4.2.12 WC: 191694 last time I was physically threatened for what I believe. Free speech is anything but free in the real world of high passions and violent tempers. It is imperative that those of us who defend the rights of bigots and others to express horrible views go out of our way to challenge these bad views in the marketplace of ideas. It is a commonplace among civil Libertarians that the appropriate answer to bad speech is good speech, not censorship. We must provide that good speech as we defend the bad speech. I had the opportunity to do just that when the actress Vanessa Redgrave had a scheduled performance with the Boston Symphony Orchestra cancelled because of her controversial political views and activities. I defended her right to perform but challenged her to a debate about her outrageous political views. She declined because she was on the Central Committee of the Revolutionary Workers Party — a British Stalinist group — and the Party had to approve in advance everything she said in public. I then explained the hypocrisy of her complaints about being “blacklisted” for her political views and activities, while she herself, and her Party, advocated the blacklisting of others. In 1978, Redgrave had offered a resolution demanding that the British Actors Union blacklist Israeli artists and boycott Israeli audiences. The resolution included a “demand” that “all members working in Israel terminate their contacts and refuse all work in Israel.” Several years later, she justified as “entirely correct” the blacklisting of Zionist speakers at British universities. And she has praised the ultimate form of censorship: the political assassination of Israeli artists, because they “may well have been enlisted ... to do the work” of the Zionists. Redgrave herself has used her art “to do the work” of terrorists. In 1977, she made a film calling for the destruction of the Jewish state by armed struggle. She has personally received training in terrorism at camps from wh