« The thought police strike again | Main | Torture: the Bay Area is down with it »

It's a free country -- well, it used to be

By Michael J. Smith on Thursday April 23, 2009 08:39 PM

Y'know, it's funny. Just when you think you've gotten used to living in a police state, something comes along that surprises you:

6 years in prison for airing Hezbollah TV in NYC

NEW YORK (AP) — A Pakistani immigrant described by prosecutors as "Hezbollah's man in New York City" was sentenced Thursday to nearly six years in prison for airing the militant group's television station.

U.S. District Judge Richard M. Berman handed down a sentence of five years and nine months to Javed Iqbal, who had pleaded guilty in December to providing aid to a terrorist organization.

Let's be clear here: the entire substance of Iqbal's crime was rebroadcasting Hizbollah's TV programming. That was the uttermost extent of his "aid for terrorism."

Let the record show that the honorable Judge Berman, who has apparently never read the First Amendment, is a Clinton appointee. I note with delight that before he became a judge, he worked for the unspeakable Jacob Javits.

Fascism is very much a bipartisan thing.

Comments (6)

Those Kids Today:

Sami El Arian, the Holy Land Foundation, Hezbollah TV, it's basically illegal to be a Muslim and a political activist in the USA today.

To me, this isn't a sign of the Israel Lobby's strength. It's a sign of their weakness. If they have to use these kinds of Stalinist tactics, it means they know deep down inside the American people are eventually going to turn against them.

MJS:

What an unexpected and keen pleasure to agree with Van Mungo and TKT at the same time! Nunc dimittis!

op:

Stalinist ?

Come come mr T

Surely the inspiration
Comes from ben gurion

U are hurting zionic pride
Their tactics are sui generis

self invention here on the fly

Stalin?
Abba eban is closer then stalin

Stalin would eat a platter full of fools like this
Mini broadcasting
Gent. At a week day brake fast

Boy, Paine just can't stand to hear a discouraging word about his beloved butcher Uncle Joe. So sensitive on this topic!

In his latest splatter of pseudo-deep dada, he writes, "Abba eban is closer then stalin."

I notice Paine constantly using "then" when he should use "than"--noticed it twice today alone, but have seen it several times before. Does this second-grade spelling/grammar distinction really escape him, or is he going to claim some dark depth of ironic wordplay the sense of which is bound to escape mere prose-bound mortals? I'm confident that he would claim the latter, the coverup option, in a kind of hyperpompous variation of the tack you often see on Millionaire--when the contestant use a lifeline, is given the right answer, and then says, "Oh, yeah, that's what I was thinking."

Those Kids Today:

I simply used "Stalinist" as a generic term for "repressive."

Ben Gurion and Stalin (Zionism and Bolshevism)are both members of a larger movement called socialism.

But if I just said "socialist" nobody would understand me. And if I said "Zionist" I'd probably be mistaken for an anti-semite.

So I decided to use the generic American idiom.

Next time I'll say "redolant of the tyrant Abraham Lincoln's crimes against the civil liberties of Clement Vallandigham."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clement_Vallandigham

bk:

Careful, TKT....BOTH sides of Ourabouros claim Saint Lincoln the doomed as their patron saint. You don't wanna be exiled, do you? :)

Post a comment

Note also that comments with three or more links may be held for "moderation" -- a strange term to apply to the ghost in this blog's machine. Seems to be a hard-coded limitation of the blog software, unfortunately.

About

This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on Thursday April 23, 2009 08:39 PM.

The previous post in this blog was The thought police strike again.

The next post in this blog is Torture: the Bay Area is down with it.

Many more can be found on the main index page or by looking through the archives.

Creative Commons License

This weblog is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Powered by
Movable Type 3.31