Debating the Limits of Free Speech LONDON - It was one of the more curious asides of this week's annual procession at the United Nations General Assembly of heads of states airing their differences, setting out their political stalls and maneuvering for position both internationally and before their audiences and voters at home. In what Reuters described as a "choppy video feed" from the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he sought refuge in June to evade extradition to Sweden, Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder, sniped at President Obama, and his remarks were heard at a packed event Wednesday on the sidelines of the General Assembly. His comments evoked a persistent debate Britain and elsewhere in Europe about the limits of free speech and what is often depicted as a need for greater guarantees of freedom of expression as the antidote to its suppression - an issue I try to explore in my latest column on Page Two of the IHT. Mr. Assange, who is wanted in Sweden to face questioning about allegations of rape and other sexual misbehavior, criticized Mr. Obama, Reuters reported, for supporting freedom of speech in the Middle East while "persecuting" Wikileaks for disseminating supposedly confidential diplomatic cables. Wikileaks' own experience, Mr. Assange said, showed that the American leader had "done more to criminalize free speech than any other U.S. president." The Assange case held up a mirror to a separate extradition imbroglio swirling around Abu Hamza al-Masri, a fiery Islamic preacher who has used the British and European legal systems for eight years to resist an American effort to try him on terrorism charges. Mr. Masri launched one more appeal against extradition this week after a European court ruled that there was no further obstacle to his being sent to the United States. For his part, Mr. Assange has apparently exhausted legal avenues in Britain, and the British police say that, if he sets foot outside his cramped sanctuary in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London's upscale Knightsbridge neighborhood, he will be arrested and sent to Sweden. The two cases do have a common strand. Both evoke challenges to societies that cast themselves as exemplars of democratic values, and both concern the delicate balance between the protection of civil liberties and, in one form or other, questions of security. That debate has become all the more urgent since the Internet airing of a contentious and crudely filmed amateur video, made privately in the United States, denigrating the Prophet Muhammad. A Pakistani government minister has even offered a bounty of $100,000 in return for killing the person who made the film, who has been identified in the United States as Nakoula Basseley Nakoul, arrested on Thursday for violating the terms of his probation. The Pakistani minister's offer prompted Shashank Joshi, a research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute think tank in London, to conclude that: "The problem is not that we in the West have too much free speech - it's that we have too little." "We ourselves are content to proscribe insults under the guise of public order," he wrote in The Daily Telegraph. Yet our response in such times should be to redouble our efforts to protect even unpopular ideas, including those with no literary or artistic merit. The solution is categorically not a global ban on the defamation of religion, a perverse idea that keeps popping up in the U.N., and was again raised last week by Pakistan's prime minister, but rather laws that demonstrate a consistent and absolute commitment to free speech, short of inciting violence.