Free Speech at Risk at UPEI - Letter to the National Post, February 25, 2006

http://www.canada.com/components/print.aspx?id=7405040a-ad1d-4052-9199-92ec299c6961

I found it difficult to believe that the president of a Canadian university would come out so strongly against freedom of the press -- or as Wade MacLauchlan refers to it, "reckless free speech." What I found most offensive, however, was the way he tried to defend himself by using the statement of a P.E.I. Muslim woman that the hurt caused by the cartoons was "as if I had been raped out on the street while the people surrounding me watched."

I'm sure that the woman in question said this in all sincerity even though, according to press reports, she has never seen the cartoons. For someone like Mr. MacLauchlan, however, to endorse the claim that 12 cartoons are equivalent to a public rape is unconscionable.

Steve Lupker