Liptak's Idiocy on Free Speech

Anyone who thinks the New York Times is liberal should read Adam Liptak's offensively stupid column in today's paper. Liptak laughs about the virtue of banning left-wing writers from the country, thus "avoiding face-to-face encounters with shaggy leftists — the cigarette smoke, for starters, and the jargon, and the complacent moral superiority." Ah yes, there's nothing quite so hilarious as government repression of dissent.

Liptak discusses two important cases, the ban of Tariq Ramadan from the US (for donating to a French charity later declared to be terrorist-linked by the Bush Administration), and the government's attempt to ban transmission of the Hezbollah news station, Al Manar. Liptak concludes, "The question before the judges considering the two cases is thus a difficult one. What role should the First Amendment play when foreigners are doing the talking and the topic may be terror?" Difficult? This is one of the easiest cases in the world. The First Amendment plays the same role for foreigners as US citizens. It restricts government repression, and it doesn't selectively protect free speech. And talking about terror has nothing to do with the Ramadan case. If anything like this had happened to American citizens, even conservatives and journalists would be outraged by it. But the suppression of foreigners is somehow acceptable in the polite society of the New York Times.