by Jerome du Bois
Big good news and kudos all around, now that Liveleak has restored Fitna to its servers. Hat tips to Instapundit, lawhawk, and Hot Air. Liveleak's statement:
On the 28th of March LiveLeak.com was left with no other choice but to remove the film "fitna" from our servers following serious threats to our staff and their families. Since that time we have worked constantly on upgrading all security measures thus offering better protection for our staff and families. With these measures in place we have decided to once more make this video live on our site. We will not be pressured into censoring material which is legal and within our rules. We apologise for the removal and the delay in getting it back, but when you run a website you don't consider that some people would be insecure enough to threaten our lives simply because they do not like the content of a video we neither produced nor endorsed but merely hosted.
That phrase--
threaten our lives
--should chill anyone who cherishes any of our freedoms.
One of the groups who must be elided but cannot go unmentioned I'll call British Antiterrorism --all the stand-up, clear-eyed, and hardy people now guarding Liveleak's employees and families without being noticed or acknowledged, and all those patient souls now monitoring a whole new network of hinky jihadist moves. I'm sure that's one of the reasons the Liveleak people feel more confident: they're covered now; still, it can't be comfortable to be a constant target. Because these awful bad guys don't forget and don't forgive: after all, Liveleak unleashed Fitna on the world --so many stronger venues refused or folded long before they did, and you can't take that away from them-- and now the viral torrent is unstoppable. The jihadists, whose lives and souls are what the Brits call "the grime," gnaw constantly like rats on their own hatred, living through its festering. British Antiterrorism has a responsibility to protect its citizens; looks like they're doing just that, so bully for them.
The worldwide tension net of terror and counterterror just widened marginally but significantly, as new tendrils and connections recalibrated and rebalanced and everything that could access them vibrated with the changes. So the world tightens, and red arrows point up, and we live with it . . . .
Now for the local coda. We got another comment from, presumably, the same coward who emailed us the "scimitar" comment I quoted in the earlier post. This time I'm going to quote it in full, meager as it is, but before I do I want to call this coward out into the real world. We want your real name. Geert Wilders, the Liveleak people and their families, Robert Spencer, hundreds of thousands of patriotic military people, Catherine and I, and millions of others, are willing to use their real names to stand behind their words, but you aren't, so far, to us. So I call you a coward.
These creeps major in minor ellipticality, so I'll quote "kofiannan" in total. He or she posted this to the "Scimitar's Smile" piece:
Back in the day I'll bet Nazis were pretty cool if you were one of them.
But enough about paranoid nationalist history repeating itself, how have you been?
I've been fine, except for droning malarial mosquitos like you. And if you read your message in the light of Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism, you will see that every progressive ever admired by the culturati today owes big dues to Mussolini and Hitler; they all thought both of those bastards were "pretty cool." It's not right-wing revisionism; it's called reading primary sources. It's called recognizing facts. And "paranoid nationalist history" sounds a lot like the theme of a Jeremiah Wright / Barack Obama speech to me. Or like Black Panther Shabazz pathetically blaming white people for his own self-twisted soul.
So step up, little person, silly person, so petty, barbarous, infantile and cruel; or shut up and step back; serious people are talking.
Posted by Jerome at March 31, 2008 04:40 PM | TrackBack