Who's Defending Free Speech?

Michael Kinsley says:

The shameful American position on all this is boilerplate endorsement of free expression combined with denunciation of the cartoons as an "unacceptable" insult. When three protesters died this week in a confrontation at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan, an American spokesman there said that Afghans "should judge us on what we're doing here, not on what some cartoonist is doing somewhere else." But the limits of free expression cannot be set by the sensitivities of people who don't believe in it. How can President Bush continue to ask young Americans to sacrifice their lives for freedom in the Muslim world, if he won't even defend freedom verbally when forces from that world are suppressing it in our own?

Defending free speech isn't for everyone.