Obama urges Arab world to embrace new freedoms
UNITED NATIONS — President Obama challenged the Arab world to use its newfound embrace of democracy to ensure protection for freedom of religion and speech and even life, using the last address of his first term to the General Assembly on Tuesday to call for a renewed focus on the “painstaking work of reform.”
Obama took on a number of issues between America and the Muslim world, vowing that the “United States will do what we must to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon” and warning that time to diplomatically resolve the Iranian nuclear issue “is not unlimited.”
But he refused to go further than what he has said, that “a nucleararmed Iran is not a challenge that can be contained,” despite pleas from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to establish a new red line.
“America wants to resolve this issue through diplomacy, and we believe there is still time and space to do so,” Obama said. “We respect the right of nations to access peaceful nuclear power, but one of the purposes of the United Nations is to see that we harness that power for peace.”
But he spent most of his 30-minute speech on the Arab democracy movement and its fallout.
Just two weeks after the beginning of violent anti-American protests that led to the killing of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya, Obama vowed that even as the United States works to bring the killers to justice, he will not back down from his support of democratic freedoms in the Muslim world. But he also gave a spirited defense of U.S. freedom of speech and the spirit of tolerance that allowed the inflammatory antiMuslim video that prompted the protests.
“As president of our country, and commander in chief of our military, I accept that people are going to call me awful things every day,” Obama said. “And I will defend their right to do so.” For that, he received cheers in the hall.
While condemning the “crude and disgusting” video that prompted the protests in Libya and throughout the Muslim world, the president worked to explain — before a sometimes skeptical audience that has never completely bought into the American idea that even hateful speech is protected — why the United States values its First Amendment.
Americans, he said, “have fought and died around the globe to protect the right of all people to express their view.”
And he said pointedly, “There is no speech that justifies mindless violence.”
It was the president’s first expansive response to the anti-American protests that erupted over the video, filmed in the United States.