Say What You Like, Just Don’t Say It Here

The American commitment to free speech is the most robust in the world. But these days that tolerance stops at the border.

Two cases pending in federal court in Manhattan will soon test how far the government can go in keeping Americans safe from what a State Department manual calls the “irresponsible expressions of opinion by prominent aliens.”

One case concerns a decision by the Bush administration to bar a Muslim scholar from visiting the United States. The other is a criminal prosecution of two Brooklyn businessmen for transmitting Hezbollah’s television station on their satellite service.

Judge Paul A. Crotty — a federal district judge in Manhattan who was New York City’s chief lawyer under Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani — will hold a hearing in the case on Thursday. In an earlier decision, he said the principles at stake were crucial ones.

“The First Amendment includes not only a right to speak, but also a right to receive information and ideas,” Judge Crotty wrote last year. That includes a right, he continued, quoting a Supreme Court decision, “to have an alien enter and to hear him explain and seek to defend his views.”


Source, and full article: New York Times, October 22, 2007