This is an open letter to LiveLeak.
In these days of the globalized Jihad everyone must choose their allies, their customers, their base with care. Choices not made still have consequences.
A few days ago, Fitna hit the Internet. LiveLeak, which hosted it, became the target of threats and rage. About 12 hours after posting the movie, LiveLeak took it down.
This is quite ironic because LiveLeak, hosted in both the UK and USA, has long been one of the most reliable places to find jihad terrorist propaganda videos. For the past couple of years, YouTube and LiveLeak have hosted hundreds, thousands of terrorist propaganda videos featuring such horrors as Juba’s sniper attacks on American and British soldiers, IED and VBIED explosions, torture murders of captives, etc. YouTube initially resisted requests to take the videos down, but eventually began to comply. On the other hand, when requested by American and British citizens to remove the terrorist propaganda movies, LiveLeak always used free speech as a defense for letting the movies stay.
For several years, against the opprobrium of patriots from the English speaking countries, LiveLeak stood firm in its stand for the free speech rights of those who were profoundly opposed to free speech for those who were not as them. Its reputation grew among the terrorists and the terrorists’ fans, both from idolaters of Jihad and those with a nihilist, post-modern, Gramscian hatred of ordinary British and American culture. LiveLeak developed these haters of Britain, America, Christianity, Jews, and capitalism into its base.
So when Geert Wilders came along with his well-publicized project to face Islam with the idolatry of Jihad within it, it seemed like a perfect opportunity for LiveLeak to poke a stick in the eye of a new target. LiveLeak exists to stir things up like this. But this time it backfired. LiveLeak was threatened, not with scorn and indignation, but with bloodcurdling threats of violence against employer, employees, and their families. The threats were believable because the evidence that violent Muslims would carry them out was in color on LiveLeak’s very own site. Worse yet, the base of haters that LiveLeak had built up with great care was the heart of the revolt against it. Now LiveLeak felt the hatred and threat of violence that it had gleefully helped its own base aim at others for years.
It spooked LiveLeak. The company threw in its cards. It banished Fitna with the cynical excuse that the price of free speech was too great.
Now it was apparent to everyone what LiveLeak was. Its ethical stance was revealed as a rotting corpse. LiveLeak turned out to be a feckless organization that cheered on murderers against its employees, their neighbors, and the countries in which they lived. Were any LiveLeak employees killed in the 7/7 bombings? Were the brothers of any LiveLeak employees killed in combat in Iraq or Afghanistan? Perhaps not, but they very well could have been. But when LiveLeak itself faced a few threats it quickly gave up and censored one, carefully chosen video that it hosted.
A few days later, LiveLeak restored Fitna. But it does not help LiveLeak, which now stands exposed as a cowardly, rabble-rousing, self-loathing organization without even the courage of its convictions. LiveLeak’s way forward will either be to self-destruct, or to take sides. Will it recruit its base from the peoples of the countries that nurtured it, that provided the environment in which the technology that allows it to exist was developed, countries that send brave young, all-too-young, men to dangerous places to protect LiveLeak from morally retrograde murderers and slave-takers, or will it recruit its base among those who would overthrow free speech, democracy, women’s and gay rights, scientific discovery, secular law, who would reinstate slavery and impose the burka, honor killings, second class citizenship, and clitorodectomies on women? That is the choice before it. The result of no choice will be a slow death of nihilism and irrelevance.
LiveLeak, it is time to choose. This is the moment that will make or break you. Take your stand or slowly wither away.
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Trackposted to Rosemary’s Thoughts, Democrat = Socialist, Right Truth, Adam’s Blog, Stuck On Stupid, Cao’s Blog, The Amboy Times, Conservative Cat, Adeline and Hazel, D equals S, Nuke Gingrich, third world county, McCain Blogs, DragonLady’s World, The World According to Carl, Pirate’s Cove, The Pink Flamingo, , Rant It Up, Tilting At Windmill Farms, Stageleft, and The Yankee Sailor, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.
Technorati Tags: Jihad, Moral Clarity, Sharia, Culture War
Wolf Pangloss 
Excellent. That’s the only word for this post. Excellent.
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In an important judgement on a case dealing with religious freedom of speech in the High Court on 23rd July 1999, Lord Justice Sedley quoted Socrates and two famous Quakers when he declared: “The irritating, the contentious, the eccentric, the heretical, the unwelcome and provocative have a right to be heard.”
The corporate and state organs have no right to decide on our behalf what we should read, watch, or hear, even if we find the material objectionable.
The removal of Fitna from various webhosts was nothing but pre-emptive censorship!
Fascinating post. As usual, there’s always more to the story than one first thinks. Thank you for these revelations. I knew nothing of Liveleak’s questionable history.
Every day is a learning experience.
Interesting post. So, correct me if I am wrong, you are disgusted by liveleak taking the film down to better secure themselves before replacing it and now you seek to browbeat them into doing what you want?
I’ve been a member of liveleak since early 2007 and I have seen many posts from US soldiers and people offering anti islamic views. Of course, to acknowledge this would be to weaken your rhetoric. Now you’re playing some “You are either with us or against us” line? Shame on you, sir. Shame on you. You are no better than those who sought to silence Fitna.
You are no better than those who sought to silence Fitna.
What’s your definition of better? Is better allowing men to kidnap your children and execute them on live tv, with the excuse that it is free speech?
While I may not agree with Wolf’s wish for Liveleak to make a choice between us or our enemies, since to me folks like Liveleakare tools and tools don’t get to decide which side they are on, I do not particularly agree with your conclusions either, Alstair.
Liveleak and YouTube are made to be on one side or another by the actions of the combatants. They, being companies and interested in money or some kind of abstract ideal they aren’t willing to shed blood or treasure for, are neutrals. And like all neutrals, they can get slaughtered by either side if we deem it tactically advantageous to deny an enemy a resource. That’s the nature of warfare. If you don’t like it, help us end the war by defeating Jihadist propaganda. Not with silence, but with active measures such as counter-propaganda and taking down jihadist propaganda messages on LiveLeak and YouTube via user complaints.
It remains to those fighting for liberty to manipulate Liveleak into a weapon just as it is up to the Islamic Jihad to manipualte LiveLeak into a propaganda tool to create and spread messages promoting their war on children and women.
Wolf gives Liveleak too much credit. Wolf treats Liveleak as an individual human when I see LiveLeak as simply an organization of tools. Sometimes tools are useful and sometimes they are dangerous and buggy.
Lord Justice Sedley quoted Socrates and two famous Quakers when he declared: “The irritating, the contentious, the eccentric, the heretical, the unwelcome and provocative have a right to be heard.”
Socrates also agreed to take poison and kill himself because the Athenian Democratic Assembly voted that he was guilty of corrupting the youth of Athens with his Spartan tainted messages.
Did you know why he agreed to kill himself even though he had allies like Plato ready to break him out of jail and live in exile in some other city-state in Greece? Because Socrates said that if you disobey laws simply because you see them as inconvenient, then the entire rule of law will fail and Athens will fall into anarchy.
Because LiveLeak chose to violate their own laws because it was “convenient”, LiveLeak no longer deserves any “rights” or protections of liberties. They have no integrity and thus nothing we do or say about them will violate what they do not have.
I don’t blame LiveLeak for being cowards in the face of real violence. Nobody trained them for it and nobody told them that freedom of speech only exists because of the freedom of others to kill people that are a danger to free speech.
Liveleak is a productive tool and sheep of Western culture and civilization. They have every right to stay that right. That right, however, is only won by the US military when force is used to defend the rights of Liveleak, coincidentally from the very people Liveleak gives the right of free speech to, the Islamofascists.
It’s a bit of irony, of course, but then again sheep are sheep. You can’t blame them for thinking the dogs with fangs are the same as the wolves with fangs. That’s just how they are.
They exist to frolic and be happy with the rights and security won for them by the leadership of the shepherd and the fangs of the guard dogs.
Civilization would be a rather oppressive and depressing place without frolicing sheep, you know.