Excerpt:
Carrie Prejean is not the only one who is being demonized these days for expressing politically incorrect opinions; free speech had a bad week all over the world. British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith last week announced the names of sixteen "extremists" whom she has barred from entering Britain -- a smorgasbord of nasty characters including a white supremacist; a Christian fundamentalist hate preacher; two Islamic jihadists; and Samir Kantar, a Lebanese Druze terrorist who brutally murdered four Israelis, including a four-year-old child. On the list also was talk show host Michael Savage, whose only offense seems to have been to espouse views that Jacqui Smith doesn't like.
Savage was livid, saying of Smith: "She's linking me with mass murderers who are in prison for killing Jewish children on buses? For my speech? The country where the Magna Carta was created?"
It was a good question, and one made all the more urgent by the likelihood that Savage, as well as the others who were not Islamic terrorists or their allies, were only added to the list in order to avoid aggravating the easily-aggravated sensibilities of Muslim groups in Britain. Alan Mendoza of the London-based Henry Jackson Society dismissed many of the names on the list as being "just here for padding." According to AP, Mendoza said that the list was devised so as to "avoid giving Britain's Muslims the impression that it singles them out."