Bill Clinton's Message to Muslims: 'You Can't React Every Time You Are Insulted'

Former President Bill Clinton addressed the unrest sweeping the Muslim world over the American-made anti-Islam film in an interview with "CBS This Morning" co-hosts Charlie Rose and Norah O'Donnell, and his message was characteristically direct: the film is offensive, but "you can't react every time you're insulted."

"We weren't disrespecting Islam by not squelching a film trailer that nobody in authority knew anything about; that 99 percent of us think was crude, and disrespectful, and awful," Clinton said, defending the U.S. government's handling of the crisis. "We have learned the hard way, over more than 200 years, that in order to preserve freedom, and liberty, including the freedom of religion, you have to allow people to say and do things that you find abhorrent."

The remarks came as the Clinton Global Initiative opened its annual meeting in New York and as the UN General Assembly took up the same violence. Clinton argued that Muslims angered by the film should answer offensive speech by making their own case: "I believe in a god and a prophet strong enough to withstand the criticisms of petty, narrow-minded, mean-spirited people."

It was a line that cut both ways: sympathy for the insult, impatience with the reaction. Years on, it reads like a summary of a debate the internet never stopped having.