Who Didn't See That One Coming?

Well, it's finally happened. Melanie Phillips is being "investigated" for "hate speech." (She has the termerity to call the Arabs who murdered the Fogler family "savages.")

Can we now expect a Geert Wilders-like prosecution, one that will all but spell the end of free speech in the country the world the Magna Carta and English Common Law?

Update: Mark Steyn writes:

Melanie will resist this attempt to shrink further the already shriveled bounds of public discourse in the United Kingdom. Whether her various editors and publishers will stand with her remains to be seen. And many other writers will simply conclude that this is one area to steer well clear of. “The lofty idea of ‘the war on racism’ is gradually turning into a hideously false ideology,” the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut said in 2005. “And this anti-racism will be for the 21st century what Communism was for the 20th century: a source of violence.”

That seems the way to bet. I would rather have a society where people are free to call others “savages” than empower the state to police them into not doing so. In Britain as elsewhere, in the name of “tolerance” and “diversity” formerly free peoples are being herded into an ever more intolerant and homogeneous conformity.

"This anti-racism," it must be noted, is also "this human rights." The other day, Prime Minister Stephen Harper dared to express what is arguably the least politically correct idea of our time--the awful truth that the new anti-Semitism (what I call Zionhass) targets Jewry through the state of Israel, using the language of "human rights" to do so. "Anti-racism," "human rights," "multiculturalism," "diversity"--lovely-sounding words, all; all of them being used to disguise the will to power of those who spit and do much worse on the West's core principle of individual freedom.