free speech anyone? for everyone??

Freedom of Expression!  Free speech !. Censorhip of Art !  They are all over the news, And  they are  all in free fall  these days. One man's freedom becomes another man's free fall doom. The tip of my nose is not the beginning of  my freedom, as it was supposed to be .  And the issue is complicated. Everywhere. For everyone. Politically so. 

What follows  is just an example of the complexity of  Freedom.   

Recall the so-called "request" in December 2010 from Joe Lieberman, made in his capacity as chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, that private corporations such as Amazon, Visa, MasterCard and others cut off all services to WikiLeaks, including hosting its website and allowing payments to the group. Those corporations instantly complied – how many American companies will continue with behavior which a leading senator announces is harming US national security? – 

But the US and its western allies have, in the name of combating terrorism, engaged in free speech assaults aimed primarily at Muslims far more dangerous than any of those examples. And with very few exceptions, these same right-wing free speech champions have remained utterly silent, except when cheering it all on.

Last September, the justice department arrested and indicted Jubair Ahmad, a 24-year-old Pakistani legal resident living in Virginia and charged with "providing material support" to a designated terrorist organization (Lashkar-e-Tayyiba (LeT)). His alleged crime? As I wrotewhen the indictment was announced:

He produced and uploaded a 5-minute video to YouTube featuring photographs of U.S. abuses in Abu Ghraib, video of armored trucks exploding after being hit by IEDs, prayer messages about 'jihad' from LeT's leader, and – according to the FBI's Affidavit – 'a number of terrorist logos.' That, in turn, led the FBI agent who signed the affidavit to assert that 'based on [his] training and experience, it is evident that the video … is designed as propaganda to develop support for LeT and to recruit jihadists to LeT.' The FBI also claims Ahmad spoke with the son of an LeT leader about the contents of the video and had attended an LeT camp when he was a teenager in Pakistan. For the act of uploading that single YouTube video (and for denying that he did so when asked by the FBI agents who came to his home to interrogate him), he faces 23 years in prison.

Such blatant assaults on the free speech rights of Muslims in the US, and in the west generally, are common. In 2009, a Pakistani man in New York was sentenced to almost six years in federal prison for the "crime" of including a Hezbollah news channel in the cable package he offered for sale to television viewers in Brooklyn. Just this month, a British Muslim teenager, Azhar Ahmed, was convicted of the "crime" of posting a Facebook message which said: "all soldiers should die and go to hell." There is even ample evidence that the US government targeted its own citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, for assassination without due process not based on unproven claims that he was engaged in plotting terror attacks (a claim the government made only long after it was disclosed that they were trying to kill him), but rather due to its dislike of his political and religious sermons against the US which became quite popular among Muslim youth on YouTube.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/16/conservatives-democrats-free-speech-muslims

Let’s be very clear about the key point: the Constitution — specifically the Free Speech clause of the First Amendment — prohibits the U.S. Government from punishing someone for the political views they express, even if those views include the advocacy of violence against the U.S. and its leaders.  One can dislike this legal fact.  One can wish it were different.  But it is the clear and unambiguous law, and has been since the Supreme Court’s unanimous 1969 decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio, which overturned the criminal conviction of a Ku Klux Klan leader who had publicly threatened violence against political officials in a speech.

In doing so, the Brandenberg Court struck down as unconstitutional an Ohio statute (under which the KKK leader was prosecuted) that made it a crime to “advocate . . . the duty, necessity, or propriety of crime, sabotage, violence, or unlawful methods of terrorism as a means of accomplishing industrial or political reform.”  Such advocacy — please read the part in bold — cannot be a crime because it is protected by the First Amendment.  The crux of the Court’s holding: ”the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force“ (emphasis added; for more on the First Amendment law protecting this right to advocate violence, see mydiscussion here).

Perhaps the most extreme example of this trend is the fact that a Pakistani man in New York was prosecuted and then sentenced to almost six years in prison for doing nothing more than including a Hezbollah news channel in the package of cable channels he offered for sale to consumers in Brooklyn.  On some perverse level, though, all of these individuals are lucky that they are being merely prosecuted rather than targeted with due-process-free assassination.  

http://www.salon.com/2011/09/04/speech_23//