A Reminder of Rights We Take for Granted

We Americans sometimes take for granted even our most cherished freedoms, forgetting that people in much of the rest of the world do not enjoy such basic rights as freedom of speech.

Consider two events that made headlines this past week as the United States was inaugurating into office President Barack Obama, our new chief defender of freedoms.

Harry Nicolaides, an Australian working in Thailand, was sentenced to three years in prison for insulting the Thai monarchy in a novel he wrote. Now, this was not exactly Salman Rushdie's international best-seller, "The Satanic Verses," which prompted Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to issue a fatwa calling for Rushdie to be killed. Nicolaides' work was a self-published paperback that to date has sold exactly 10 copies.

The case against Nicolaides was brought under a Thai law that calls for prison terms of up to 15 years for anyone who "defames, insults or threatens" members of the royal family.

Nicolaides was originally sentenced to six years, but that was cut in half when he agreed to plead guilty. He said he has endured "unspeakable suffering" in his five months of imprisonment so far.

The second incident came at the instant Obama uttered these words in his inaugural address: "Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not just with missiles and tanks, but with sturdy alliances and enduring convictions." As soon as he got to the word "communism," the censors at the state-run China Central Television could take no more. They cut away from the speech and went to an anchor interviewing an analyst.

Chinese translations of Obama's speech published by state-run news organizations censored the line about communism and another Obama passage about "those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent."

These are indeed precious things, our freedoms.

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