Andy McCarthy takes a deep look at the war on terror (or Militant Islam) and the First Amendment in the new issue of Commentary. Here’s a taste:

Without security, there is no liberty at all. The fact that government is made up of human beings, and that human beings are certain occasionally to abuse any powers given them, is surely a rationale for narrowing those grants of power; but not for eradicating them, or reducing them to a quantity that fails to protect or even to take account of the higher interest that impelled the grant in the first place. Individual abuses of dissent are bad, but undermining the framework that ensures the right to dissent is immeasurably worse. This, as Holmes intuited, is supposed to be a matter of degree.
Moral clarity, moreover, postulates that some evils are so palpable we need not further test them in the marketplace. There are relatively few of them, but they do exist and we need not fear we are wrong about them. Such recognition is critical to the functioning of a healthy society, and declaring an end to discussion of any conceivable value they may have is very far from declaring a tyrannical power to end discussion of any topic disfavored by government. Do we really need additional ideological thrust-and-parry to know, for example, that the advocacy of genocide, or rape, or the indiscriminate mass slaughter of civilians is condemnable under any and all circumstances?
Anxiety over “chilling effects” is the most curious and overwrought of all concerns. Is it realistic to believe that we would actually lose the benefit of any idea worthy of the name were we to ban the advocacy of terrorism? Al Qaeda, its precursors, and its facilitators have been aggressively prosecuted in this country for over a decade—and are now targets of military operations and seizures of assets. Far from having chilled dissent, this enterprise has produced an alphabet soup of Islamic support organizations, many of which brazenly insist that terrorism, especially in Iraq or against Israel, is merely a form of resistance; relentless and fearless protest from the likes of the ACLU, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch; and an entertainment industry (as well as a political cohort) that cannot bestow enough plaudits on Michael Moore. Exactly what meaningful dissent will we miss if we proscribe the advocacy of murder, or of militant Islam’s clarion call to violent jihad?
There are practical issues to be considered here as well. Prior to the 9/11 attacks, no terror organization in the world had been responsible for the slaughter of more Americans than the Iranian-backed Hizballah. Although its atrocities have been exhaustively documented, what has been little appreciated is the catalyzing role played by speech, especially broadcast advocacy, in its deadliness.

Read his whole piece here.