My original plan was to write about some civil rights abuses currently going on in the Muslim world. Just the other day in Turkey, Fazil Say became yet another in a long line of artists convicted of the crime of denigrating Islam. His mode of defilement? Twitter! Amongst these tweets was a quote from a famous Omar Khayyam poem which points out Islam’s obsession with turning heaven into a combination bar/whore house. Say was sentenced to ten months in prison, but had the sentence suspended, provided he would not insult Islam again in the next five years.
Then we have the story of Kuwaiti opposition politician Musallam Al-Barrak, who had the temerity to speak ill of Sheikh Sabah IV Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah, the autocratic king of the tiny country. For the crime of “undermining the emir” el-Barrak has been sentenced to five years in jail.
These crimes against free speech and human dignity are atrocious, but, as Westerners we tend to look on such things as almost inevitable. In backwards countries ruled by seemingly random religious prerogatives the violation of free speech is practically a foregone conclusion. If only they could better emulate places like the United States, a land founded on the preservation of natural human rights, then all would be well.
Then I opened a newspaper and saw that the Obama administration was advocating that suspected Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev be tricked into violating his rights, particularly his right to counsel. Say what you will about Turkey, at least they let Fazil Say have a lawyer.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev
This idea of delaying Mirandizing Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is just so stupid it boggles the imagination. There is literally no upside to it. The Miranda warning does not confer rights; it merely reminds us of them. Not reading Miranda to a person does not strip them of their Constitutional protections. How could it? If not being read Miranda could do such a thing, then no American had Constitutional protections until 1966. The long and the short is that it is not possible for the government to strip anyone of these rights, regardless of how popular the idea may be.
And boy, is it popular! Barack Obama, Eric Holder, John Boehner, Lindsey Graham, John McCain and a slew of other people who should know better have taken it upon themselves to decide who gets access to their rights and who doesn’t. Considering several of these men are lawyers (particularly the Prez, who keeps telling people he was a Constitutional law professor) this shocking degree of ignorance is unforgivable.
