The courage of a blogger

A blogger writing as Irish Rose is well known in the circles of Little Green Footballs, and she recently posted a response to a commenter on her blog, in which she stated "the real 'anti-Jihad' warriors" are the men and women of the U.S. military. She's absolutely right about that. However, she also notes that it doesn't take being brave and fearless to blog all day.

On that, she is wrong. The reason is because sitting behind a computer and blogging for how ever long it takes can require actual courage; it depends on where one is in the world.

Paul Ray, a.k.a. Lionheart, is a very good example. The rise of Islamic extremism in Britain (and the existence of 85 Sharia courts) is cause for grave concern. Mr. Ray's efforts to expose the threat and dangers of this extremism has been rewarded by having to engage in a long legal battle for supposedly inciting racial hatred. To blog about the threatening rise of Islam under threat of arrest for telling the truth about it (a.k.a. "inciting racial hatred") takes courage.

The rest of Europe may be regarded as a safe place to blog; what happened to Paul Ray in Britain could be considered an isolated matter. I don't buy that. Not in countries like the Netherlands, where filmmakers are murdered for producing films featuring the truth about Islam, and where politicians who speak out against Islam must rely on armed guards for protection. The threat of Islamic extremism is just as real in Europe as is in Britain, and most if not all of the governments in Europe bend over backwards to appease this extremism. Bloggers in the whole of Europe have to be careful when addressing the threat of Islam. They need real courage for what they do.

Bloggers in the Middle East, especially in Iran, face numerous untold restrictions when it comes to blogging, and the merest criticism of the governments in those countries in their blogging, the slightest dissension, can have serious repercussions for those bloggers. For bloggers in places like Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iran and Yemen, to sit in front of a computer and blog for just a few minutes takes actual courage.

The same is true for bloggers in China, where online censorship is a way of life there, where the truth of the Tiananmen Square massacre 20 years ago, for instance, remains a forbidden subject, and where the punishment for dissension is the same as in the Middle East.

For me, it doesn't take courage to sit at a computer and blog freely all day, but if I were in Europe, the Middle East or China, that would be a different matter. That requires courage.