The freedom to express views is upheld in the West, but according to a human-rights lawyer it is by no means an absolute right, especially where the Israel-Palestine conflict is concerned Iwrote a book for Faber and Faber on terrorism some years ago– ­standard stuff (for me) about the ­language of terrorism, how it has been invented to distract us from the abuse of state power, and in particular how it prevented any fair assessment of the rights and wrongs of the Israel-Palestine conflict. It was well received in the UK but never found an American publisher. The problem was with the last point: it was too close to the bone. A colleague in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who had often experienced the same difficulty explained the position, providing an answer to a