Irrepressible?
From the desk of Filip van Laenen on Wed, 2006-08-30 21:55
Would a quote from The Brussels Journal stand a chance of appearing on Amnesty International's irrepressible.info website one day?
Readers of The Brussels Journal already know that the Belgian government has been harassing Paul Belien for quite a while now, first in a direct way through the CEOOR (Center for Equal Opportunities and Opposition against Racism), and later in an indirect way in connection with home schooling. One certainly gets the impression that the goal seems to be to shut down The Brussels Journal one way or another, and recently both The Washington Times and The Wall Street Journal have reported about this in an editorial and an article respectively.
If the Belgian government should succeed, it would be interesting to see if Amnesty International would take up the cause of The Brussels Journal. In July, AI launched a global campaign against Internet repression, accompanied by a website called irrepresible.info. Would a quote from The Brussels Journal be included as an example of censored material that participants can include on their own websites? Actually, the correct question should rather be whether The Brussels Journal already qualifies for this as things stand right now. Something tells me this is not going to happen: I'm quite confident that the local Belgian chapter of AI, well entrenched in the Brussels establishment, would make sure that the campaign headquarters are «properly informed» in order to avoid a mishap. Just imagine…