Terrorist leaders and terrorists all over the world love to spew their vile words to any subject willing to listen and willing to accept their propaganda, and lately the language has been flowing in vicious floods. The use of violent threats to intimidate or coerce others for political purposes is nothing new. Today, all terrorist organizations can and do use the media to obtain and to disseminate critical information. Should we give terrorists the right to our media access?
Bruce Fein, a noted Constitutional scholar, doesn't think so. He does not believe there should be a haven in our free-speech traditions for "hate speech teaching that indiscriminate murders are morally justified to further a crazed religious, racial, ethnic or political cause." However good this may sound, consider the implications of such actions.
However odious the speech, the American Press Institute (January 6, 2005) draws excellent reasons for not banning terrorist speech:
1. From a practical point of view, drafting a law that narrowly targets "terrorist speech " would be a task fraught with futility. Precision and fairness would be elusive.
2. Similar attempts to criminalize hate speech, whether for racial or sexist expression, have been ruled unconstitutional by federal courts.
3. A ban would challenge America's democratic values of freedom from censorship. It would let advocates of violence stampede citizens into a flight from their own principles.
4. Banning speech about hate, after all, would not eliminate hate or violence.
5. There is a real danger in proposing to regulate speech, let alone punish it, based on mere assertions of a connection between speech and violence rather than a certainty.
Instead of a criminalizing terrorist speech, the American Press Institute urges citizens to focus instead on the fact that hate speech exposes the haters for what they are, for their ignorance, their fear, their irrationality and occasionally their intent. Here are some of the latest terrorist threats for your inspection.
Bin Laden's Warnings
A new message to the American people has been issued on an Islamist website in which al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden said, "The U.S. president is "powerless" to stop the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The message was released by As-Sahab, Al-Qaeda's media wing, and distributed to several Jihadist websites. Part of the taped message condemned the United States support of Israel."The time has come for you to liberate yourselves from fear and the ideological terrorism of neo-conservatives and the Israeli lobby," the voice in the tape said. (www.muslimnews.co.uk, September 14 2009)
Bin Laden referred to recent events on the tape: Obama's speech in Cairo, which took place on June 4, and former President Jimmy Carter's visit to Gaza in June. He also condemned the Israeli invasion of Gaza, earlier this year, saying that American bombs were used by Israel during the conflict.
The terror leader said the United States should work towards Iraq's release instead of "fighting for its liberation." If not, President Obama could suffer "the same fate as former President Kennedy and his brother," bin Laden said. In his last known message, in June, he said that U.S. President Barack Obama had planted the seeds of "revenge and hatred" towards the US in the Muslim world.
Ahmadinejad's Warnings
In an Associated Press release (September 18, 2009), Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad lashed out at Israel and the West, "questioning whether the Holocaust ever happened and claiming it was a pretest for occupy Palestinian lands, reiterating anti-Israel rhetoric that has brought him international condemnation." (Fox News, September 18 2009) He said the Jewish state was founded on "a lie and a mythical claim."
U.S. officials denounced the Iranian leader's comments on the Holocaust, which Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, called "hateful." She said President Barack Obama would not meet with Ahmadinejad during next week's gathering of world leaders at the U.N. General Assembly. (Nasser Karimi, Huffington Post, September 18 2009)
Omar's Warnings
Reuters reporter Peter Graff said (September 19, 2009), "Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Omar issued a statement Saturday telling people of the West not to listen to U.S. President Barack Obama's justifications of war and vowing to defeat NATO troops like other invaders of history."
In this statement posted in English on a Taliban website (shahamat.org), Omar said U.S. and British offensives in recent months had been a failure."We have already shown (your failure), and we have stated (this) many times in more than two decades since the start of our disagreement with you, which is caused by your support for the Israelis who are occupying our land of Palestine, and which led us to carry out the events on September 11, 2001," Omar said.
Zahar's, Gandoor's, and Siyam's Warnings
The staff at the Israel Insider (August 13, 2009) reported, "In a show of force, Hamas founders and political leaders appeared Saturday on a stage together for the first time in a decade to tell the Palestinian people that the militant group's armed struggle will go on after Israel's impending withdrawal from the Gaza Strip."
Hamas will continue its armed campaign and will not disarm, according to a senior Hamas leader in Gaza, , ynetnews.com reported. "The Hamas movement won't disband its military wing, won't disarm, and won't hand in its weapons," he said. One leader, Ahmad Gandoor, stated, "Our weapons are holy...even if they kill us."
Ayid Siyam, another leading Hamas figure, said, "Like in Shaaba, we will continue to work to liberate the areas in which the Israelis remain." Siyam continued,“In the course of the celebrations we will not forget that a large part of our land continues to be occupied."
3 comments:
Let them speak. As long as they are running their mouths, the less likely people will forget danger lurks.
Besides, valuable intel can be garnered from these idiots. They aren't as clever as they think.
I agree. Let the idiots spew their hatred and venom. I want people to know exactly what these people think of Americans. So many will just fall asleep if someone doesn't wake them up every now and then.
I've often wondered why, we Americans, are so quick to forget the recent past. It's one thing to not dwell on things but it is something totally different to not learn lessons from our past. It's not just terrorism or wars but politics and almost every other facets of our lives.
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