Chris Owens is running for Congress in 2006 from the 11th District, a Brooklyn seat his father, Major Owens, has held since 1982. He is obviously an intelligent man, having graduated from the Bronx High School of Science, so I’m having difficulty understanding why he doesn’t comprehend what the phrase “freedom of speech” entails. Two reasons might explain that failing: He is a Democrat and he went to Harvard.

Mr. Owens sent out a press release February 22, defending those students from Junior High School 51 in Park Slope, Brooklyn, who sent letters critical of the Iraq war to a soldier stationed in a combat area. Mr. Owens chastised the New York Post for using phrases such as “poison-pen pals” to refer to the students who, Mr. Owens said, were engaging in “the most essential of democratic activities – free speech.”

To recap what the controversy is all about, Private First Class Rob Jacobs received 21 letters from those students, nine of which were full of political rhetoric and viciously critical of our presence in Iraq. One accused the soldiers of burning mosques and killing civilians. They were demoralizing and offensive, and the public reaction has been vehement, with some suggesting that the children were mouthing the opinions of adults.

When it comes to the Iraq war, Mr. Owens, like many other Democrats, has a problem distinguishing it from the Vietnam conflict, even though, he writes, he was only 8 at the time. A very precocious third-grader, I might add, who read daily newspapers and went on protest marches with his parents.

“I was no more a victim of propaganda in 1967 than these children are today,” the candidate said. “And, as students, none of us were as influenced by media-stoked hype and fear as the millions of Americans who never challenge the Iraq War or its foundations.”

Mr. Owens writes in his press release:

“The Iraq conflict is allegedly a defense of our way of life. Are we not defending free speech? If the purpose of writing letters to our men and women in uniform was to only say nice things and pretend there are no issues, then there would be no educational value to the exercise. Thirty years ago, it was the moral conflict in America that ended the slaughter of American and Vietnamese lives. Young people were the catalysts for change then and it is the next generation’s power that will change our policies in this decade.”

Some Harvard professors think freedom of speech refers only to speech that is politically correct. Right, Mr. Summers? As for Mr. Owens’s statement that he was not a victim of propaganda, I’ll just put that statement down to third grade naivete. The only news coverage of the Vietnam War was by a left-leaning press sympathetic to the anti-war movement, coverage that accentuated the negative and eliminated anything positive. One day in the future, the havoc that journalists such as Walter Cronkite wrought on this nation by deliberately distorting our military victories will be exposed, but not by this current crop of accomplices who’ve been trying to do the same thing in Iraq.

No one is denying anyone the right to free speech, but when Mr. Owens can say the purpose of writing letters to soldiers should not be to say nice things he has no heart. By all means, have those students write to President Bush, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Rice, but to the grunts out in the field? Write nice things. Wish them well. Save your scathing remarks for the powers that be. Teach your children compassion.

Events like this make me embarrassed to be a New Yorker, but then it’s always good to hear a story with a different slant about us. Matt Friedeman, who has a state-wide radio program in Mississippi, received a call from a soldier who commented on that beer commercial showing soldiers getting cheers at an airport. This Marine, who called himself Rick from Winona, came back in December and landed at JFK airport. He and seven other soldiers had been nervous about how they would be treated. “We didn’t know what to expect,” he told Mr. Friedeman. “From the news media we were seeing, the whole country was basically telling us we’re a bunch of jerks.”

As they stepped off the breezeway in trepidation, an elderly man stopped, tears came to his eyes, and he saluted them. “Everybody in the terminal … I kid you not, at least two to three hundred people … just started clapping, spontaneously,” the Marine said. “To me, it was so much worth what we were doing, to realize that people over here actually get what we are doing.”

Would you have clapped, Mr. Owens?