Just so we’re clear, that was a rhetorical question. Of course it is. Why would I say that you may ask.
Well, for starters, if you are a student of current events, you have undisputable, and perpetually recurring evidence that speech is only free to those who agree with that speech.
The underlying premise of free speech, as it appears to be viewed by the leading lights and opinion makers of the day is, “If I agree with it, it’s all good. If it discomforts me, it’s racist, or discriminatory, or defamatory, or hate speech, or antisemitic, or…you fill in the blank.
Campuses across America today are roiled, in part because Jews, and supporters of Jews believe and argue they are being persecuted, while Palestinians, and supporters of Palestinians believe the Israeli Prime Minister is fostering a proxy war aimed at annihilating Palestinians in the region.
In the Middle East, far more than rhetoric has infected the discourse, and threatens the co-existence of two peoples, locked in a finite, and incredibly small land area. In the United States, the discord is still largely an increasing explosion of rhetoric, speech that both sides find unacceptable to their ears, when emanating from the other side. In their respective opinions, the speech of the other side should not be free…because ostensibly, the speech is a precursor for indecent acts, such as the October 7th attack, murder, and hostage-taking on Israelis by Hamas, or the subsequent slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians, a majority of whom have been women and children, carried out by Israelis, intent upon decimating and extinguishing Hamas.
There are inherent festering problems of both sides of the equation. Palestinians and Israelis each hold a litany of grievances against each other. The conflict is as old as Israel itself. The nation we call Israel is relatively new, having been created in 1948. For years before that, Britain maintained a colonial mandate for Palestine. Furthermore, while peace in the Middle East has been a fleeting concept, since the very inception of Israel, the region has experienced sustained volitivity, dating back to Biblical times. In fact, that factoid has led some to opine, what would make anyone thing a region that has a history of thousands of years of sporadic warfare is ever going to just recalibrate, and opt to live in peace?
I certainly am not here to submit a prescription for war. Rather, I am positing, upon intensive examination, there is no such thing as free speech. Never doubt, “Freedom of Speech is Merely a Figure of Speech!”
I’m done; holla back!
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