FREEDOM IS IN JEOPARDY
“To us, to me personally, this video is disgusting and reprehensible,” she continued. “It appears to have a deeply cynical purpose — to denigrate a great religion and to provoke rage.” — Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
This overt expression of empathy for the rioters strengthens there cause, it is fanning the flames.
The Libyan ambassador to the U.S. called the movie's producer "a terrorist like anyone else."
The U.S. Embassy in Cairo issued a statement saying that it “condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims—as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions.” The statement added: “We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others.”
The White House asked Google to review the video, obviously attempting to pressure them into removing it. They repeatedly blamed the video, the rioting was a “response not to United States policy, and not obviously the administration or the American people,” but were “in response to a video, a film we have judged to be reprehensible and disgusting.”
So censorship of free speech is the U. S. government solution to the problem. Let's investigate and prosecute the offending film maker, and throw him in jail as a hate monger, a reprehensible denigrator of a "great religion."
Pope Benedict XVI, former head of what was called previously the office of the Inquisition, is quoted as saying: "Religious fundamentalism seeks to take power for political ends, at times using violence, over the individual conscience and over religion," the Pope said. "All religious leaders in the Middle East endeavor, by their example and their teaching, to do everything possible to uproot this threat, which indiscriminately and fatally affects believers." — BBC (see ECCLESIA IN MEDIO ORIENTE, #30)
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said: "Freedoms of expression should be and must be guaranteed and protected, when they are used for common justice, common purpose," Ban told a news conference. "When some people use this freedom of expression to provoke or humiliate some others' values and beliefs, then this cannot be protected in such a way." "My position is that freedom of expression, while it is a fundamental right and privilege, should not be abused by such people, by such a disgraceful and shameful act," he said.
The constitutional right of free speech in the United States has every appearance of being in serious jeopardy, even from high officials in the U.S. government. Incredibly, the U.S. Government even paid Pakistani TV to broadcast this pathetically lame clip in which President Obama "rejects all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others" and Hillary Clinton states "America's commitment to religious tolerance goes back to the very beginning of our nation." That is nauseating. Shame on them. It is entirely irrelevant what Obama or Clinton think about the movie in question, in the United States it is lawfully and constitutionally protected by freedom of speech. WE DO NOT TOLERATE THE RELIGION OF OTHERS, WE GUARANTEE THEIR RIGHT TO BELIEVE AND PRACTICE THEIR RELIGION WITHOUT GOVERNMENTAL INTERFERENCE.
"The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam. Yet to be credible, those who condemn that slander must also condemn the hate we see when the image of Jesus Christ is desecrated, churches are destroyed, or the Holocaust is denied. Let us condemn incitement against Sufi Muslims, and Shiite pilgrims." — Obama's speech Sept 25, 2012 to the U.N.
It is not the right or responsibility of the U. S. civil government to enforce the blasphemy laws of any religion.
The U.S. was founded largely by religious dissenters who sought freedom of religion and freedom of speech, fleeing the persecutions of the Roman Catholic Church. These Protestants broke away from what they knew to be an apostate, corrupt state church, the biblically prophesied harlot church ruled by the antichrist papal dynasty. Protestantism was not attempting to be hurtful regarding Catholics in preaching and teaching the errors and corruptions of Catholicism, it was simply stating what it knew to be the truths of the Bible. The Protestant's free speech right was and is not subject to the potential "hurt feelings" of the Catholic, no matter how humiliated or offended the Catholic might be. The Protestant had a protected right to believe, preach, and print whatever he wanted regarding Catholicism.
Today however, there is a disturbing trend developing that freedom of speech has a boundary, a line, that is drawn and determined by whoever is offended by what is said, that the limits of free speech are somehow exceeded whenever someone does not like it, or finds it denigrating or hateful, and that when that line is crossed, it should be subject to criminal prosecution as "hate speech." In May of 2007, the Vatican's L'Osservatore Romano accused an Italian comedian of terrorism simply because he had criticized the Pope and Catholicism publicly. That response is what appears to be developing in the U.S., and should that happen, freedom of religion and freedom of speech will be history, a thing of the past, the constitution will be a worthless piece of paper.
We should be defending our freedom of speech and religion, not appeasing lawless mobs bent on violence murder and intimidation.