Please Raise Your Voices While You Can

Peter Hitchens writes:

There is still just time for our Government to do a good, brave deed, which will be recognised as such decades hence. There is still just time for prominent figures in politics and the media to place themselves on the side of justice and liberty, where they ought always to be.

Julian Assange must not be extradited to the US, for such an action will shame our country.

If in doubt they should consider the very similar case of Daniel Ellsberg, who has just died. Mr Ellsberg was excoriated, hounded and put on trial when, half a century ago, he publicised documents revealing the nasty truth about the Vietnam War. President Richard Nixon mobilised the law to silence and punish him. Ellsberg died a much-honoured hero of liberty. Nixon died in shame and disgrace.

Yet the shadows are closing fast around Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who infuriated the US government by revealing a trove of embarrassing material about its misdeeds.

A few weeks from now, he could be bundled into a van at Belmarsh prison, the high-security fortress where he has been cruelly held for years. And then he could be led on to an aircraft and flown to the US, where there is a strong chance that he will spend the rest of his life buried alive in some federal dungeon.

I wrote here in September 2020: 'Do we really want the hand of a foreign power to be able to reach into our national territory at will and pluck out anyone it wants to punish? Are we still even an independent country if we allow this?

'The Americans would certainly not let us treat them in this way. It is unimaginable that the US would hand over to us any of its citizens who had been accused of leaking British secret documents. 'Yet if Mr Assange is sent to face trial in the US, any British journalist who comes into possession of classified material from the US, though he has committed no crime according to our own law, faces the same danger.

'This is a basic violation of our national sovereignty, and a major threat to our own press freedom. I think that no English court should accept this demand. And if the courts fail in their duty, then I think that any self-respecting Home Secretary should overrule them.'

Please raise your voices while you can. This is a political prosecution and we should not permit such a thing against anyone on our soil.

And:

Abortion is the only legal medical procedure in which a human being is intentionally killed. We have lied to ourselves about this for decades, by using the dismissive, harsh Latin term ‘foetus’ – instead of recognising that what we are destroying is a future human being.

In almost all cases, I really cannot see why adoption would be worse than abortion, if the mother truly does not want the baby.

So how should we view the case of Carla Foster, a mother of young children sent to prison for 14 months for unlawfully aborting her baby, long after our very liberal law permits this? You might be interested to know that, in this case, the aborted baby’s name was Lily. I think this helps us to realise that we are dealing with two human beings, not just one.

The abortion lobby thinks the case may damage its cause and its relentless efforts to make abortion even easier to obtain. I hope it does damage that cause. I think it is precisely our lax abortion laws which put Carla Foster in the terrible circumstances that led her to panic and then entangled her in an impossible knot of lies. That is why she did something we know she now deeply regrets.

Those laws encourage women (and also irresponsible, selfish men) to think they can behave just as they like, and be rescued from any consequences, by aborting the resulting child.

If they did not think this, I believe they would be more careful in the first place. You cannot blame this sad, hard case on the severity of the law, which is anything but severe. It is important to know that if only Carla Foster had pleaded guilty sooner, her sentence could legally have been suspended and probably would have been. Plainly, she lied because she panicked and her private life was in a dreadful mess and who cannot sympathise with that?

But why was she in this plight in the first place? I believe it is because abortion is too easy, not because it is too difficult.