Israel Matzav

Welcome to 2012 where everyone is entitled to his own facts but not his own opinion

The late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a former United States ambassador to the United Nations, once said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”   

That those words even needed uttering was an indication of how convoluted the application of free speech was growing a few decades ago. But Moynihan didn’t know the half of it. Today, the motto that is being imposed on and embraced by the Free World is that “everyone is entitled to his own facts, but not to his own opinion.”

It is for this reason that nobody is allowed to hold a dim view of Islam without paying a deadly price for it, yet official information provided by the International Atomic Energy Agency on Iran’s nuclear progress is debated “rationally” in TV studios and on op-ed pages.

It is thus, too, that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had to open his address to the U.N. General Assembly yesterday by restating the Jews’ biblical connection to the Land of Israel. So disputed has this fact become that the beleaguered democracy living in a sea of increasingly radical Islamist regimes has been put not only on the political, ideological and military defensive, but on the historical one, as well.

This was also at the root of Netanyahu’s reiteration of the number of Jews exterminated in the Holocaust — something that should be taken for granted by now. Instead, however, the only thing that seemed to be assumed this week was the attendance at the U.N. General Assembly of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose ambitions for nuclear and Islamist hegemony — proven repeatedly in word and deed — are being treated as “matters of opinion.”

Labels: Binyamin Netanyahu, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Iranian nuclear threat, United Nations General Assembly

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 8:36 PM