One of the characteristics of True Religion is the ironclad belief in possessing Absolute Truth. We’ve seen a lot of that lately.

Because Islamists hold that their True Religion alone is ultimate, eternal and holy, “insulting” Islam is so grievous that it must be punished by death - the ultimate form of speech control.

But there are other True Religions whose adherents seek to control others’ speech, though not as violently as Islamists. Take for example, the Western Left. By now most blog readers are well aware of the suppresion through intimidation at Columbia University of speaker Jim Gilchrist, founder of the Minutemen border-watching organization. Peggy Noonan smmarizes:

As [he] spoke, angry students stormed the stage, shouting and knocking over chairs and tables. “Having wreaked havoc,” said the New York Sun, they unfurled a banner in Arabic and English that said, “No one is ever illegal.” The auditorium was cleared, the Minutemen silenced. Afterward a student protester told the Columbia Spectator, “I don’t feel we need to apologize or anything. It was fundamentally a part of free speech. . . . The Minutemen are not a legitimate part of the debate on immigration.”

This is a form of Holy War. I have explained before that al Qaeda’s main war is against other Muslims.

How can Muslims make war on other Muslims when it is prohibited in the Quran? The same way that Christians in Europe killed one another over religion during the religious internecine wars of Europe that occurred regularly from the 16th to 17th centuries. If you see yourself as the defenders of the true faith, then you exclude from the faith the other side.

… Al Qaeda excludes most of the world’s Muslims from the umbrella of protection afforded by the Quran. Either al Qaeda considers them apostate or heretical Muslims, thus not truly Muslims, thus permissible to kill, or al Qaeda considers collateral deaths permissible in the furtherance of its aims. Or both, in some way.

Do you see the ideological similarity (or identity) between the man holding the “death to insulters” sign, above, and the “angry students” at Columbia University?

Both are adherents of True Religion, the former a type of Islam and the latter a political absolutism. Both claim the authority to define whose speech, and what kind of speech, is permissible in society, and both will punish those who transgress. Both are tyrants.

Speech control is more insidious than we might think. Robert Cox, president of the Media Bloggers Association, emails,

My new Op-Ed is now up on Examiner.com: “When will the right recognize the cost of conceding Web 2.0?”

In it I related my experience over the past several years watching my friends on the left build and control most every “node” in the emerging Web 2.0 and talk about how the Michelle Malkin/You Tube controversy is just the leading edge of a very broad sword which liberals are using to cut conservatives out of the online national dialog. I have been trying to wake folks up to this issue for a few years with no luck. Maybe now they will start to listen.

He analogizes that with radio, all stations are equally accessible no matter who makes the radio, but when persons with specific political slants own and thus control internet nodes, such as Google or Youtube, they can - and do - control whose content gets carried there. For example:

Enter Fox News pundit, author and top-rated blogger Michelle Malkin. Last week she received notice from YouTube, the world’s most popular video sharing service, that her video had been deemed “offensive.” The result? Her account was terminated and her videos deleted.

YouTube refused to say why her videos were “offensive” and there was no avenue available to challenge the decision. Today, her videos are gone and her voice is suppressed on the most important video “node” on the Internet.

Some might note that Malkin can still host her videos elsewhere. Of course she can, but that would fail to understand the powerful forces of “network externalities” at play online. There is no Avis to eBay’s Hertz for good reason: Once an online network is fully catalyzed, there is no reason to join an alternative network. If you want to get the most money for your Beanie Baby collection, you are going to want access to the most potential bidders — and that means eBay.

YouTube is poised to become the eBay of video file sharing. If you want the biggest audience for your video, you want access to the most potential viewers — and that means YouTube.

Peggy Noonan concludes her column,

There’s a pattern here, isn’t there?
It is not only about rage and resentment, and how some have come to see them as virtues, as an emblem of rightness. I feel so much, therefore my views are correct and must prevail. It is about something so obvious it is almost embarrassing to state. Free speech means hearing things you like and agree with, and it means allowing others to speak whose views you do not like or agree with. This-listening to the other person with respect and forbearance, and with an acceptance of human diversity-is the price we pay for living in a great democracy. And it is a really low price for such a great thing. …

Students, stars, media movers, academics: They are always saying they want debate, but they don’t. They want their vision imposed. They want to win. And if the win doesn’t come quickly, they’ll rush the stage, curse you out, attempt to intimidate.

And they don’t always recognize themselves to be bullying. So full of their righteousness are they that they have lost the ability to judge themselves and their manner.

Peggy, they don’t ever think they are bullying. They believe in a True Religion that cannot tolerate open dissent therefrom. They will not render “the price we pay for living in a great democracy” because they do not like democracy and oppose it in principle and ideology. “They want their vision imposed.”

They are tyrants and must be identified as such.

Update: Jeff Jacoby writes in the Boston Globe that,

[E]nemies of free speech … insist not only that speakers with politically incorrect opinions be shunned, but that anyone offering them a platform be punished as well. …

Environmental writer Mark Lynas, for example, puts dissent on climate change “in a similar moral category to Holocaust denial — except that this time the Holocaust is yet to come, and we still have time to avoid it. Those who try to ensure we don’t will one day have to answer for their crimes.” This totalitarian view is taking root everywhere, making skepticism on climate change taboo and subjecting anyone reckless enough to question the global-warming dogma to mockery and demonization. Former vice president Al Gore lumps “global warming deniers,” some of whom are eminent scientists, with the “15 percent of the population (who) believe the moon landing was actually staged in a movie lot in Arizona” and those who “still believe the earth is flat.”

The silencers are at work in the marketplace of ideas, using hook or crook to smother opinions they dislike. The lust to censor is as powerful as ever. If only liberty’s defenders were equally vigilant.

Speaking of “global warming,” I posted a follow-up essay on how another characteristic of the Left’s True Religion is apocalypticism (the world is about to end), of which “global warming” is only one manifestation. (Thirty years ago they said the world was going to freeze and that the danger was a new ice age.)