In an interview with David Letterman, President Obama warned emerging Muslim democracies in North Africa and the Middle East that with freedom should come respect for free speech:
“Our first job is obviously to make sure that we’re reinforcing security at these embassies, that we’re fully investigating what happened and bringing these murderers to justice; that’s our number one priority. But the broader issue here, is there’s a lot of change that’s taking place in the Middle East and we as Americans always stand on the side of democracy, we want people to have opportunity to determine their own fates, their own destinies, but the message we have to send, I think, to the Muslim world is, we expect you to work with us to keep our people safe. And as offensive as this video was, and obviously, we denounced it, and the United States government had nothing to do with it, that’s never an excuse for violence. And in this part of the region, as they emerge, into a new form of govt, part of what they’re going to have to do is to recognize that democracy is not just casting a ballot, it’s respecting freedom of speech and tolerating people with different points of view, and it means that you’ve got to make sure that you never have any excuses for the kind of violence against innocents we saw last week, and that’s a message that I’ve sent very clearly to the leaders of various countries, and we expect their full cooperation, because that’s the only way the international order works.”
