The rash of protests across Northern Africa, the Middle, & Far East bring about a monumental clash of Human Rights vs. the right to be offended. The very first Right of the People, Our Founding Fathers chose to enumerate was the Right to Free Speech, including the Right to Freedom of (not from) Religion. The Obama Administration has chosen political correctness over defense of the Right to Free Speech. It has chosen dhimmitude to defense of Americans overseas.
While these protests are NOT about a previously unknown and poorly constructed youtube video, the video has become a rallying cry for Islamism and an excuse for murder and attacks. The basic fact is that the US Government, nor any other government, had anything to do with the video. Not even Google or its subsidiary, YouTube, which hosted the video, had anything to do with the video. Unfortunately, Google did take the video down. I say unfortunately, because it was an act of appeasement and dhimmitude, not because the video was in any way a good thing.
Islamists have a goal of suppressing Speech and the current protests and murders demonstrate that. The call for protests by the Nour Party in Egypt show that the goal is to make it illegal in the entire world to say anything negative about Islam. The Nour Party, which is a more extreme Islamist party than is the Muslim Brotherhood, controls 20% of the Egyptian parliament, which is writing the new Egyptian Constitution. After attacking the US Embassy in Cairo, they raised the black flag of al-Qaeda, on 9/11/2012.
Islamism understands that it cannot convert others to its oppression, by any means other than force. It cannot convert others by use of Free Speech, but rather, only by threat of death. Islamism seeks to kill those that fail to conform to its dictates, hence a 14 year old mentally challenged Pakistani Christian was charged with a Capital crime when it was alleged that she burnt papers on which verses of the Koran were written. She literally faced the death penalty for burning trash.
While I do not defend the video, I do defend the right of the Coptic Egyptian refugees inside the United States to have made it. While I will say the video was poorly made, how can it be an insult to use the actual events written about in the Koran? Mohammed DID marry a pre-teen, while promising his friend, the father of the bride, that he'd wait until she had pubic hair. Mohammed did launch a bloody crusade that converted much of the Middle East by the sword. Mohammed did take multiple wives and did retain the "right" to take the wives of slain enemies as "war booty."
And the Egyptian Coptic Christians have been the subject of murderous attacks from Islamists in Egypt, with a slowly responding Egyptian police force, that seems to arrive after the attacks are over.
As I said previously, in the case of the former Marine thrown in the loony bin for Conspiracy Theory rants on Facebook, it does not matter that I don't like the Speech, it is OUR duty, OUR responsibility, to defend their Right to Free Speech. You have a Right to pray to any god you believe in. You don't have a right to kill others for saying your god isn't "the God."
One hundred years ago, there were virtually no Muslims in America. Today, Muslims come in every ethnicity in America, including the European descendents of those that were Americans in 1776 and those that were Native to America 1000 years ago. Americans have converted to Islam, because OUR Constitution guarantees the God-Given Right to Free Speech.
Conversely, there can be NO Sharia Law in the United States, nor can Dhimmitude be allowed to become a norm. This is not the time for our "leaders" to apologize that refugees of Egypt have exercised their Right to Free Speech. Now is the time for Our Leaders to Defend the Right of Every Human to Free Speech.
At least 10 people have already been killed over a two-bit video that no one would have otherwise watched and Islamists have claimed offense over. The first 4 were Americans. The next 4 were Yemeni protestors. And then came a Lebanese and a Tunisian.
Arab Spring protests were supposedly about "freedom," but you cannot have Freedom if you don't allow Free Speech. If you want Freedom, you must also defend the Right of those you disagree with to voice their opinions, even about those things you find sensitive to you, particularly about those things. And when they do, you can voice your own opinions. But, if you deny the Freedoms of others, then you also curtail your own.
And it is a sad day in America, that the man who presides over the government of this Republic, and is sworn to protect these Freedoms, instead finds the easy path of condemning Freedom, in hopes of appeasing Islamists, rather than defending Our Troops and Diplomats and Citizens' Right to Freedom, from those that would take it from everyone.
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