A speech by WILLIAM BLUM, author of Rogue State
This is the text of a presentation given by Blum on November 2, 2007, as part of the Will Miller Social Justice Lecture Series at the University of Vermont in Burlington (http://www.willmiller.org/).
UP UNTIL recently I had been in effect banned from speaking on college campuses. This ban lasted for a full year, ever since January of last year when Osama bin Laden, in one of his audiotapes, recommended that Americans read my book Rogue State. With this announcement I was swamped by the media—CNN, C-SPAN, MSNBC, and many others. People who called in to the TV and radio programs I was on attacked me as if I and bin Laden were friends and I had asked him for the endorsement. I had to point out that he and I were not really friends; in fact, I hadn’t spoken to him in more than a month.
Interviewers pressed me to repudiate bin Laden’s support. Wolf Blitzer on CNN was genuinely annoyed with me because I wouldn’t do so.