FREEDOM OF SPEECH
In the wake of the murder of U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens
and the Benghazi attacks against American
citizens, Barack Obama stood in front of the U.N. and representatives of Iran
and other despotisms and said:
The U.S.
is slowly but certainly accommodating the view that free speech, when it comes
to religious (i.e. Muslim) matters, is suspect. We have reached this point, in
large part, because of the growing success of the idea that any criticism of
Islam is actually pathology, rather than a legitimate exercise of free speech.
It is, in other words, "Islamophobia."
EXCELLENT
VIDEO – CONGRESSMAN LOUIE GOHMERT IN RESPONSE (3 minutes)
Congressman
Louie Gohmert (Republican – Texas)
has been a strong ally in the defense against radical Islam. A former federal
judge, the Congressman has spent much time on the floor of the U.S. House of
Representatives educating his colleagues and C-SPAN viewers about these issues.
In addition, earlier this year, Congressman Gohmert introduced an ACT! for America
petition into the Congressional Record which was signed by thousands of
Americans expressing their concerns about changes to government counter
terrorism training materials. Congressman Gohmert was one of the speakers
at the ACT! for America
Conference in July.
The Freedom to be Silenced
The first response from the U.S. Embassy in Cairo was to apologize for “those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others”. Even in the face of the brutal murders of its own people, the State Department was relentlessly holding to the line that freedom of speech must take a backseat to respect for Islam. The Obama Administration collaborated with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation in its attack on freedom of speech by internationalizing Islamic blasphemy laws.http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/the-freedom-to-be-silenced
Are Radical Imams Going to Redefine Freedom of Speech?
Let us not allow those who
employ violence to initiate a debate about the limits of free speech. Democracies
should not allow themselves to be held hostage to violent extremists.
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/alan-m-dershowitz/are-radical-imams-going-to-redefine-freedom-of-speech
Will Geert Wilders Be Denied a Visa to Australia?
Taji Mustafa, spokesman for the British branch of the Muslim group Hizb ut-Tahrir, an international Islamist organization that is the largest group of its kind in Britain and supports the goal of a caliphate had no problem getting into Australia. By contrast, Geert Wilders, member of the Dutch parliament and head of the Dutch Freedom Party is still sitting on a more than three-week-old visa application.
Look in Your Mirror
An insult — even one as stupid
and ugly as the anti-Islam video on YouTube that started all of this — does not
entitle people to go out and attack embassies and kill innocent diplomats. That
is not how a proper self-governing people behave. There is no excuse for it. It
is shameful.
Islamic Violence Needs No Spark
The video is nothing more than a convenient pretext for the latest episode of the continuing Muslim jihad against everything we stand for in the West. In full dhimmitude mode, President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and UN Ambassador Susan Rice refuse to place the blame where it belongs – on the Islamists themselves who do not need an excuse to incite violence against the “infidels.”
The Price of a Koran by Daniel Greenfield
The Muslim is dying for the Koran and the American soldier is dying to bring tolerance and civil rights to them. Unlike the Koran, our freedom is priceless because it is beyond price. The lives of our sons and daughters are equally priceless. And if we allow them to be sold for the price of a Koran, then it is we who have forsaken our sacred honour.
Woman
Exercises Her Rights – And Some Lefts – Against Iran’s Veiling Law
YOU
GO GIRL!!
A woman in the Iranian city of Shamirzad, angered earlier
this month by a cleric who told her she was insufficiently covered, decided
that enough was enough with such religious street harassment and took matters
into her own hands. This apparently fed-up Iranian female was obviously not in
the mood for any more religious street bullying, at least on this particular
day. After the admonishment about the state of her dress, she abruptly told the
intrusive cleric, Hojetoeslam Ali Beheshti: “You should close your eyes.” The
price of the poor cleric’s martyrdom for the cause of “commanding right and
forbidding wrong,” as his moral guardian duties are officially called, was a
three-day stay in the hospital.
The Suicide of the
Free Press
by Robert Spencer
As
the Muhammad movie riots continue to roil the world, prominent Muslim leaders
in the U.S. and elsewhere are calling for restrictions on the freedom of
speech, including the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, and the Muslim Brotherhood – and in the U.S., Sheikh Husham al-Husainy of the Karbalaa
Islamic Education Center in Dearborn, Michigan and Imam Mohammad Qatanani of the Islamic
Center of Passaic County, New Jersey. Given Sharia prohibitions on free speech,
that is to be expected. What is more surprising – or should be more surprising,
if the free press were doing its job -- is the alacrity with which the
mainstream media has echoed these calls for self-censorship and submission to
Islamic blasphemy laws.by Robert Spencer
In the wake of the worldwide Muhammad movie riots, the Los Angeles Times, for example, published its second op-ed in four weeks calling for restrictions on the freedom of speech. To be sure, the second piece, by Sarah Chayes of the Carnegie Endowment, was far more sophisticated and well reasoned than the crude call for censorship of the first, which was written by the thuggish Nathan Lean. Where Lean had ham-fistedly smeared and demonized those whose speech he hates and then called for them to be silenced, First Amendment be damned, Chayes argued on the basis of a fine distinction that already exists within American free speech law: “U.S. law makes a distinction between speech that is simply offensive and speech that is deliberately tailored to put lives and property at immediate risk.”
Indeed, but as the Wall Street Journal pointed out, the legal distinction to which Chayes was referring was formulated in response to the Ku Klux Klan’s advocacy of violence, and thus did not apply to the Muhammad movie filmmakers, who called for no violence from anyone. The Klan, said the WSJ, “advocated (but did not incite) violence on the part of their own supporters in order to promote their cause of racial supremacy. By contrast, the filmmakers provoked a violent reaction from the other side. To prosecute them would be analogous to punishing civil rights activists for inciting white supremacists to commit violent or lawless acts.”
A point well taken. But the larger question is, why is the Los Angeles Times coming down on the side of restrictions on the freedom of speech in the first place? Are they not aware that such restrictions, if implemented, can and probably will be used against them? While the Los Angeles Times editors are no doubt serene in their certainty that they will never print anything that will insult Islam or Muslims, there could all too easily come a time when a governing authority deems something they have published to be “hateful” or even “deliberately tailored to put lives and property at immediate risk,” and – if free speech by then has been restricted – that will be the end of the Times as an outpost of the free press.
Can the Times’ editors, and those at other mainstream media that have written favorably about free speech restrictions in the wake of the recent Muslim riots, and those who have written harshly about Pamela Geller’s pro-Israel and Islamorealism ad campaigns, really be so short-sighted? Or is it that they are so consumed by hatred for voices on the Right that they will do whatever it takes to silence them, even defang the First Amendment? Or is it that today’s mainstream journalists share the Left’s taste for authoritarianism and thus never really liked or appreciated the concept of free speech in the first place?
Whatever the case may be, the foes of free speech may see their fondest wishes come true, and not very long from now, either. In that event, they will learn firsthand the truth of Thomas Jefferson’s adage: “Our liberty cannot be guarded but by the freedom of the press, nor that be limited without danger of losing it.” It may be that the remarkably suicidal free press of today will discover a taste for their First Amendment rights only when they have lost them. Some may even realize at that point that they have no one to blame but themselves (there will be no more “Islamophobes” for them to blame), and that the bad old world of robust discussion, debate and dissent really wasn’t all that bad after all. But by then it will be too late.
ACT! FOR CANADA/Quebec Chapter
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