Why Americans Should Worry About One Filmmaker With Baggage

by Albert Milliron | October 4, 2012 at 11:06 am

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By Kevin Williams – Guest Op-Ed

A few weeks ago, we all learned about the terrible attacks upon our Embassy in Cairo, Egypt and our Consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Our Ambassador Christopher Stevens, a good man by all accounts, and Sean Smith, Tyrone S. Woods and Glen A. Doherty were murdered in Benghazi by Islamist extremists led by an Al Qaeda member released from Gitmo (Prisoner #557). As bad as these events were, what was almost as bad was and is the Obama Administration’s lack of focus on the real threat involved. Instead, they responded to these incidents by blaming them on an obscure, poorly-made film called The Innocence of Muslims. Actually, it was just a fourteen-minute film trailer, but that isn’t the point.

From jump, the scape-goating of this YouTube film trailer and its filmmaker for the murder of our Ambassador and his staff (as well as nearly twenty other riots in Europe and the Middle East) doesn’t pass the “scratch and sniff” test. As a matter of fact, it doesn’t pass the “Remember the Maine” or “Gulf of Tonkin” tests either. It has become obvious that Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, President Barack Obama, U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice and their many surrogates and spokesmen needed and spun a cover story and reason for Benghazi, et al. I’d bet that most Americans didn’t expect our current Administration to trade away our very “American” concept called Freedom of Speech in exchange for some political and election year “C.Y.A.”

Freedom of Speech is protected in the First Amendment to our U.S. Constitution (ratified December 15, 1791):

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
The above words guarantee that short of endangering others by shouting “fire” in a theater… we can and should say what we want to as best we can. It is why every American is able to say what the heck we want to, either verbally, written or through an art medium without repercussion by law enforcement officials or any suppressor. Even though the decades-long war on Free Speech by many on the Left has succeeded on many levels due to the Mainstream Media’s enforcement ability, we as a people still have the right to say what we feel or think at any moment. Little movies like Innocence of Muslims have a right to be made and be seen, just as much bigger films in the past like Citizen Kane (1941), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), and Last Tango of Paris (1972) faced censorship and banning issues. These films were still seen by the People and their respective filmmakers, Orson Welles, Martin Scorsese and Bernardo Bertolucci all went on to make more films and had fruitful careers and lives.

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