Better in their words…

When Rudy Giuliani was mayor of New York, he tried to cut off taxpayer funding for a museum showing a work entitled “The Holy Virgin Mary,” featuring an image of the Madonna smeared with elephant dung, surrounded by cutout porn photos of female genitalia. Mr. Giuliani said the museum didn’t have a “right to government subsidy for desecrating somebody else’s religion.” Hillary Clinton, then a Senate candidate, defended the right to show the artwork: “Our feelings of being offended should not lead to the penalizing and shutting down of an entire museum.”

Mr. Giuliani, who always acknowledged the artist’s First Amendment right while questioning the public funding, was a censorship softie compared with Mrs. Clinton today. Her State Department’s response to a movie trailer tied to Islamic mob violence and organized terrorism has been censorship and a global apology campaign.

The movie “Innocence of Muslims,” apparently made by a Coptic Christian in the U.S., mocks Muhammad, the Islamic prophet, but it exists publicly only as a 14-minute trailer on YouTube. Digital technology can spread mischief, but it was only when an Islamist television show in Egypt aired excerpts that the video got widespread attention. The movie, if there is one, would never have gotten distribution in theaters, with its amateurish filming and clumsily dubbed voices.

The U.S. government attributed enormous power to these 14 minutes of video. The White House press spokesman insisted that the attacks in Egypt, Libya and some 20 other countries were a “response not to United States policy, and not to, obviously, the administration, not to the American people,” but “to a video, a film we have judged to be reprehensible and disgusting.” The White House later backtracked, blaming organized terrorists for killing the U.S. ambassador in Libya and three other Americans.

But the problem is not the video. It’s that many of the post-Arab Spring governments condone or encourage Islamist groups that find any pretense to attack the U.S. The Obama administration kowtowed to pressure from Egypt and other supposed allies, asking Google to remove the YouTube footage globally. Google rightly refused to censor, citing the right to free speech, which the president is sworn to defend.

When the government in Pakistan last week cynically organized a “Love for Prophet Day,” the State Department bought time on Pakistani television to run groveling advertisements. In one, Mrs. Clinton says: “Let me state very clearly . . . the United States government had absolutely nothing to do with this video. We absolutely reject its content and message.”

Instead of seeking to censor the video or apologizing, the White House should be reminding the world that free speech, even when tasteless or hateful, is an American right. The U.S. should be encouraging the new governments in the Middle East to value free speech. In contrast to the U.S. abandonment of free speech, tiny Denmark refused to apologize for the satirical cartoons of Muhammad that ran in the Jyllands-Posten newspaper in 2005, which provoked rioting in many countries.

Indeed, in the aftermath of the YouTube video, France has been truer to free speech than has the U.S. A French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, responded to the video controversy by running more cartoons of Muhammad. Its editor, Stephane Charbonnier, told the German magazine Der Spiegel: “We publish caricatures every week, but people only describe them as declarations of war when it’s about the person of the prophet or radical Islam.”

French authorities offered protection to the magazine before it went to press. “Of all publications, our magazine, which mocks the police at every opportunity, is now protected by it,” Mr. Charbonnier says. “Which only goes to show that freedom of speech is protected in our country.” He pledges to keep satirizing Catholics, Jews and Muslims. Meanwhile, France temporarily closed its embassies and schools in 20 countries when the magazine came out.

A silver lining to this controversy is how many people, apparently mostly Muslims themselves, used the online medium in a humorous way to make the point that Islamic fundamentalists are a minority of the religion. Under a hashtag on Twitter that Newsweek created for its cover story, #MuslimRage, they tweeted laugh lines for what leads to “Muslim Rage”:

“Sale at the butchers! Oh, only on pork.”

“Lost your kid ‘Jihad’ at the airport. Can’t yell for him.”

“Head & Shoulders STILL hasn’t made a beard conditioner!”

“When I wear a white hijab to a TV interview with a white backdrop.”

On a more serious note:

“Hezbollah offended by the movie but not by the daily murder of hundreds of Syrian civilians.”

“Memo to those few violent Mideast protesters, this is how you fight Islamophobia. You make fun of it.”

These tweets use free speech the way it was intended: To make political points, unapologetically. Islamists will protest and some will even kill for any reason or for no reason. On behalf of Americans and reformers around the world, the White House should stand up for free speech instead of recoiling from it.

A version of this article appeared September 24, 2012, on page A21 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The White House Goes Mum on Free Speech.

Crovitz: The White House Goes Mum on Free Speech – WSJ.com.