Posted: 9/17/2008 8:51:00 PM
Author: Michelle Malkin
Source: This article originally appeared in the New York Post on Sept. 17, 2008.
Book-Banners Hollywood Ignores
by Michelle Malkin
EVER heard Hollywood liberals talk about suspected jihadists the way they talk of suspected GOP "book-banners"? The 9/11 attacks didn't turn celebrity leftists into hawks. But the minute they started reading false rumors about Sarah Palin restricting access to "Daddy's Roommate" and "Heather Has Two Mommies" in her hometown library, Tinseltown's doves became militant warmongers.
Matt Damon, parroting Internet lies about Palin's censoring novels while mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, took a defiant stand against the "terrifying possibility" of a McCain-Palin victory. "We can't have" book-banning, he inveighed.
Feminist playwright Eve Ensler ("The Vagina Monologues") seethed in a mass e-mail that Palin "has tried to ban books from the library, has a tendency to dispense with people who think independently. She cannot tolerate an environment of ambiguity and difference."
Classic projection. Da- mon, Ensler and the anti-censorship crusaders are the ones who can't tolerate independence, ambiguity and difference. The rumormongers keep spreading a bogus banned-book list attributed to Palin that includes books not even published when she was mayor. No city records corroborate reports that she tried to keep any books off government-funded library shelves available to children.
And even if she did inquire about the process, so what? Regulating age-appropriate content is only alarming to the civil-liberties extremists who oppose reasonable filtering of sexually explicit material in public spaces.
If book-banning is such a life-and-death issue to these celebrity foot soldiers for free speech, where were they four years ago when John Kerry and his rabid minions were pressuring Regnery Publishing to withdraw "Unfit for Command" from bookstores?
Where were they when members of the Borders Books Employee Union openly advocated sabotaging book sales? A message on the union's members-only Web site urged: "You guys don't actually HAVE to sell the thing!
"Just 'carelessly' hide the boxes, 'accidentally' drop them off pallets, 'forget' to stock the ones you have and then suggest a nice Al Franken or Michael Moore book as a substitute."
Where were they when left-wing hitman David Brock of Media Matters for America sent a demand letter to Wal-Mart, Amazon and Barnes & Noble urging them to pull "Unfit for Command"?
Where were they two years ago when two New Jersey Democrats, Assemblywomen Joan Quigley and Linda Stender, called on merchants to ban the sale of Ann Coulter's book "Godless" because of her remarks about anti-Bush 9/11 widows? "
Where were they in 2005, when University of North Carolina law professor Eric Muller called on his blog readers to get one of my books banned from a bookstore?
Where were they when J. Millard Burr and Robert O. Collins' "Alms for Jihad" was banned in Britain; Robert Spencer's "The Truth about Muhammad" was banned in Pakistan; and "The Jewel of Madina" was banned, well, everywhere?
And where are they now? Concocting horror stories about terrifying Christian bogeymen who threaten peace, tolerance, independent thought and difference. Patting themselves and each other on the backs as the valiant protectors of dissent. (But only the kind with which they agree, of course. Shhhhh.)
