BEIRUT — I’ve always been a fan of free speech. I rarely mod­er­ate com­ments, except for spam, and I’ve banned very few peo­ple. Only once was I raised to rage when a com­menter made my mother cry by call­ing for my death at the hands of Marines because I was allegedly too friendly to the insur­gents. He also, weirdly, thought I was a Sunni Arab who was born in Iraq and had immi­grated to the U.S. for the pur­poses of … well, I’m not sure. He was mad. I banned him, mainly on the basis that my embrace of per­sonal expres­sion stops when you make my mom cry.
So I have a lot of patience for rol­lick­ing debate. But that’s not what has hap­pened here. Recent com­ments have been vile, venge­ful and more than a lit­tle dis­turb­ing — and all of them have come from peo­ple who allegedly want peace and are anti­war. Che_Guerilla has called for me to be beheaded on the Inter­net; da_ali_truth_show says: “I’ll fight you. Please come back to the States I’ll fuck­ing smash that smug ‘objec­tive’ bull­shit through your stu­pid face. Bring friends you pussy. Your Time Warner cor­po­rate Black­wa­ter mer­ce­nar­ies won’t be pro­tect­ing you from me, dick­head.” (We’ve never employed Black­wa­ter mer­ce­nar­ies, for the record. Our secu­rity staff is made up of Iraqis who have proven them­selves truly loyal and good friends in the face of ter­ri­ble risk to them­selves.)
Any­way, what I’m get­ting at is that *you will no longer be allowed to com­ment unless you’ve reg­is­tered with Type­Key.* I tried this once before and it really cut down on the peo­ple leav­ing com­ments. I didn’t like it. But I feel the bar­rage of threats of death and vio­lence against me and my fam­ily is too much. No one should have to put up with that. I’ve had friends die and be kid­napped; I’ve been shot at by all sides in this con­flict. I frankly don’t need juve­nile rant­ing clut­ter­ing my site and intrud­ing on my thoughts. You folks who do this are fin­ished. (Which is what _khaalas_ means: “enough, fin­ished, ended, done.”) It should also cut down on com­ment spam which is still a scourge that is dif­fi­cult to com­bat.
So, to my reg­u­lar read­ers and com­menters, such as Trish and Niall, who have left thought­ful notes through the years, I’m sorry for this step and grate­ful to you all. I hope you stick around. You guys are always wel­come. For the che_guerillas of the world, go to hell. You care for noth­ing more than scor­ing cheap points off dead bod­ies of Iraqis and Amer­i­cans. You’re just as bad as the _National Review_ crowd who say “2,000 deaths is noth­ing when you look at how many died in World War II.” You deserve noth­ing but con­tempt and you under­mine the very anti­war cause you claim to support.