Ann Barnhardt: I’m your huckleberry

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Free speech is a great idea? It is a bedrock principle of Western civilization and the United States. Individuals are free, sovereign agents. Individuals are not property or drones of the State. The government doesn’t tell the people what to think and say. The people tell the government what to think and say, through the mechanisms of representative republic governance under the Constitution. But what I suspect this really has to do with is intellectual snobbery and elitism. Lindsey Graham, you look at Terry Jones, and you see a redneck with a handlebar mustache who speaks with a southern drawl, without the benefit of a fancy Ivy League education. And you determine that a man like him cannot be trusted with his own personal, intellectual sovereignty under the First Amendment, and therefore you, in your superior intellectual state, have to reign him in. Listen Jackass, it doesn’t work that way. The First Amendment applies to all American citizens equally. It does not operate on a sliding scale based upon how expensive an education one receives, what one’s income is, or whether or not one is invited to tony soirees in Georgetown. But if that’s the game you want to play, that’s fine. If you want to go head to head with a person of intellectual parity, I’m your huckleberry. Come after me. Debate me. I stand foursquare with Terry Jones and am proud to do so.

Diana West, Ann Barnhardt: Vox Populi? Let's Hope

About that public space: It's extremely hard to get a word in there -- hard to stand out against the static, hard to punch through the murk of propaganda and appeasement that serves as an excuse for news and policy. Punching through becomes the work of activists, lightning rods, so-called "zealots," people whom it is all too easy for gloss-encased, college-pedigreed elites to dismiss as "nuts," and worse...

But, folks -- due to the emergency crisis in our leadership, civilian and military, professional and clerical, and their total surrender to Islam, as evidenced never before more gut-wrenchingly than in this latest Afghan-massacre-queued capitulation by the presidency (no surprise, obviously), by the military command, by the Congress, by the media, by the undefinable but still perceptible "consensus" -- we are down to these supposed "nuts" and lightning rods. God bless them and America.

The fact is, I could write a (relatively) non-"nutty" syndicated column a week for 10 years on the copiously, redundantly, patently documented evils of Islam (gee, come to think of it ...). I could get lots of supportive mail that I deeply appreciate, refine my arguments, work on a book or two (half) on related subjects, give talks at home and even abroad -- and what. Nothing changes. No ignition -- except, of course, that of the country, which continues, hell-in-handbasket-style, to go up in smoke, which is a far stretch worse than a single copy of the Koran burning; or, as our dhimmified, diss-able "leaders" prefer, aping the "a la mode," the holy Qu'ran.

Which brings me to Terry Jones, for whom my admiration has no bounds given the sheer, static-busting audacity of this one perfect, purposeful act of symbolism that rejects not just Islam but an evil the world has known much longer than Islam: the evil that crushes the human spirit, the evil that incarcerates free will and dictates free thought, that imposes, demands and exacts truly dread conformity.

Such conformity is codified in the laws of Islam, which the non-Islamic world has reoriented itself to as though Mecca were the new magnetic North. This reorientation has taken place, and at warp speed, particularly since the Islamic law of jihad drove 19 hijackers to attack the United States on September 11, 2001. But other such codifications -- cults -- mar human history, most often tending toward theories of forced collectivization familiarly exemplified in the modern era by Marx.

File under: audacious, combustible, static-busting acts of symbolism that reject not just Islam but the evil that incarcerates free will.