Hispanic High Schoolers Fly Mexican Flag Above American Flag Flying Upside-Down

I received this piece of information from a friend who presently lives and works in California. What's up with this? Is this an act of 'free speech?'

The protestors put up the Mexican flag over the American flag flying upside down at Montebello High School in California.

Speaking of free speech, does anyone remember the screenplay of THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT in which Andrew Shepherd states:

Everybody knows American isn't easy. America is
advanced citizenship.
You gotta want it bad, 'cause it's
gonna put up a fight. It's gonna
say, "You want free speech? Let's
see you acknowledge a man whose words
make your blood boil, who's standing
center stage and advocating, at the
top of his lungs, that which you
would spend a lifetime opposing at the
top of yours. You want to claim
this land as the land of the free,
then the symbol of your country can't
just be a flag; the symbol also has
to be one of its citizens exercising
his right to burn that flag in
protest." Show me that, defend that,
celebrate that in your classrooms.
Then you can stand up and sing about
the land of the free.

A Nation of Terrorists?

My daughter called me from Chicago early this afternoon and told me that while walking in the downtown area near Union Station, she walked into a rally protesting the United States' support of Kosovo's declaration of independence. She said the banners proclaimed that the United States is a nation of terrorists.

Feeling a bit alarmed, I suggested that she "get out of there."

She laughed into her cell phone, and agreed.

Holocaust Curriculum in France Sparks Protests

President Nicolas Sarkozy dropped an intellectual bombshell this week, surprising the nation and touching off waves of protest with his revision of the school curriculum: beginning next fall, he said, every fifth grader will have to learn the life story of one of the 11,000 French children killed by the Nazis in the Holocaust.

“Nothing is more moving, for a child, than the story of a child his own age, who has the same games, the same joys and the same hopes as he, but who, in the dawn of the 1940s, had the bad fortune to be defined as a Jew,” Mr. Sarkozy said at the end of a dinner speech to France’s Jewish community on Wednesday night. He added that every French child should be “entrusted with the memory of a French child-victim of the Holocaust.”

Adding to the national fracas over the announcement, Mr. Sarkozy wrapped his plan in the cloak of religion, placing blame for the wars and violence of the last century on an “absence of God” and calling the Nazi belief in a hierarchy of races “radically incompatible with Judeo-Christian monotheism.”