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The 1st Amendment Is Not a Suicide Pact: Blocking the Speech That Calls for Our Death, by Newt Gingrich. Posted Dec 04, 2006. Human Events Online

From a speech to the Nackey S. Loeb School of Communications, Gingrich Communications, November 27 2006. By Newt Gingrich

Originally Posted by Newt

We need a serious dialogue -- not knee-jerk hysteria -- about the 1st Amendment, what it protects and what it should not protect. Here are a few baseline principles to consider:

* We should be allowed to close down websites that recruit suicide bombers and provide instructions to indiscriminately kill civilians by suicide or other means, or advocate killing people from the West or the destruction of Western civilization;

* We should propose a Geneva-like convention for fighting terrorism that makes very clear that those who would fight outside the rules of law, those who would use weapons of mass destruction and those who would target civilians are in fact subject to a totally different set of rules that allow us to protect civilization by defeating barbarism before it gains so much strength that it is truly horrendous. A subset of this convention should define the international rules of engagement on what activities will not be protected by free speech claims; and

* We need an expeditious review of current domestic law to see what changes can be made within the protections of the 1st Amendment to ensure that free speech protection claims are not used to protect the advocacy of terrorism, violent conduct or the killing of innocents.