Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Irrepressible?

Would a quote from The Brussels Journal make a chance to appear on Amnesty International's irrepressible.info website one day?

Readers of The Brussels Journal already know that the Belgian government has been harassing Paul Beliën for quite a while now, first in a rather 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 would succeed one day, it would be interesting to see if Amnesty International would take 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, maybe the correct question should rather be whether perhaps The Brussels Journal already qualifies for this as things stand right now. Anyway, something says me this is not going to happen: I'm quite confident that the local Belgian chapter of AI, well being a part of the establishment in Belgium, would make sure that the campaign headquarters would be «properly informed» in order to avoid a mishap. Just imagine…