The international embarrassment continues

It's never a good thing when your country makes a list of places where freedom is being eroded. Thanks, human rights commissions!

Here's the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune:

Freedom of speech is under attack. Let us count the ways.

The first and most obvious: Those who criticize militant Islamists — from novelist Salman Rushdie to Danish cartoonists to memoirist Ayaan Hirsi Ali — are routinely threatened with deadly violence. It would be black humor to say this is having a chilling effect.

The second is political correctness. On campuses and within Western governments it is increasingly taboo to label terrorists who slaughter in the name of Islam "Islamist terrorists." In Canada, "human rights commissions" attempt to enforce this taboo by putting such writers as Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant on trial for the "crime" of expressing opinions that offend Islamic grievance groups — and also for quoting Islamists accurately and thereby casting them in an unfavorable light. If that’s not Orwellian, what is?...