Mark Steyn:
Encouraged by President Obama’s and Secretary Clinton’s prostrations before the howling mob, the U.N.’s No. 2 honcho explains free speech:
Free speech is a “gift given to us by the [Universal] Declaration of Human Rights,” said Deputy Secretary General of the United Nations Jan Eliasson during a press conference on October 2nd at UN headquarters in New York. It is “a privilege,” Eliasson said, “that we have, which in my view involves also the need for respect, the need to avoid provocations.”
Free speech is a gift given to us in 1948 by U.N. officials? Who knew?
The only appropriate response of free-born peoples to such a statement is: **** off, ******. Free speech is not in the gift of minor Swedish timeserving hack bureaucrats, either to grant or withdraw.
I thought freedom of speech was one of the rights endowed by our Creator, considerably antedating 1948. How Christian of me...
As the minor Swedish timeserving hack bureaucrat at the UN inadvertantly points out, human rights that are not endowed by God are ephemeral, to be bestowed and withheld at the whim of minor timeserving hack bureaucrats and the like.
Our real rights are from our Creator, and are not subject to UN veto.
When free speech is a gift from government, government feels entitled to take it back on a whim.
ReplyDeleteThis Eliasson is only emboldening the mob. Here's how they see it--a prominent UN official is telling them that people need to guard against provocation. He's placing the blame on the provocateur. So if Person A punches Person B for saying something that Person A doesn't like, then Person B didn't have the right to say it in the first place. Person B's speech was outside of protected speech, and thus deserved it.
Care to guess where that leads? The most violent among us dictate what we can say and the government backs them up.
JQ
I thought freedom of speech was one of the rights endowed by our Creator, considerably antedating 1948. How Christian of me...
ReplyDeleteYeah, the Bible is really big on free speech, isn't it? It's not like certain speech carries a death penalty or eternal damnation, no sirree, uh-uh.