In his address to the UN General Assembly on Tuesday, President Obama will defend the First Amendment values of the United States in wake of the surging uptick of anti-American protests caused by the anti-Islam video Innocence of Muslims. The remarks contrast starkly with previous White House efforts to distancing itself from the trolling California filmmaker Nakoula Basseley Nakoula and offer a forceful defense of freedom of speech.
The prepared remarks, issued to reporters this morning, state that the recent wave of violent incidents against U.S. embassies abroad "are not simply an assault on America. They are also an assault on the very ideals upon which the United Nations was founded." He rejects the notion that the low-budget anti-Islam YouTube clip justifies violence stating, "There are no words that excuse the killing of innocents. There is no video that justifies an attack on an Embassy. There is no slander that provides an excuse for people to burn a restaurant in Lebanon, or destroy a school in Tunis, or cause death and destruction in Pakistan."
Urging UN member countries to condemn the recent spate of anti-American attacks, he says, "Today, we must affirm that our future will be determined by people like Chris Stevens, and not by his killers. Today, we must declare that this violence and intolerance has no place among our United Nations."
The remarks differ significantly with the message presented in the $70,000 ad blitz the administration ran in Pakistan, in which the president focused exclusively on condemning the film Innocence of Muslims. "We reject all efforts to denigrate religious beliefs of others," Obama said, followed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who added "Let me state very clearly that the United States has absolutely nothing to do with this video. We absolutely reject its contents."
It's welcoming to hear the subtle argument that not everything produced within the borders of free nations is state sanctioned. It's something that seems abundantly obvious in a world where CNN is at blows with the State Department for reporting details from a killed ambassador's journal and a French magazine is publishing images of the Dutchess of Cambridge's breasts, but one that clearly needs to be stated as political opportunists in the Muslim world aim to depict the film as state-supported project.
The president is scheduled to speak at 10:00 a.m. today and we'll stream the video as soon as the speech goes live.
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