21st-century Left waging new war on free speech, by Jennifer Oriel.

Free speech was forged as a right through centuries of bloody wars. Western history brims with the names of martyrs who sacrificed their lives so the children of enlightenment ­­— you and I — would be liberated from the yoke of censors to discern the truth and state it openly.

The 21st-century Left is waging new war on free speech by eroding its legal protections and degrading its cultural value. There is no better way to devalue freedom than to publicly disesteem its most potent defenders. But after years of sustained attacks, illustrator Bill Leak and columnist Andrew Bolt are still standing. …

Despite being fattened on taxpayer funds and surrounded by fawning dullards, the PC censors proscribing our right to reason are demonstrably incapable of beating Leak or Bolt in a battle of wits. So they incite the mob to bully freethinkers out of public life. Race Discrimination Commissioner Tim Soutphommasane has urged people to complain about Leak’s latest thought crime: a politically incorrect cartoon.

Aren’t jihadists waging war on the West? Wasn’t Leak forced to move house after Islamists threatened to kill him? Apparently, what concerned the Australian Human Rights Commission more was the unfolding drama of cartoon capers. …

What we had, under the Enlightenment, until recently:

There should be no get-off-scot-free card because you are born female, or black, or haven’t migrated from the land of your forebears. None of those facts makes you a better human being than your fellow citizen, or deserving of superior protections and privileges under law.

The idea that made the free world free and the world’s most humanising principle is that we are each born free and equal, endowed with reason.

What we have now under postmodernism and PC:

Under the regime of minority privileges enshrined in the Racial Discrimination Act, however, we are once again unequal and endowed with emotion. I feel therefore I am has replaced reason in the minority Left rule book. I’m offended therefore you’re wrong is the revelation bequeathed by the PC Left.

Voltaire is often credited with saying “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”, but in fact it was a biographer, Evelyn Beatrice Hall, who said it in 1906.

In 2015, Leak was forced to move house after Islamists threatened to kill him because he drew a cartoon featuring Mohammed in response to the jihadist slaughter of Charlie Hebdo artists. A year and a half later in a safer house, there are five emergency alert cards affixed permanently to his computer in case jihadists find their way to him. How many of the outraged Twits and commissioners attacking Leak put their lives on the line each day in defence of free expression?

In 2015, a Muslim also threatened the life of Bolt. In 2016, there has been another jihadist threat on his life and this time, he had to move his family from their home while police investigated.

The big, elephant-in-the-room question:

Where is the outrage from the ABC, Human Rights Commission and Press Council and about Islamists threatening to kill our artists and writers? Or is free speech only protected in Australia if it’s left wing?

hat-tip Stephen Neil