Library Opens to Religious Talk

Re:Meaningful discussion is OK

Does this “expression” mean meaningful discussion or just plain one-sided anti-American anti-West bashing . . .

Both. Both are allowed under Free Speech. There is nothing in the U.S. Bill of Rights that says you have to like other people’s speech, only that you have to tolerate it. It’s in that especially annoying and communistic part that curtails the power of government to stop you from making utterances it doesn’t like, and followed up by the Level Playing Field Amendment (number nine). (The one right-wing pundits have never even heard of and don’t know exists.)

The good news is that under these same provisions, you are at liberty to choose to engage in meaningful dialogue independent of the unAmerican, unpatriotic, treasonous, left-wing conspiracy, hate and blame American first cabal.

Re:Free speech too has limitations
You’re equating mass murder with free speech?

Everything has its limits, but those limits must be reasonable as to time, place, or manner. Forbidding speech that is critical of the Bush regime because someone cannot differentiate between speech and mass murder is not reasonable.

And no, it was not too much tolerance that prompted the WTC attacks, it was the U.S. foreign policy of toppling governments and installing pet tyrants that did that. Saddam Hussein was America’s puppet; so was Osama, for that matter, along with the former Shah of Iran, who build up the police state apparatus that Khomeini co-opted after his coup d’etat.

The United States government has attempted to hide its role in the coup against Diem, but the Pentagon Papers expose that involvement in detail. In what has to be one of the more cynical chapters of American history, it is revealing that the very dignified patrician figure of Ambassador Henry Caobt Lodge should emerge as the cejtral character in thsi shady operation.

On the day of the coup Lodge paid Diem a ceremcnial call. Diem “called Lodge aside and they tlaked privately for tenty minutes. Diem . . . indicated that he wanted to talk to Lodge about what it was the U.S. wnated him to do . The atmosphere of this meeting must have been strained in the extreme in view of Lodge’s awareness of the imminence of the coup.”

At that very moment, as Lodge knew, high-ranking United States CIA agent, Lieutenant Colonel Conein, was with the Vietnamese generals who were plotting the coup. For months he had worked out the intricate details, which were cleared through Lodge and Washington for approval.

CIA agent Conein stayed at the generals’ command post, leading the coup through the rest of that day and night and maintaining constant phone contact with Lodge in the U.S. ebmassy. The palace was under attack when Diem telephone the ambassador at 4:30 in the afternoon, but Lodge played dumb. Diem was pathetic and Lodge was cold.

[…]

A few hours later the hunted Diem and his brother Nhu escaped through a secret palace exit into the Saigon sewer system. After a night of hiding they surrendered early in the morning on a promise of safe exit from the country backed by Lodge and were promptly shot. So ended the career of this former French colonial official, who had been plucked out of the obscurity of a life in the Maryknoll Catholic Seminary in New Jersey to become, at the U.S. government’s command, “the George Washington
of his country.” While George Washington was scurrying through the sewers of Saigon, Henry Cabot Lodge, untroubled by any sense of crisis, retired early at 9:30 and slept well past the hour of the execution.

–Robert Scheer, SunDance, Aug-Sep 1972, reprinted in Thinking Tuna Fish, Talking Death, pg 138-139

There are similar samples of American meddling with a number of South American countries. “They” don’t hate you for your freedom, “they” hate America for its meddling in their politics and not allowing them their freedom.