From Bruce Bawer (author of While Europe Slept, get it at Amazon if you don’t own it yet, a must-read) about the censorship of the vital Human Rights Service in Norway(H/T DhimmiWatch):

February 21, 2008 (2:13 P.M., CET): It is reported today that Imbera, a Norwegian firm that hosts the website of Human Rights Service, removed three items from that site without notice because two of them were illustrated with Kurt Westergaard’s famous Muhammed cartoon from Jyllands-Posten and one was illustrated with a Muhammed drawing by Lars Vilks. Imbera claimed to be acting in accordance with the EU directive on electronic commerce, and law professor Jon Bing says that Imbera had not only a right but a legal obligation to do what it did. But Nils Øy of the Association of Norwegian Editors disagrees, while Per Edgar Kokkvold, head of the Norwegian Press Association, calls Imbera’s action “unacceptable,” noting that if Internet hosting services can do this to HRS they can do it to newspapers, too.

The good news is that HRS has already received an offer from Linpro AS, which hosts Jyllands-Posten, to take over its site for three years free of charge. (”Freedom of speech is important to us,” writes Linpro head Per Andreas Buer.) The bad news is that Imbera’s action is just one more sign of the ongoing erosion of free expression in Europe. As HRS observes today on its site, Norwegians are now living in a “threat culture….The government, bishops, and others don’t see that they have capitulated to this threat culture, but prefer to define it as a dialogue. But where the threats begin, the dialogue stops.”

Go to the HRS website - as you’ll see, it appears that the 3 motoon illustrations are back up, so maybe they’ve already migrated to the Linpro AS server. Linpro deserves a big thumbs up for doing the right thing.

If you’re hosting your website in Europe, know the threat doctrine that the European Union will employ to remove your site - thanks to Bawer for bringing this to everyone’s attention again.