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Some thoughts regarding our loss of freedom of speech at the hands of the jihadists....

What the first amendment protects us from is the government (specifically Congress) from abridging the freedom of speech and the press.

It does not protect us from any person or group restricting our free speech. For example, the islamists have learned that by terrorizing (or simply threatening to terrorize) people that say and do what offends them they can shut them up the constitution be damned.

They willingly sacrifice a few of their own to achieve that. And by setting an example such as Charlie Hebdo, they managed to effectively silence all public outlets of speech that they don’t like. And our constitution ain’t going to do squat to get that back for us. No media that has a public presence is going to publish a cartoon of mohammed, even if they’re anti islam. The reason of course is that they don’t want to be massacred.

So how do we get our freedom of speech and of the press back?

Well since the reason the media has chosen to self-censor themselves out of FEAR of getting killed, then the solution would seem to lie in eradicating that fear.

How does one do that? Well there are two options:

1. exterminate the source of the fear, or
2. protect yourself from the source of the fear, or
3. some combination of 1 and 2.

Option 1, exterminating the source of the fear would mean exterminating the jihadists. But that’s easier said than done because you would have to first identify them. And after you identify them, on what basis would you arrest them before they’ve committed any crime? And would any law that allows that violate the freedom of religion portion of the first amendment? I would think some smart legal mind ought to be able to come up with something acceptable, since similar laws existed for Nazi and communist sympathizers during WW2 and the Cold War.

Option 2, taking well planned and a priori protective measures before you “offensively speak” (and forever more). This is essentially what Pamela Geller and Co. did in Texas. That works pretty well but it’s quite expensive and restrictive. Imagine the armies that would be needed to protect the NYT or LAT or any big public outlet and all their workers and families. Also, even though it might protect you from being massacred, you might have to do the massacring (as in this case in Texas), and who wants to go through that hell.

It may take both 1 and 2 to solve the problem. We need many more Pamela Gellers, whom I truly admire for her courage and her dedication to protecting our freedom of expression.

If many other public outlets would do what Geller did in a coordinated way, it would flush out (and end up killing) quite a few of these islamists. Also in the investigations that follow a lot of intelligence would be gathered that would point to other islamists in the network and they could be arrested, thus putting into operation option 1.

Of course it would be extremely helpful in carrying this out if we had a leader that orchestrated this and made abundantly clear that there is a war against enemies of our cherished freedoms. Unfortunately right now not only we don’t have that, but we have someone who himself is an enemy of our freedoms.