© REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry speak to media at the Chancellery in Berlin February 26, 2013.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry speak to media at the Chancellery in Berlin February 26, 2013.
"As a country, as a society, we live and breathe the idea of religious freedom and religious tolerance, whatever the religion, and political freedom and political tolerance, whatever the point of view," Kerry told the students in Berlin, the second stop on his inaugural trip as secretary of state.
"People have sometimes wondered about why our Supreme Court allows one group or another to march in a parade even though it's the most provocative thing in the world and they carry signs that are an insult to one group or another," he added.
"The reason is, that's freedom, freedom of speech. In America you have a right to be stupid - if you want to be," he said, prompting laughter. "And you have a right to be disconnected to somebody else if you want to be.
"And we tolerate it. We somehow make it through that. Now, I think that's a virtue. I think that's something worth fighting for," he added. "The important thing is to have the tolerance to say, you know, you can have a different point of view."
Kerry made the comments on his first foreign trip since becoming secretary of state on February 1. After one-night stops in London and Berlin, he visits Paris, Rome, Ankara, Cairo, Riyadh, Abu Dhabi and Doha before returning to Washington on March 6.
While speaking to the students and earlier to U.S. diplomats, Kerry reminisced about the time he spent in Berlin in the 1950s as the intrepid son of an American diplomat and retold a story of sneaking across to East Berlin with his bike.
"I used to have great adventures. My bicycle and I were best friends. And I biked all around this city. I remember biking down Kurfuerstendamm and seeing nothing but rubble. This was in 1954 ... the war was very much still on people's minds," he told the diplomats, referring to West Berlin's main shopping avenue.
"One day, using my diplomatic passport, I biked through the checkpoint right into the east sector and noticed very quickly how dark and unpopulated (it was) and sort of unhappy people looked," he added, saying it left an impression "that hit this 12-year-old kid."
"I kind of felt a foreboding about it and I didn't spend much time. I kind of skedaddled and got back out of there and went home and proudly announced to my parents what I had done and was promptly grounded and had my passport pulled," he added.
"As a 12-year-old, I saw the difference between East and West," he later told the students. "I never made another trip like that. But I have never forgotten it. And now, it's vanished, vanished."
Source: Reuters
He is no more than a puppet and mouthpiece for the PTB. To state to the world that the American people have a right to be stupid. One wonders in what sense he considers the stupidity of the American people.
Is it because of the manipulation of the mainstream media, laws and bills that are passed in legal language that deliberately obsfucate the real intention of those laws and bills slowing denying the American citizen of his rights and freedeom.
No the American citizen does not have the right to be called stupid or be thought as stupid, they have the right to demand and receive the truth.This right has been perverted and is slowly being destroyed bit by bit with each succesive year. Most are living in ignorance of the true intentions of there government which is intentional I might add.
What arrogance to define one's fellow citizens in such a manner and to consider stupidity as a right. The loose definition fo stupid is lacking intelligence or common sense. I think the defintion of this word more aptly applies to the Secretary of State.