Certainly I am all for free speech. But has America so defined or redefined free speech that in includes things that were never intended to be allowed? Arguably yes. Public vulgarity would never have been intended to be allowed. They call it free speech today but it used to be called poor manners and being rude to women and children. Pornography used to be plain indecency and vile. Today it is a free speech issue. So what about allowing people to use free speech to undermine the culture in the middle of a war?
Here’s part of what I said: “Either before we lose a city, or, if we are truly stupid, after we lose a city, we will adopt rules of engagement that use every technology we can find to break up [terrorists'] capacity to use the Internet, to break up their capacity to use free speech [protections] and to go after people who want to kill us — to stop them from recruiting people before they get to reach out and convince young people to destroy their lives while destroying us.” Click to listen.
Is the cover of Free Speech acceptable cover for those actively recruiting those in our country so that they might kill us?
Since I made those remarks, I’ve heard from many, many Americans who understand the seriousness of the threat that faces us, Americans who believe as I do that free speech should not be an acceptable cover for people who are planning to kill other people who have inalienable rights of their own.
A small number of others have been quick to demagogue my remarks. Missing from the debate? Any reference to the very real threats that face Americans.
There was no mention of last week’s letter from Iranian leader Ahmadinejad that threatens to kill Americans in large numbers if we don’t submit to his demands.
There has been little attention drawn to any of the many websites dedicated to training and recruiting terrorists, including a recent one that promises to train terrorists “to use the Internet for the sake of jihad.”
No mention of efforts by terrorist groups like Hezbollah to build “franchises” among leftist, anti-globalization groups worldwide, especially in Latin America.
Newt proposes at least these three things.
- We should be allowed to close down websites that recruit suicide bombers and provide instructions to indiscriminately kill civilians by suicide or other means, or advocate killing people from the West or the destruction of Western civilization;
- We should propose a Geneva-like convention for fighting terrorism that makes very clear that those who would fight outside the rules of law, those who would use weapons of mass destruction and those who would target civilians are in fact subject to a totally different set of rules that allow us to protect civilization by defeating barbarism before it gains so much strength that it is truly horrendous. A subset of this convention should define the international rules of engagement on what activities will not be protected by free speech claims; and
- We need an expeditious review of current domestic law to see what changes can be made within the protections of the 1st Amendment to ensure that free speech protection claims are not used to protect the advocacy of terrorism, violent conduct or the killing of innocents.
Whether you agree or not it isn’t too hard to understand that just because someone calls it free speech doesn’t mean it is. Why honor evil just because it garners the cloak of freedom?
