Europe's thought police: It's easy to forget at times the benefits of being a writer or polemicist in the United States. The First Amendment protects everyone — from the hate-monger to the well-paid purveyors of conventional wisdom. Not so in Europe. Last week saw two truly disturbing consequences of the combination of leftist do-goodery with the force of the state. A British man got into a verbal fight with some Muslim Brits on the street when they averred that the Americans who perished on September 11 "deserved to die." Provoked by that obscenity, the man burst into what was an unfortunate diatribe against Islam. He now faces jail time under a new British law that forbids the insulting of anyone else's religion. The Muslims face no such liability, of course. Hating Americans is not forbidden under the new religious hate-crime laws. I guess if it were, there'd be precious little space left in the jails. Meanwhile, in Paris, the lively liberal polemicist, Oriana Fallaci, is also facing criminal charges for writing a book highly critical of some of the more extreme currents in contemporary Islam. A while ago, it was just the Ayatollahs who issued fatwas against writers challenging Islam. Now it's Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac. One small but wonderful detail: Miss Fallaci's lawyer is the exquisitely-named Christophe Bigot.
