Elisabeth Sabaditch-Wolf: In Praise of Free Speech

Elisabeth Sabaditch-Wolf, the Austrian who spoke at AFA’s August conference in 2016 and who was convicted in Austria of “hate speech” for speaking the truth about Mohammed, joined us at a dinner in Los Angeles recently.  A celebration of our First Amendment and specifically, the Constitutionally-protected right we have to free speech, her talk was also an expose and indictment of the cultural suicide being engaged in by European nations.  As she also pointed out, this suicide is made much more difficult to check precisely because of their lack of a First Amendment.

She described situation after situation where various European nations eschewed their own cultural values, standards and mores in incredible contortionist efforts to accommodate immigrants from muslim cultures.  She enumerated new laws in place, new policies and tiers of government established in order to impose “coexistence” regardless of the cost to the citizens of their nations.

She spoke of the “spiral of silence,” a term coined by German political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, that refers to the “peer pressure” to remain silent when in the minority, a concept that conservatives face here in the US (and especially in Los Angeles) but which she used in reference to the maintenance of their own national culture.  Another concept she referenced was that of “Gleichschaltung,” the forced elimination of all diversity of thought and of independence as a means towards totalitarianism.

That this talk would not be permitted in Austria was one of the more shocking revelations.

As so often happens, it takes an outsider – Trevor Loudon from New Zealand, Avi Davis from Australia, Nonie Darwish from Egypt, Guy Milliere from France, among others – to recognize the priceless gift we have in our Constitution and the rights which it guarantees.  Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolf is another whose personal experience of a society without it has brought a particular appreciation for what we take so for granted.  But as President Reagan said, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction,” a statement true then and feels even truer now.

The video of her remarkable talk is here, courtesy of Scott Jacobs of Democast.