rondi adamson.ca

She gave an award to one of the Danish Mohammed cartoonists, for which she is receiving tons o'praise. But the folks at Reason make some good points:

But before we heap too much praise upon Merkel for doing the obvious—defending the free speech rights of an elderly cartoonist—keep in mind that she couldn’t avoid qualifying her support of Westergaard with that ubiquitous nonsense line, repeated like a mantra by critics of Jyllands-Posten and Westergaard—about freedom of speech being freighted with certain “responsibilities.” Bizarrely, Merkel also condemned the Florida sociopath who will hold a Koran burning at his church to mark the anniversary of September 11th as "abhorrent." (Yesterday, the German police staged a series of raids on buildings associated with the neo-Nazi movement, though President Obama has yet to weigh in on the group’s anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.)

...

Why does a limited defense of free speech by the leader of a Western democracy provoke such astonishment from the press corps?

Oh gosh, I don't know -- because even that little is so rare these days? (And yeah, I am tired of the rest of the world heaping judgment on the United States but getting huffy if the reverse happens.)