Michael Savage banned in Britain
May 5, 2009:Â Talk radio host Michael Savage considered legal action against Britain’s top homeland security official after she released a list grouping him with terrorists and neo-Nazi murderers banned from entry because the government believed their views might provoke violence.
In a telephone interview with WND, Savage noted Britain has very strict anti-defamation laws.
Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said she decided to publicize the list of 16 people banned since October 2008 to show the type of behavior Britain will not tolerate, according to U.K. news reports.
Savage’s immediate reaction upon hearing the news was typically wry.
“Darn! And I was just planning a trip to England for their superior dental work and cuisine,” he recalled thinking.
“Then it sank in,” he told WND, “and I said, ‘She said this is the kind of behavior we won’t tolerate? She’s linking me with mass murderers who are in prison for killing Jewish children on buses? For my speech? The country where the Magna Carta was created?'”
Smith explained to Britain’s GMTV that she believed it was “important that people understand the sorts of values and sorts of standards that we have here, the fact that it’s a privilege to come and the sort of things that mean you won’t be welcome in this country.”
“Coming to this country is a privilege,” she said. “If you can’t live by the rules that we live by, the standards and the values that we live by, we should exclude you from this country and, what’s more, now we will make public those people that we have excluded.”
Savage said the last time he was in Britain was decades ago, and he had no immediate plans to return.
In an interview with the BBC, Smith said Savage, the No. 3-rated radio host in the U.S., is “someone who has fallen into the category of fomenting hatred, of such extreme views and expressing them in such a way that it is actually likely to cause inter-community tension or even violence if that person were allowed into the country.”
Savage said his message for Smith and the people of the U.K. was, “Shame on you. Shame that you’ve fallen to such a low level.”
“It’s interesting to me that here I am a talk show host, who does not advocate violence, who advocates patriotic traditional values – borders, language, culture – who is now on a list banned in England,” Savage said. “What does that say about the government of England? It says more about them than it says about me.”
Our soldiers do die
May 5, 2005:Â On this day, WND reported the sad news of the death of an American hero, retired Army Col. David Hackworth.
One of the most decorated veterans in U.S. history, Hackworth had been a vocal advocate for military reform in the years since he returned from Vietnam.
He had written a weekly column for WND for seven years before succumbing to bladder cancer.
“Hack never lost his focus,” said Roger Charles, president of Soldiers for the Truth, a California-based veterans group for which Hackworth served as chairman. “That focus was on the young kids that our country sends to bleed and die on our behalf. Everything he did in his retirement was to try to give them a better chance to win and to come home. That’s one hell of a legacy.”
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