I take exception to your implication that voices are being muzzled or "shouted down".
Calling dissenters traitors or bin Laden lovers would be an *opinion* of some. And that *opinion* is just as open to criticism as the very opinion they deride.
The internet is one of the very few venues where freedom of expression can indeed flourish. As opposed to some of our academic institutions.
Here's an editorial decrying a REAL example of "shouting down" and "muzzling" ideas...
Free speech isn't for a select few
editorial
Austin American-Statesman
Tuesday, February 1, 2000
A small group of protesters at the University ofTexas has decreed that only those people they
approve of will be allowed to speak on campus without disruption.
Others who try – including University of California Regent Ward Connerly and former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger -- will be heckled, harassed and shouted down. Speech at UT is only free for those who please the Campus Radical Network. All others must stay away or suffer all the humiliation a hundred or so people can heap on them.
University officials advised Kissinger to cancel his lecture at the LBJ School auditorium, which had been scheduled for tonight. Harry Middleton, director of the LBJ Library on campus, said he advised Kissinger to stay away because of the protests planned by students. Bob Jensen, an associate professor of journalism and faculty adviser to the students, helped organize the protest.
UT Chancellor William Cunningham and President Larry Faulkner cited safety reasons for urging Kissinger to cancel. More likely, they wanted Kissinger to avoid the embarrassment suffered by Connerly when he spoke at the law school last year. Connerly had to cut his talk short because of the constant shouting from a few people in the audience.
University officials should be familiar with the tactics of disruption by now. Before the shameful Connerly episode, Jensen was arrested at the Capitol in 1998 for disrupting a speech by former President George Bush.
Crushing a speech by threatening a disturbance is abominable on a college campus, where the answer to objectionable speech should always be more speech, not a blackout. Only those with the narrow vision of a closed mind can believe that the way to educate is to shut down dialogue rather than expand it. That Kissinger was the target of a radical protest is a sign either of the dearth of controversial figures in Austin or the campus activists' desperate need for attention. Kissinger has not served in any government post for 15 years and hasn't had official power since he left as former President Gerald Ford's secretary of state 23 years ago.
Campus radicals could have used Kissinger's appearance as a catalyst for a serious debate over this country's foreign policy. Instead they chose agitation and boorish behavior to communicate their objections to his policies, which were lightning rods for protest more than two decades ago when he was former President Richard Nixon's national security adviser, but are now relics of Cold War history.
Faulkner and other university leaders must not allow Jensen and a handful of activists to continue to determine who can and cannot lecture at the University of Texas. A university exists to court thought, even controversial thought, not avoid it.
For campus leaders to do otherwise is to endanger the university's national reputation as a leader in higher education.
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