for people like this.  Nor for the school principal and district superintendent who, by their actions (or lack thereof), demonstrated that they are no better than he is.

          That’s how we see it.  What do you think? 

When Sacred Texts Tell Tall Tales

R.D. Gold, Editor

While a literal reading of the Bible is becoming increasingly difficult to defend (even some Christian evangelicals are questioning it), many monotheists remain convinced that their faith has to be historically grounded in order to be legitimate.  From their narrow perspective, the Bible chronicles both the developing word of God and the lives of real flesh and blood individuals, not fictional constructs contrived to develop and support a particular theological or spiritual doctrine.  For these people, Israel Finkelstein’s groundbreaking work in biblical archeology presents a serious challenge to their theological worldview. Finkelstein, a professor of archeology at Tel Aviv University in Israel, has shown that many of the Bible’s historical claims are false.  In a recent interview with Finkelstein in NewScientist, he explains his key findings and the relationship between archeological research and his own belief system.

          Finkelstein is a towering figure in the field of archeology.  Indeed, his superb book, The Bible Unearthed (written together with the historian Neil Asher Silberman) was a major source for the second chapter of my new book, Bondage of the Mind, called “The Fundamentalists vs. the Archeologists.”

          Finkelstein, who has lectured at Harvard, the University of Chicago, and the Sorbonne, and is also the author of David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible’s Sacred Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition, has been instrumental in undermining conventional wisdom about the legitimacy of many of the Bible’s key narratives.  For instance, he presents compelling evidence to demonstrate that the Exodus, the Revelation at Mt. Sinai (the watershed event in world history for Orthodox Jews), and Joshua’s conquest of Jericho never happened.  (Not only did Jericho’s high walls not come tumblin’ down, as the Bible says. There was no city with walls of any height there at the time of Joshua’s supposed attack.)  Finkelstein has also argues that David and Solomon were not the larger-than-life kings who ruled a vast and powerful United Kingdom from their splendid palaces in Jerusalem, but were instead only hill-country chieftains with little real political power in the region.

          Finkelstein’s work has been nothing short of revolutionary.  Perhaps his most radical claim is that a series of surveys conducted in Israel over the last several years demonstrates conclusively that not only did the Israelites not conquer the Canaanites in battle, but that they were living in Canaan all along, together with the Canaanites, and indeed started out as Canaanites themselves.  I go into this in some detail in my book.

          It should be noted that Israel Finkelstein believes that the Bible need not be a true record of historical events in order to ground his identity as a Jewish believer.  He says that the Bible is the “root of [his] identity.” Powerful empirical archeological evidence need not erode one’s identification with Jewish culture even as it does challenge head on the unswerving fundamentalist belief that Bible is an accurate history of the ancient Jewish people.

          That’s how we see it.  What do you think?

On Being Good at Metaphysics

R.D. Gold, Editor

          In a recent essay on the relationship between science and religion called “Baby Einstein,” Rabbi Avi Shafran proclaims that Albert Einstein was a rather foolish, indeed “childish” theologian.  Like so many scientists who arrogantly venture outside their small areas of expertise, he asserts, Einstein got metaphysical questions about God’s existence and his plan for humanity dead wrong.  We think it is Rabbi Shafran who is wrong.  Wrong on the specific question of Einstein’s thinking, and wrong on the more general – and much more important – question of whether the physical universe points toward a divine designer.

          Reading Rabbi Shafran’s essay, one should be alert to the classic Orthodox rhetoric trick of using tone words [underlined here] early on to set the mood for his arguments.  He refers to an “amusing pair of letters” to the New York Times from scientists, and says that it must have been difficult for the editors “to squash the urge to respond mockingly,” concluding that the letters and response are “entertaining evidence for how limited scientists can be in negotiating the world outside their labs.”  Translation:  Yes, scientists may be brilliant in their narrow scientific fields, but dare they venture into the world of philosophy, metaphysics and religion, their thinking is at best amusing entertainment that serious people, people who are really qualified to think and comment on the cosmos, the world at large, and God, can’t possible take seriously.  Having set the stage thus, Rabbi Shafran is now ready to take on the greatest modern scientist of all, Albert Einstein – “rambling outside his area of expertise” (when he declared that Judaism, like all other religions, was “an incarnation of the most childish superstitions”) – to prove his point.

          Rabbi Shafran’s knock on Einstein is that while he may have been a brilliant scientist, he was “not so smart” outside his physics lab.  He was a “resolute socialist,” the rabbi claims, and then makes the leap from Einstein’s alleged socialism to an intimation that he was a Marxist, another neat trick of rhetoric.  Nor was Einstein so smart “regarding God and Judaism either.”  The rabbi concludes with a literary flourish and a burst of armchair psychology: While Einstein understood light (he was a physicist after all, and that was his field), what “prevented him from seeing the Light may well have been his own childishness, the self-centeredness that he retained from his babyhood.”

          In addition to tricks of rhetoric, there is also a lot of noise in Rabbi Shafran’s essay.  For example, he introduces colorful – but irrelevant – quotes from two European academics to buttress his view that even the most brilliant scientists make fools of themselves when giving opinions on anything outside their field.  Then there’s his gratuitous comment that “many brilliant people – and Einstein is, sadly, no exception here – who were atheist or agnostic were not beacons of morality in their personal lives and relationships.”  So what?  We could just as easily point the same finger at Orthodox Jews who were hardly paragons of virtue (one example: the Orthodox Union’s handling of an Orthodox rabbi where there was documented evidence of his abusing teenagers in his charge).  Also irrelevant.  And finally Rabbi Shafran focuses on Einstein’s alleged flip-flopping on whether or not God exists, citing several seemingly contradictory letters Einstein wrote that, he alleges, are examples of undisciplined thinking when it came to theological matters.

          At root, Rabbi Shafran seems to be asking: “Why can’t Einstein just have a consistent, unified view of God’s existence?”  But this is a straw man.  Einstein did have a consistent view.  Remember, Einstein was something of an agnostic.  He apparently believed in some kind of higher power or deeper reality behind the world of appearances, but, after a brief flirtation with Orthodoxy, he never put stock in the personal God of Judaism.   Agnostics are certainly entitled to think that science cannot answer certain metaphysical questions.  Indeed, Immanuel Kant, one of the greatest philosophical thinkers ever, took precisely this position in The Critique of Pure Reason.   

          Cutting through all the rhetoric and noise, there is really only one key issue here.  Rabbi Shafran asserts that by placing reason on a pedestal and allowing himself to be spellbound by the complexity of the physical world, Einstein failed to see the moral, ethical and spiritual demands God makes on all of humanity.  “He missed the big picture.” (The rabbi cites that rather depressing document, the sifrei mussar, to support his position.)  So the question is: Did Einstein miss the big picture? Given all the available evidence, was Einstein’s refusal to place his belief in an all-powerful deity irrational or unjustifiable?  Although we cannot know for sure, since Einstein is no longer here to ask, we can safely conjecture that he thought something more than the complexity and beauty of the natural world is needed to justify belief in a personal God.  Einstein wanted tangible evidence so he could form a belief about God’s existence that was principled.  This is hardly the approach of a man who, as Rabbi Shafran tells us, somehow “got lost” by venturing into the realm of metaphysics.  Speculation was precisely the thing that Einstein was trying to avoid.

          Rabbi Shafran writes very well, with verve and humor.  But like all Orthodox Jews – indeed, like all religious fundamentalists – who know The Truth, his a priori assumptions about God and man severely constrain his ability to understand the world, the cosmos, and even a thoughtful and careful thinker like Albert Einstein.

          That’s how we see it.  What do you think?

The Problem with Loyalty Oaths

R.D. Gold, Editor

          The freedom to think, believe, and say what you feel is critical to a healthy functioning democracy.  The reason this is so is that democracy flourishes only when free and equal persons are able to indulge in and explore ideas, beliefs and practices – both plausible and outlandish – in a more or less unfettered way.  As obvious as this should seem, the California State university system has abandoned, or at least forgotten, this important truth. 

Earlier this year, Wendy Gonaver, a teacher who was just starting employment at Cal State Fullerton, was fired before her first class began for refusing to sign a loyalty oath indicating that she would defend the U.S. and California constitutions against “all enemies, foreign and domestic.”  A Quaker by faith, Ms. Gonaver offered to sign the oath provided she could attach a brief statement to the oath expressing her pacifist views.  California State officials flatly refused, and this is not the first time.  California State fired math teacher Marianne Kearney-Brown for refusing to sign the oath without inserting the word “nonviolently” to indicate the type of action Ms. Kearney-Brown was willing to undertake to defend the U.S. and California constitutions.  (Kearney-Brown was reinstated after her firing drew unwanted media attention unfavorable to the Cal State system.)

Some might argue that these oath requirements aren’t really so bad, since they require everyone – regardless of creed – to express the same type and degree of commitment to the political and legal system which protects them.  Before this specious idea seduces you, consider where loyalty oaths came from in the first place.  Historically, California, along with a number of other states, used oath requirements to weed out communists. Communism may be dead, but the oath requirement lives on, and is today being used to prevent religious folk with controversial beliefs – such as pacifism – from securing employment.  We think this is not only outrageous, but a bit silly as well.  There’s no place for loyalty oaths in a liberal democracy for the simple reason that pacifism and patriotism are not mutually exclusive.  And while the President, members of the Executive Branch, and especially members of the armed services cannot – and should not – be pacifists, there’s no practical reason to think the security of the United States somehow depends on what university professors think of war as a method of solving political conflict and addressing humanitarian crises. 

That’s how we see it.  What do you think? 

The Moral Costs of Religious Fundamentalism

R.D. Gold, Editor

          Religious fundamentalism, no matter how natural and true it seems to believers, is a morally and socially corrosive phenomenon.  Whenever people – irrespective of their specific belief system – presume that God has granted them exclusive knowledge of The Truth, they often indulge in the most despicable forms of immorality in the name of their faith.  And if anyone needed to be reminded of this sad fact, the FBI and local Texas investigators have provided very compelling evidence indeed:  Over 400 young children suspected to have been subjected to sexual and physical abuse were recently liberated from a compound in Eldorado, Texas operated by a fringe, fundamentalist Mormon group. 

          The compound, called the Yearning for Zion (“YFZ”) Ranch, was raided in early April 2008.  What the FBI found there is shocking.  At the YFZ Ranch, girls in their teens were coerced into marrying older men and bearing children as quickly as possible.  This is hardly surprising, since the head of the fundamentalist Mormon Church that runs the YFZ Ranch, Warren Jeffs, was convicted last year of being an accomplice to rape in Utah.  (In fact, the moniker that the compound bears with pride – the “Yearning for Zion Ranch” – is taken from the title of a song that Jeffs himself wrote.)  The violence visited upon these young women is almost too grim for words.  In the name of religion, indeed, in the name of absolute fidelity to God, this fringe sect systematically abused young girls.  Not only were these adolescent girls (some as young as 13) forced to marry men they neither loved nor even knew very well, some of them were continually raped by “husbands” two or three times their age. 

The moral depravity of child marriage has been criticized with verve and insight in Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven and in my own Bondage of the Mind.  To borrow Krakauer’s apt words, Mormon fundamentalism has, at its core, a commitment to “faith-based violence.”  Young girls are married off, sometimes to their own relatives, and not a moment’s thought is given to the fact that they are human beings, with feelings, hopes and dreams, and untapped capacities.  Yet fundamentalist Mormons demur.  Vessels for the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints they shall be, and nothing else. 

          That’s how we see it.  What do you think?   

Why Teaching Evolution is Constitutional

R.D. Gold, Editor

Dinesh D'Souza, a brilliant conservative writer and speaker, is probably the most effective spokesperson for a reasonable (as opposed to fundamentalist) brand of religion in general and of Christianity in particular. So when Dinesh D'Souza proposes something new, agree or disagree we should all listen and take it seriously. Such is the case with his recent suggestion that public schools are teaching Darwinian evolution in such a way that it is tantamount to their endorsing atheism. He goes on to make the case that this represents a violation of the Establishment Clause of the United States Constitution, and recommends that Christian parents sue the offending school districts for allowing this to take place.

If D'Souza's assessment is correct - that public schools are teaching Darwinism in a way that promotes atheism - he would certainly have a case with which reasonable secularists would have to agree. But for any lawsuit brought by Christian parents to have merit, it would have to prove that the public schools are indeed violating the Establishment Clause. Except for particularly egregious specific cases, we don't think this case can be made.

The legal theory underlying D'Souza's assessment is that school districts have violated the Establishment Clause by teaching Darwinism in a way that reveals a strong preference for non-belief over belief. To analyze D'Souza's proposal, then, we need to (i) introduce the applicable law, (ii) identify the science instruction that allegedly violates the law, and (iii) examine how courts would analyze a lawsuit alleging that teaching Darwinism in a certain way is unconstitutional.

The law. In Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971), the United States Supreme Court developed what is now known as the Lemon test to help courts determine whether a particular state act is consistent with the Establishment Clause. The Lemon test is straightforward: first, the act must have a bona fide secular purpose; second, the act's principal or primary effect must neither advance nor inhibit religion; and third, the act must not result in an excessive entanglement of government with religion. In order for a state action to be valid, each prong of the Lemon test must be satisfied.

The offending instruction. What kind of instruction does D'Souza have in mind when he claims that some school districts teach Darwinism in a way that impermissibly endorses atheism? He surely is not referring to (a) off-hand remarks about the superiority of Darwinism sometimes made by science teachers which could be interpreted by students as some kind of indirect endorsement of atheism. Nor do we think he is referring to (b) a tendency that some science teachers have to selectively draw on natural history in a way that could be interpreted as convincing impressionable students that Darwinism is the only viable theory of the world's origins, and that this, in turn, represents an indirect endorsement of atheism. What D'Souza must have in mind is (c) science teachers' attempts to "convert" impressionable young students to atheism by casting the atheist world view as the only reasonable one in light of Darwinism, because to make legal action necessary, the behavior of the science teachers in question would have to go beyond merely sharing their personal views about Darwinism. Their conduct would have to be reasonably viewed as an accurate reflection of the school district's official position on the relationship between Darwinism and atheism.

Applying the law. For the sake of argument, assume that specific science teachers described Darwinism in such glowing terms that some of their students concluded that those teachers viewed atheism as the "only reasonable world view." Would this violate the Lemon test? A school district could satisfy the first prong of the Lemon test by demonstrating a bona fide secular purpose by drawing on a rich history of Supreme Court jurisprudence endorsing the importance of teaching Darwinism. This would be easy for a challenged school district to do, since the Supreme Court in Edwards v. Aguillard (1987) held that Darwinism and creation science do not deserve "equal time" in the classroom because doing so would not serve a secular purpose. Under Edwards, teaching Darwinism undeniably has a secular purpose. The second prong is also satisfied because the principal or primary effect of teaching Darwinism is to introduce a set of influential scientific ideas to high school biology students. Drawing on the Supreme Court's language in Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe (2000), even where a teacher enthusiastically teaches Darwinism she is not thereby endorsing atheism. Unless an "objective observer" would perceive a teacher's conduct "as a state endorsement [of atheism]," the school district's conduct will be held blameless by a court. (We set aside the third prong of the Lemon test, as it is irrelevant.)

The bottom line. With perhaps some isolated exceptions, we do not think there are any science teachers who proclaim the death of God while teaching Darwinism or who deliberately spend class time trying to convert their students to atheism. If such teachers existed, their conduct would surely infringe the Establishment Clause, and D'Souza would be right to strenuously object and encourage Christian parents to sue. But we believe that most science teachers cover Darwinism in a non-coercive way. And so, unless science teachers are (1) actively and explicitly promoting atheism in the classroom or (2) coercing their students into accepting atheism, the Constitution does not forbid teaching Darwinism in the context of a high school biology course. It is true, of course, that exposure to evolutionary theory could lead students to freely and reflectively adopt a materialistic, anti-religious conception of the world. But the Establishment Clause merely prevents the state from adopting an official position favoring belief or unbelief. It was not designed to insulate Americans from scientific theories that might, upon thorough deliberation, tip the scales in one direction.

That's how we see it. What do you think?

What Does the United Nations Have Against Free Speech?

R.D. Gold, Editor

Geert Wilders, the controversial Dutch politician infamous for openly criticizing Islam, recently released a film called Fitna that reveals how sinister radical Islam really is.  Fitna (which means "chaos" or "strife" in Arabic) includes video footage of the World Trade Center attacks, pictures of civilians decapitated at the hands of Muslim terrorists, and clips of Muslim women being shot in cold blood.  The message of Wilders’ video is simple and compelling:  Because Islamic doctrines are being used to justify unspeakable acts of terrorism, the part of the Muslim community that adheres to, promotes, and acts on these doctrines represents a real, formidable danger to Western society.

Soon after Fitna was released at a video website called LiveLeak, radical Muslims and their sympathizers erupted with characteristic fury.  In Karachi, Pakistan’s busiest city, the fundamentalist group Jamaat-i-Islami staged a protest where their minions chanted "Death to the Filmmaker."  Khalid Naciri, Morocco’s Communications Minister, couldn’t be bothered to address the accuracy of Fitna’s message, but did remark that Wilders was "mentally retarded."  And then, amid this outcry in the Muslim world, the operators of LiveLeak received a series of personal threats to its staff members that led to Fitna’s removal from the website.  In a public statement, LiveLeak said that "[t]his is a sad day for freedom of speech on the net but we have to place the safety and well being of our staff above all else."  (Note that YouTube has censored the video and Network Solutions is preventing interested citizens from seeing what Mr. Wilders has to say about Islam.)

Indeed, this is a sad day for free speech.  But it gets worse.  Ban Ki-Moon, the current Secretary General of the United Nations, a public official who should be steeped in Enlightenment values, actually encouraged suppressing the Fitna film because it is "offensively anti-Islamic."  In an official U.N. statement, Mr. Ban insisted that "[t]he right of free expression is not at stake here" and emphasized that he endorses "the efforts of the Government of the Netherlands to stop the broadcast of the film."  Free speech isn’t imperiled when people want to ban a video based on what it says about radical forms of Islam?

This is an outrage.  It is sad when a website is forced to remove a video like Fitna to protect the safety of its employees, but it is unacceptable when the Secretary General of the United Nations deliberately attacks the right of free and equal citizens of the world to speak their mind.  And remember, this is the same United Nations that didn’t utter a word of protest when the President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, gleefully sponsored a cartoon exhibition in Tehran whose sole purpose was to defame the Jewish people by showcasing cartoons that denied the Holocaust and depicted Israelis as tyrants.  That this is one more example of the U.N.’s double standard when it comes to Israel is not our point.  Our point is that instead of sending a clear message to Muslim fundamentalists that their illiberal and unreasonable demands will not be tolerated, the U.N. decided it would be better to sacrifice the value of free speech.  The U.N., unfortunately, has forgotten the wise words of Voltaire, who once said:  "I may disagree with what you say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it."

That’s how we see it.  What do you think?