YANKS **** UP THE RIGHT TO FREE SPEECH
9 February 2006
HERE'S a challenge to all of those bravehearts currently banging on about how they'd fight to their dying breath to preserve our right to free speech.
Pick up your gun, use up your Virgin air miles and go shoot those fundamental religious fanatics who've just suppressed a 62-year-old knight of the British realm's right to express himself.
I'm talking about Sir Mick Jagger having two songs censored by American TV networks during Sunday's Super-bowl, for fear they would upset the country's dominant Christian right. Did he call Jesus gay or Mary a *****? No. He mentioned a grain-eating farmyard animal.
This is the line deemed so offensive in the land of BLEEP* that it had to be taken off screen: "Once upon a time I was your little rooster, am I just one of your cocks?" And if you think stopping a rock-and-roll pensioner saying "cocks" is nothing to worry about, think again. These are the same TV networks who decide what their people see whenever BLEEP* sends troops on a foreign military adventure.
In this new era of "embedded journalism" Americans only see what the Pentagon wants them to. Material which is sanitised again by CBS and NBC for the patriotic sensibilities of Mid- American couch potatoes.
Those sanctimonious ones among us who believe free speech is what differentiates us enlightened Westerners from Eastern fanatics are deluding themselves.
You know why America was paranoid over the Stones' lyrics? Because during the 2004 Superbowl Janet Jackson's nipple slipped out and 500,000 viewers registered their disgust. Yet we slag off Muslims for stopping their women showing off their bodies.
We demand the arrest of mad mullahs such as Old Hooky when they talk of global domination as a necessity to satisfy Allah, yet think nothing of BLEEP* admitting he holds conversations with his God. And is occasionally told to invade nations whose politics he doesn't agree with.
How does BLEEP* use his freedom of speech? To say who can own nuclear weapons (countries who submit to American dominance) and who can't (those who don't). He uses it to call cultures which don't conform to his Christian world view "The Axis of Evil".
THIS man uses it to ask Congress to give him £230billion a year for weapons to see off anyone who "threatens" the Christian way of life.
He used it to say: "Ah feel good" at the start of a religious crusade which has killed 32,000 Iraqis, 2,250 Americans and more than 100 Britons.
He uses it to tell henchmen to pick up Muslim "suspects" and fly them to friendly countries for torture. (Obviously not seen on US TV, because sticking electrodes in "cocks" might offend.)
He uses his free speech to invent reasons for wars, then clams up when quizzed on his lies. But still we good old Brits are proud of our "special relationship" and say we'd fight to our dying breath to protect this form of free speech and our shared way of life.
Let's abandon the moral high ground and admit we are as censored as Western governments need us to be to sustain their economic and military dominance. A censorship we never question because it's white, speaks our lingo and sends us Britney Spears and The Sopranos.
*Owing to this column being available on the internet in America, I have censored the use of the US President's name - because it can be construed as a term for female pubic hair.
Y'all are too cute. I swear, and did it with the same letter for each word. I must give y'all a huge hand for that.
