A National Security meeting to get updates on where we are and what we are doing. And particularly when were in the moment of a particular threat or challenge. I think what the department of Homeland Security was really talking about is sort of a generic set of threats and challenges that are out there that were working to respond to. We have an unprecedented level of communication and information sharing, intelligence sharing taking place. With other countries. We have the Counter Terrorism Partnership Fund which were requesting money from all of you to implement. And thats 390 million which will be used to enhance Border Security among our foreign partners. Were working with europeans to move them now to sharing lists on passengers which they hadnt been doing. Were trying to increase the scrutiny of people moving in between countries. And share more information about it. Were trying to stem the financial flow to these groups through nations and increased scrutiny of whos giving money
Are in the middle of delicate negotiations . Was it a wise move to ignore the administration in terms of appearing in front of a joint session of congress . What are your thoughts on that . Secretary kerry my thoughts are that you as a secretarys have leeway to make up your own minds about how you feel about this. My job is to work with the Prime Minister of israel to maintain security to honor our very strong relationship, and i speak with the Prime Minister more than any other leader. I speak with him later. I speak with him regularly. The enduring relationship we has, nobody should question that relationship. You all have to make up your own minds about the propriety of the way this unfolded or what happened. We are going to proceed about our business, which is protecting the country in maintaining the integrity of these relationships and that includes israel. I will be, i know i have been focused on iran negotiations in ukraine and afghanistan and a bunch of other things. I will be
And didnt put any of the cartoons in there. And my reaction was disbelief because once not talking about taste anymore. This is what the book was about. And while perhaps you didnt have to publish every one of them its hard to communicate what was going on if you dont do it. I mean, i had a letter in the New York Times complaining about the fact that they didnt publish any of the cartoons at issue with respect to what we are talking about today. Their stated position was, they have a policy against publishing materials which by their nature are offensive and dont advance public discussion of some issue. My view was that they were newsworthy. How could they not be . And while one could make a determination that in the service of good taste, if you will, not to publish them all publishing none of them seemed to me to depriving the readers of the chance to make a more informed judgment, or at least have a better informed body of knowledge, as to what was going on. Now, it may be that it w
Moved forward since that event. This is 40 minutes. I am going to have two introduce a little bit to make sure that everyone understands the order of the day. Im going to ask, who as you probably already know, is the editorial director and columnist and contributing writer to the New York Times and then im going to ask to follow on all of us i hope everyone in journalism knows, if you have a problem with the First Amendment, you call and there really is no number two. You just call floyd abrams. And then to sort of talk about the elephant in the room and really bring us to the point of understanding what the problem is, what the underlying problem is and where things are going and im hoping theres a lot of cross dialogue. Im going to ask each person to speak for about five minutes to set the stage. Syl, yeah, will tell us what is going on and what the problems are, from her perspective. Ill let floyd outline the differences and similarities between our idea and america of Free Expressi
Silvie first, will tell us what is going on and what the problems are, from her perspective. Ill let floyd outline the differences and similarities between our idea and america of Free Expression and perhaps a french notion which may be different in some respects. And then finally bret. With no further ado, sylvie, can you let us know what you think . Sylvie thank you very much and thank you for having me here. Its always a great to come back to new york where i have spent five of probably the most enjoyable years of my life. I will go straight to the point. We have a very serious situation in france at the moment. I would like to remind you of a basic fact to start with, which is that france has the biggest Jewish Community in europe and the biggest Muslim Community in europe. So i used to say we have our own little middle east in france. Weve had tensions at various times. You may remember in 2003, 2004 during the iraqi invasion in the war, you know, there were a lot of tensions in t