By way of my better half comes this article from Bruce Bawer. I think Bruce is mostly accurate with a very minor touch of being too strongly into his thesis, but that this threat to speech and the enlightenment has gone this far and succors such protection remains disturbing. Here to me is the core point, but it is well worth reading the entire article:

Enough. We need to recognize that the cultural jihadists hate our freedoms because those freedoms defy sharia, which they're determined to impose on us. So far, they have been far less successful at rolling back freedom of speech and other liberties in the U.S. than in Europe, thanks in no small part to the First Amendment. Yet America is proving increasingly susceptible to their pressures.

The key question for Westerners is: Do we love our freedoms as much as they hate them? Many free people, alas, have become so accustomed to freedom, and to the comfortable position of not having to stand up for it, that they're incapable of defending it when it's imperiled - or even, in many cases, of recognizing that it is imperiled. As for Muslims living in the West, surveys suggest that many of them, though not actively involved in jihad, are prepared to look on passively - and some, approvingly - while their coreligionists drag the Western world into the House of Submission.

But we certainly can't expect them to take a stand for liberty if we don't stand up for it ourselves.

This issue hits somewhat close to home as I've made it a bit of personal policy to make sure that speech that has been attempted to be supressed is posted here. That's knowing that there is a guy in Waziristan who used a former credit card number of mine to buy flights to London on a particularly interesting day. He posted here to threaten...