Excerpt:
Only a week after being praised by the Obama Administration for his supposed helpfulness in ending the fighting in Gaza between Palestinian Hamas terrorists and Israel, Muslim Brotherhood (MB) Member and Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi apparently decided to cash in his praise "chips" early. Most prominently, President Morsi made himself immune from the Egyptian Supreme Constitutional Court's oversight, thereby essentially assuming dictatorial powers over his nation. Less prominently, one of his appointed judges convicted eight persons, including seven Americans, for their "blasphemy" towards Islam. Included in this group were well-known Florida Pastor Terry Jones, who has burned several Korans in the United States, and Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, one of the people behind the controversial American film "Innocence of Muslims." So far, the Obama Administration has lodged no complaints (and here) with the Egyptian regime over either action.
It should be shocking to the Obama Administration, and Americans, that a foreign nation can sentence our citizens to death for the "crime" of free speech. Free speech, and the First Amendment, is supposed to be sacrosanct in the US. Our Founding Fathers were certainly very supportive of it. President George Washington said, "If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter." Benjamin Franklin understood that, "(i)n those wretched countries where a man cannot call his tongue his own, he can scarce call anything his own. Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech." And prominent Supreme Court Justices have continued to praise free speech over the years. Justice William O. Douglas stated, "Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us." Justice Louis Brandeis believed, "Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burned women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fear."