With Muslim attacks on US embassies spreading to more than a dozen countries, the Obama administration handed Islamist fascism a major victory yesterday, calling on YouTube to “review” an anti-Islam video it insists was solely responsible for the violence — and thoroughly trashing the First Amendment in the process.
Specifically, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said the Obama administration asked YouTube to see if the video “is in compliance with their terms of use.”
But the company publicly announced Wednesday that the film — which mocks the prophet Mohammed — “is clearly within our guidelines and so will stay on YouTube.”
So how else to take the White House “request” as anything other than an unsubtle threat to YouTube and its parent company, Google: Think again, folks. Federal regulators could soon be a big part of your corporate lives.
This isn’t to say that the video isn’t playing a major role in the violence. It is, and Google had already blocked it in Egypt and Libya when Carney spoke.
Nor is the First Amendment absolute. One can’t falsely shout fire in that proverbial crowded theater, after all.
Then again, there is reason to believe that the video protests are a red herring, anyway — meant to cover anti-US violence timed to the anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks.
But, in the end, none of that matters.
What the White House did yesterday was not only to big-foot the First Amendment, but to grant moral authority to howling foreign mobs seeking to silence domestic political discourse.
Never mind that the video is errant nonsense — so is a disturbingly high percentage of all Internet content.
Now the nihilists know that all they have to do to enlist the Obama administration’s censors to their side is to kill American diplomats; Jay Carney will do the rest.
It’s the heckler’s veto deployed on an international scale.
Too bad the White House wasn’t paying attention Thursday, when Secretary of state Hillary Clinton declared:
“It is hard for some people to understand why the United States cannot or does not prevent these kinds of reprehensible videos from seeing the light of day.
“Even if it were possible, our country does have a long tradition of free expression which is enshrined in our Constitution and our law,” she added, “and we do not stop individual citizens from expressing their views.”
Well, that was Thursday.
Yesterday, the Islamist hecklers were in the driver’s seat.
For them, there will always be another video, another book, another speech they find “offensive.”
For America, the price of liberty is eternal resistance.