Rant of the Decade

From Gates of Vienna, this most excellent rant in support of free speech.

The lady is Ann Barnhardt, and the video is in response to a remark by Senator Lindsey Graham. Sen. Graham said, in response to a question about the Koran-burning of Pastor Terry Jones:

Yeah, I wish there was some way we could hold people accountable. Free speech is a great idea, but we're in a war. During World War II you had limits on what you could say if it would inspire the enemy. Any time we can push back here in America against actions like this that put our troops at risk, we ought to do it.

Barnhardt takes this apart, sentence by sentence, and tears him a new one in the process. It's as fine a defence of free speech as I have heard, and an excellent example of sustained polemic. I doubt if Sen. Graham wants to hear the word 'jackass' ever again.

(There is a Part 2, in which she reads out quotations from the Koran, then rips the pages out and burns them, and I am less comfortable with this. You can find the link for yourself if you want to see it. I believe she has the right to do this if she wishes, and I wouldn't hold her responsible if someone somewhere else in the world was murdered as a result of her video, but I feel it is a rather unnecessary provocation and to some extent devalues the excellent case she makes in the first part. It's a bit yah-boo for my tastes, and doesn't advance free speech or the case against violent Islam one iota. The choice of bacon for the bookmarks was inspired, however.)

I won't make any comment on the video, as she says it all far better than I ever could. Balls of steel, if she had any, and we need more people like her in the West (and fewer like Cameron, busy apologising to Pakistan for Britain's sins while giving them £600m of our money that we really can't afford to give away).