Among the platitudes spoken by President Obama at the UN today was this perfectly correct assertion:
“Given the power of faith in our lives, and the passion that religious differences can inflame, the strongest weapon against hateful speech is not repression, it is more speech,” Obama said.
But if our president actually believed that hateful speech is best confronted with more speech, why was the full force of the US government used to pressure a private company — YouTube — to remove a privately- produced video clip of a movie called “Innocence of Muslims”?
And if our First Amendment rights to free speech were such a value to Obama, why was the man allegedly responsible for the movie made to walk a media gauntlet and subjected to intense questions by federal law enforcement authorities, as if he’d committed some heinous crime?
Obama also said this: “the notion that we can control the flow of information is obsolete.”
He had just a paragraph earlier proclaimed the value of greater speech so where is the logic in arguing over the impotence of bans?
Finally, there was this bit of real propaganda: “Attacking an Embassy won’t create a single job,” Obama declared.
Terrorism is not economic. It is not about poor people wanting a better standard of living. Terrorism is ideology by means of violence. In this case, it is pro-Shariah, pro-Jihad ideology in the form of mortars and murder.
President Obama is propagating a debunked myth that third-world people’s are violent because they want to be first-world wealthy and that if they could only have hi-def TV and iPhones that all would be well.
Obama should know better so he is either cynical for propagating this falsehood or ignorant.
Both options are tragic.