A quote: very bad lefty ideas. Why did they stop caring about free speech?

«But the Americans don't know anything about human rights.

We do not agree ... that the human rights of the victims are more important than the human rights of the terrorists.»

Graham Watson, leader of the Liberal Democrats in the European Parliament.

Indeed a captured terrorist does have rights, but no effort should be expended prior to their capture which would place any person at risk becuase of the wooly headed way some people interpret it, and do it at the expense of society. Random bag checking in order not to seem like a profile is being drawn, frisking little old ladies, to save face with pressure groups who themselves are the ones who can't make a distinction between criminality and ethnicity.

Concider for a moment the Palestinian bus driver who didn't want a certain someone (who was also Palestinian) on his bus because he suspected him of wearing that season's chic new self detonating colors. Would his judgement survive that test if he was obliged to neither judge nor refuse? In case you're wondering, the refused passenger detonated hiself outside the bus, and only the bomber himself was hurt.

What's worse is the erosion of rights running along side it. Hard as it is for the European left to accept, you can’t stop people from talking and thinking, regardless what awful things they’re talking about. That's the greatest lesson of the 20th century which showed itself in the blood stained snows of the Gulags and Concentration camps.

Curtailment of speech, no matter how awful, is indeed throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

This is from a continent that while not taking the point in protecting their citizens against terror, feels perfectly comfortable identifying and not tolerating of abhorrent speech which will only drive incitement further underground and poison the air for everyone else in a way that the Patriot Act never did.