U.S. won’t bow to terrorists over ‘free speech’

In case we’re overlooking it, Lebanon’s officials (and almost all Arab media) are attacking the U.S. Congress’s new law that “scrambles” news broadcasts from terrorist networks. It’s all over their media, in many countries. They say America is only for “free speech” as long as it’s America’s view.

That’s not true, and I’m sure our State Department will put it straight. We are for free speech, but we’re not for terrorists’ broadcasts of how to teach people to behead others. Identifying specific Americans to kill, and then giving out times and places of escape routes after the assassination, or beheading, is not free speech. Arab media inaccurately describes Congress’s law on scrambling terrorists’ broadcasts. We should explain our proper and correct reasoning for the law, and the need to stop terrorists’ broadcasts.  Surely all of us can get behind opposition to jihadist beheading training lessons broadcast in the media.

Osama bin Laden’s recent “free speech” on the Internet on global warming shows his ideas are pitifully uninformed, and motivated only by hatred of the U.S. His five-point plan to stop buying American products as a solution to global warming is senseless. He would be have been laughed out of Copenhagen global warming talks involving all the countries of the world.

He ignores the overwhelming problem of 775 new coal plants planned to open in China and India in the next 12 years. (The U.S. will only have 1/10th that amount). Acid rain from existing coal plants in Asia already is causing acid rain in our forests of Western U.S. states, since emissions drift on the wind. The new coals plants will overwhelm any other attempts to reduce CO2 emissions.

We should welcome the “free speech” of bin Laden to show, as our First Amendment shows, the value of open discussion in the “marketplace of ideas.” Bin Laden certainly loses in his argument that not buying American products is an answer to global warming, and it shows his only argument is hate-based. Welcome to the marketplace of ideas; let’s keep him in it since he’s making a fool of himself (if he must stay alive).

Anita Hartke | Amissville