By Selwyn Duke

When I first heard that radio
host Michael Savage had been banned from traveling to England along with an
assortment of Moslem terrorists and other miscreants, my first thought was that
the public relations arm of the politically correct thought police had struck
again.  It only made sense.  Given how Britain is now bedeviled by Islamic
jihadists, it had a legitimate reason to keep their most zealous fellows from the
nation’s increasingly volatile Moslem masses. 
Yet the spineless Neville Chamberlain bureaucrats charged with this task
— whose motto seems to be “peace through capitulation” — would never want to be
seen as singling out Moslems.  So they
traded a man’s reputation for peace in our time. 

Now this analysis has been
vindicated with the release, under a Freedom of Information law, of shocking documents
showing that the U.K.’s Home Office did in fact ban Savage to “balance” the Moslem
personae non gratae.  Writes the Daily
Mail:

One message, sent by an unidentified Home Office official on November 27 last year, said that 'with Weiner [Savage’s birth name], I can understand that disclosure of the decision would help provide a balance of types of exclusion cases'. 

The documents include a draft recommendation, marked 'Restricted', saying: 'We will want to ensure that the names disclosed reflect the broad range of cases and are not all Islamic extremists.'

And
it appears the decision involved officials in the highest levels of government,
perhaps even extending to Prime Minister Gordon Brown himself.

The documents also contain a rather
explicit admission that banning Savage was unjust, with another unidentified
official warning, “I think we could be accused of duplicity in naming him.”  This could be a smoking gun in a defamation
lawsuit Savage has filed in which he is seeking £100,000 in damages from Jacqui
Smith, the former secretary of the Home Office who recently resigned in
disgrace.  At the helm of the bureaucracy
when Savage was banned, Smith impugned him in a press release issued in defense
of the action, saying that the host was “seeking to provoke others to
serious criminal acts and fostering hatred which might lead to inter-community
violence.”  But with the newly-released
documents, her claim that she truly viewed Savage as a threat seems like
nothing but air.

However
the case plays out in court, there is no doubt that Savage was sacrificed to
fill a quota.  The host addressed this in
his usual inimitable style, telling
WorldNetDaily.com, “The name Dreyfus comes to mind.  They have attempted to destroy my reputation
to avoid offending those Muslims who want to destroy them!  The Warsaw ghetto comes to mind, where some
Jews threw other Jews into Gestapo hands to live another day.”

Yet
every aspect of this case smacks of political correctness and expediency,
starting even with the appointment of the villain in the story, Jacqui Smith,
herself.  Just recently, in a development
as shocking as the documents vindicating Savage, she admitted incompetence,
saying, “When I became Home Secretary, I'd never run a major organization. I
hope I did a good job but if I did it was more by luck than by any kind of
development of those skills.  . . . every
single time that I was appointed to a ministerial job I thought that [I wasn’t
up to the task]. I didn't sleep for a week in 1999 when I got my ministerial
job.”

Ain’t
political correctness grand?  Like Sonia
Sotomayor, Joycelyn Elders, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and so many others, it’s
obvious that Smith was an affirmative-action appointee.  She held her position because of chromosome
configuration, not qualifications.  So
you could say that the Savage story is one of a bureaucrat chosen by quota who
then chose a victim by quota. 

This
ought to give all of us pause.  You may
rest secure in the knowledge that you’re not as controversial as Savage, but
understand the implications of quota selection. 
Whether you’re favoring a person or persecuting him, the standard is the
same: you’re selecting him not based on what he has done but what he is.  And who will be chosen based on a profile
next time?  Can you be sure that what you
do and say will save you when what you are is precisely the sacrifice needed?

And,
really, some would say it is this utilitarian approach of the Home Office that is
most unsettling.  It reminds me of the
old saying, “The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference.”  If Smith and her comrades had hated Savage,
then, in a strange way, it perhaps would have been a bit more noble.  After all, in their own minds — twisted
though they are — they just might have believed they were dispensing justice.  But the situation in question here was quite
different, as it involved cold, detached calculation.  Of course, some of these bureaucrats may also
harbor deep hatred, but of what we can be sure is that they certainly don’t
love their fellow man enough to view him as anything but a pawn, a means to an
end.  These are the kind of people who
operate gas chambers by rote.

This
is just one reason why I wish Michael Savage Godspeed with his lawsuit.  The hate-speech tyrants have spent years
using the perpetual motion machine of bureaucracy to persecute those without
the means or will to fight back.  And
even when the Smiths of the world meet resistance — such as when Canadian
journalist Ezra Levant was targeted
after republishing controversial Danish cartoons of Mohammed in 2006 — the best
their victims can usually hope for is Pyrrhic victory.  Levant won his case, for instance, but had to
endure an emotionally draining, two-year investigation and spend $100,000 on
legal fees.  As he said, the process is
the punishment.  So let’s hope Savage can
give the unthinking thought police a taste of their own medicine.

Most
importantly, however, figures such as Savage and Levant stand in the vanguard.  The ultimate goal of the thought police’s
minions in government, Hollywood, the media, academia and various homosexual
and Moslem advocacy groups is not to restrict us to our own borders.  It is to restrict us within them, and with
every victory their iron burka descends ever lower over those who speak
Truth.  And if the powerful in the media
can be silenced, the rest of us won’t stand a chance.

                       © 2009 Selwyn Duke — All Rights Reserved