Free Speech Necessary for Non-Violence

"The principle of free speech is not concerned with the content of a man's speech and does not protect only the expression of good ideas, but all ideas. If it were otherwise, who would determine which ideas are good and where forbidden? The government?"
"Once a country accepts censorship of the press and of speech, then nothing can be won without violence. Therefore, so long as you have free speech, protect it. This is the life-and-death issue in this country: do not give up the freedom of the press -- of newspapers, books, magazines, radio, movies, and other forms of presenting ideas. So long as that's free, a peaceful intellectual turn is possible." Ayn Rand

The Bush Knesset Speech

Seth Coulter Welles, HuffPost

According to 29-year CIA veteran and former NSC official Bruce Riedel, Wednesday's announcement of joint peace negotiations between Israel and Syria revealed President Bush's diminished standing in Middle East affairs.

"Think of the irony," Riedel said. "George Bush goes to Jerusalem last week. He gives an impassioned speech about never dealing with nasty regimes [that sponsor terror]. He basically says 'don't make agreements that appease [them].' And less than a week later, the Israeli government announces it is engaged in peace negotiations with the Assad dictatorship in Syria. We're talking about a rather distasteful regime that likely had a hand in the murder of [former Lebanese Prime Minister] Rafik Hariri. I guess [Israeli Prime Minister] Ehud Olmert didn't think the speech was meant for him."

Riedel, who served as a special assistant to the president until 2002 and is now with the Brookings Institution, said the lack of weight accorded to Bush's appeasement speech "shows more and more that the Middle East is not listening to him anymore, as does the deal announced in Doha for Lebanon today." In that Doha agreement, the Iranian-supported Hezbollah secured effective veto power within Lebanon's next cabinet -- an arrangement that is sure to frustrate any future efforts to disarm the political party that the U.S. considers a terrorist organization.

Turkey's mediation of Israel-Syria talks has been "an open secret" in the region for the last month, according to Riedel. "A lot of very serious Israeli thinkers have felt for some time that the Syria agreement could be a strategic way to break out of the logjam that Israel is in," he said. "There's no holy Jerusalem to contend with, no refugees. It's a simple land for peace swap, and everyone knows what the price is: 100 percent return of the Golan Heights, in return for which they would get a full agreement with Syria. ... If this works, it would demonstrate that negotiating with Assad's Syria can produce serious and important results for a democracy like Israel."

But not all observers are that optimistic. Independent analyst and Israeli political adviser Dahlia Scheindlin cites a recent report by the War and Peace Index that suggests Israelis are more willing to consider a compromise over certain areas in Jerusalem than they are likely to approve of any deal with Syria that involves relinquishing the Golan.

According to that study, only 19 percent of Israelis support the idea of giving up the Golan, while 40 percent are willing to consider giving up Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem. "It's sort of counter-intuitive and surprising," Scheindlin said, "you wouldn't think it would be quite so emotional. But the Golan has been annexed for so long, it now feels like part of Israel. The people who live there are considered regular Israelis, not settlers. Also, they've been through this many times before. Talks start and end faster than you can say 'jackrabbit.' So there's a lot of cynicism. While this story is leading the news today, it could easily be gone tomorrow."

Where the Perfection Begins

The End of the Obama Speech Yesterday

The speech is very good, but you may have missed the ending.

“There is one story in particularly that I’d like to leave you with today – a story I told when I had the great honor of speaking on Dr. King’s birthday at his home church, Ebenezer Baptist, in Atlanta.

There is a young, twenty-three year old white woman named Ashley Baia who organized for our campaign in Florence, South Carolina. She had been working to organize a mostly African-American community since the beginning of this campaign, and one day she was at a roundtable discussion where everyone went around telling their story and why they were there.

And Ashley said that when she was nine years old, her mother got cancer. And because she had to miss days of work, she was let go and lost her health care. They had to file for bankruptcy, and that’s when Ashley decided that she had to do something to help her mom.

She knew that food was one of their most expensive costs, and so Ashley convinced her mother that what she really liked and really wanted to eat more than anything else was mustard and relish sandwiches. Because that was the cheapest way to eat.

She did this for a year until her mom got better, and she told everyone at the roundtable that the reason she joined our campaign was so that she could help the millions of other children in the country who want and need to help their parents too.

Now Ashley might have made a different choice. Perhaps somebody told her along the way that the source of her mother’s problems were blacks who were on welfare and too lazy to work, or Hispanics who were coming into the country illegally. But she didn’t. She sought out allies in her fight against injustice.

Anyway, Ashley finishes her story and then goes around the room and asks everyone else why they’re supporting the campaign. They all have different stories and reasons. Many bring up a specific issue. And finally they come to this elderly black man who’s been sitting there quietly the entire time. And Ashley asks him why he’s there. And he does not bring up a specific issue. He does not say health care or the economy. He does not say education or the war. He does not say that he was there because of Barack Obama. He simply says to everyone in the room, “I am here because of Ashley.”

“I’m here because of Ashley.” By itself, that single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is not enough. It is not enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children.

But it is where we start. It is where our union grows stronger. And as so many generations have come to realize over the course of the two-hundred and twenty one years since a band of patriots signed that document in Philadelphia, that is where the perfection begins.”