The personal freedom of Europeans suffered three severe blows in
the past two weeks, and each is highly instructive. Together, they
show that America is divided from Europe by much more than opinion.
In fact, the divide that separates us from our European “cousins”
is because they no longer value freedom as we do. There is nary a
whimper from them as their governments — and the EU
pseudo-government — chip away at their most fundamental rights.
Consider what the Frog courts have done to La Bardot.
Brigitte Bardot — sixties sexpot now in her late sixties — was
fined $6,000 by a French court for inciting racial hatred. From
what the French court said about her book, A Scream of
Silence, you’d think it was the Frog equivalent of Mein
Kampf. The court said that “Mme. Bardot presents Muslims as
barbaric and cruel invaders, responsible for terrorist acts and
eager to dominate the French to the extent of wanting to
exterminate them.” (Exterminate the French? Just don’t go there. Be
good. Pay attention.)
Whether what she says in her book is right or not doesn’t
matter. It’s her opinion and in a free country she’d have the right
to voice it. She isn’t inciting violence against anyone. She isn’t
selling secrets to an enemy of her country. (That’s Chirac’s job.)
So what gives? France has taken political correctness and turned it
into criminal law. Freedom of speech in France is yours only as
long as you don’t offend anyone the government either likes or is
afraid of.
Freedom of speech isn’t just a freedom to be polite and
objectively correct. It’s also the freedom to be unreasonable,
bigoted, pigheaded, stupid, and even French. The only boundaries
our Constitution allows are libel, creating danger, and treason.
France is well on the way to becoming what the Soviet Union was, if
you take away the cheap vodka and replace it with cheese,
cigarettes, and a sneer.
WHILE FRANCE SURRENDERS freedom of speech, in Britain freedom of
the press is eroding.
Let’s give a big “harrumph” to Britain’s “Office of
Communication,” a government bureaucracy whose mission it is to
“balance the promotion of choice and competition with the duty to
foster plurality, informed citizenship, protect viewers, listeners
and customers and promote cultural diversity.” Last week “Ofcom”
scolded Fox News Channel’s John Gibson for accusing the BBC of
lying and “frothing-at-the-mouth anti-Americanism.” Gibson’s
broadcast had struck a nerve with twenty Brit whiners who
complained to Ofcom when he attacked the Beeb’s Andrew Gilligan for
his wildly false reporting during the 2003 Iraq campaign. Gilligan
— most famous for making up the charge that the Blair government
had “sexed up” the intel on Iraqi WMD (and thus lied the UK into
war) — had been proven false by a formal investigation. When David
Kelley — Gilligan’s supposed source — killed himself after
denying saying that to Gilligan, the whole mess was investigated.
The report by Lord Hutton found that the Beeb, not Blair, had made
things up. I remember Gilligan’s reports from Baghdad and its
outskirts. They could have been (and possibly were) written by
Baghdad Bob. None of those outrages was enough to wake Ofcom
up.
Now, Ofcom has puffed itself up to chastise Gibson who,
predictably, reacted by using one of his opinion segments to tell
Ofcom to stuff it. He was much too polite. The Beeb is relentlessly
anti-American, anti-war, anti-Bush, and anti-everything else that
doesn’t fit neatly into its own far-left view of the world. Just
ask the sailors of HMS Ark Royal, who voted to ban it from
the ship during the ‘03 fighting because of its bias. But forget
the Beeb. Its biases are too blatant to even worry about. The real
problem is the overreach of Ofcom.
Ofcom has no regulatory authority over American television
except as it is broadcast in Britain. They won’t ban Fox from the
UK because they have neither the power nor the guts to do so. To
that suggestion, Fox would surely say, “make my day.” The problem
with Ofcom is that it’s part of a foreign government arm
interfering — or in this case attempting to — in the content of
American broadcasts. That offends me much more than the whining
libs of the BBC. Brit freedom of the press has always been less
than we have here. Now their bureaucrats want to bring the same
reduced press freedom here. As Tony Soprano would say to them,
“fuhgeddaboudit.” And that’s not nearly the worst of it. The worst
— as always — comes from the European Union.
IN THEIR SUMMIT last week, the EU nations’ leaders finally agreed
on a constitution for this new sort-of-nation. It needs to be
ratified by all its members by the end of 2006 and at least eight
nations, including Britain, are planning to hold referenda on it.
But on what?
Most Europeans apparently don’t care. In the EU parliament
elections, they stayed home in droves. In their delightfully
descriptive phrase, the agreed draft is now going through the
“toilettage” process, by which scores of bureaucrats and
translators will try to interpret its 333 pages into the more than
a dozen languages of the member nations. Better they should flush
the whole thing. From several reports, I gather that the new
document bears the marks of artful dodging. It’s the process
lawyers call “vaguing it up.”
Tony Blair went to the EUnuchs’ summit with a theatrical chip on
his shoulder, demanding a veto of tax and foreign policy
initiatives, and defending other vestiges of British sovereignty.
He came home claiming victory. But just what his victories consist
of has yet to be seen. The EUnuch lawyers have fiddled and diddled
with the language in a manner reminiscent of the U.N. One of my
pals — a former U.N. deputy ambassador himself — explained the
difference in how the U.S. and the Europeans conduct diplomacy.
In any U.N. resolution there will always be something vagued up.
When the Europeans see something vague, if only one of the
interpretations is the one they want, they vote in favor and claim
victory. If only one interpretation is contrary to the United
States’ interpretation, we vote against it and label it a defeat if
it passes. Segue to the U.S. Constitution.
Remember that little sentence, part of which reads, “Congress
shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech or of the
press…”? Pretty simple and clear, ain’t it? The rights
enshrined in that sentence are worth everything. There’s nothing
that clear in the new EU constitution. If I were you, my European
friends, I’d be worried. Real worried.
TAS Contributing Editor Jed Babbin is the author
of Inside the Asylum: Why the U.N. and Old Europe Are Worse
Than You Think.
