Stop Apologizing for Our Liberties

You cannot apologize to a fanatic. It only serves to convince him that he was right all along, and that is the last course the United States should be pursuing at this critical juncture of world history.

The last few weeks have witnessed a peculiar and disturbing spectacle: An American administration that has spent a great deal of time and energy apologizing for our liberties—in particular, for what many would regard as the foundation of all our other liberties, namely, the freedom to express our minds as we see fit. This signature freedom, of which Americans were once so boastful, has clearly become a source of befuddled embarrassment to the current administration and many of its liberal supporters. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the speech President Obama delivered before the UN Assembly yesterday. The president was bold and strong in making clear that there can be no excuse for the riots that have swept the Muslim world, but he was weak in his defense of our most fundamental freedom. The president came across as if he regarded the right to free speech as a bothersome and irritating nuisance that Americans put up with solely because it’s one of our quaint and bizarre local traditions, instead of celebrating it as a moral lesson to mankind and a blessing bequeathed to us by our ancestors.  It did not seem to bother Obama in the least that he was apologizing to the world for the First Amendment, and that is very troubling.
Unfortunately, the president is not alone in his mixed feelings about the First Amendment in our post-Arab Spring era. Many of the same liberals who have always pushed the First Amendment as far as they possibly could have suddenly decided that it has been pushed a bit too far. Some of them seem to regret that the First Amendment to the Constitution left out a clause prohibiting insults to Islam and its prophet Mohammed. Of course, the Founding Fathers couldn’t think of everything, and it is hard to blame them for failing to foresee, more than two centuries in advance, just how useful such a prohibition would be in dealing with the Muslim cultural revolution known as the Arab Spring. For let there be no doubt about it, what is currently standing in the path of peaceful coexistence between the United States and the Muslim world is not the state of Israel, much less the producers of the film, Innocence of Muslims—no, it is that troublesome First Amendment. That is what is really fanning the flames of fanaticism, and nothing else—a moral utterly lost to the current administration in its misguided efforts to appease Muslim fury by pursuing a policy of abject apologetics.

Read more: http://www.american.com/archive/2012/september/stop-apologizing-for-our-liberties