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Billybones
Snowy Owl
Snowy Owl

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Joined: 27 Jan 2012
Gender: Male
Posts: 140

26 Mar 2012, 1:53 pm

TM wrote:
If there are sanctions put against you, such as sensitivity training, anger management or you get fired, then that's censorship as far as I'm concerned. Do we really have to do the list of people who got fired or suffered sanctions for saying something that isn't PC?


Oh, I can think of a few.

Bill Maher had his show cancelled by ABC because he made a comment about the commonplace of describing acts of terrorism as "cowardly". To paraphrase, he said that, however reprehensible their cause & their acts, the 9/11 hijackers were willing to die for their cause, while the United States killed by firing cruise missiles from thousands of miles away . . . that's cowardly.

Helen Thomas, the veteran White House correspondent, was fired by Hearst News Service for statements critical of Israel's occupation of Palestinian lands.

Eason Jordan was forced to resign as president of CNN for suggesting, at Davos, Switzerland, that the U.S. was deliberately targeting journalists in its wars. Though this statement is probably unprovable, there is certainly evidence to back this claim. But for what he said, truth is no defense. He impugned the conduct of the U.S. military, which is strictly out-of-bounds, & for this he was forced out.

Octavia Nasr, senior editor for Middle East affairs at CNN, was fired for a Twitter comment in which she expressed sadness at the death of Iraqi-born Lebanese Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah, founder of Hizbullah.

It's one thing for an employer concerned about its public image to fire an employee for impolitic or unpopular statements. But it's on another level entirely when the sanction involves prosecution & imprisonment. Javed Iqbal, the owner of a satellite TV business in NYC that caters to Arabic-speaking viewers, was sentenced to 5 years & 9 months in federal prison for the crime of offering al-Manar (Hizbullah's TV channel) to subscribers.

Censorship is reprehensible. On that I think we can agree. But my point is that most censorship that results in real sanctions comes from the political right & is aimed at the left (especially those perceived as hostile to Israel), not the other way around. Yes, most often PC is a straw man, but apparently the label only applies when it's coming from the left.