THE DAILY BLADE: What Freedom Of Speech Means To Muslims (The U.S. Edition)
Following the riots in Denmark over cartoons depicting Mohammed, death threats against Pope Benedict XVI – accompanied by a nun’s murder and firebombings of several churches – over an obscure reference in a lecture, and fears of violence that caused the Deutsche Oper in Berlin to cancel performances of Mozart's Idomeneo, The Stiletto observed:
[W]hether Muslims are in the majority or minority, living in a Western nation or in the Middle East, governed under laws that are secular or Islamic, "moderate" or fundamentalist they are all too often hostile to free speech rights.
Battles over freedom of thought and expression are not just occurring in Europe, which woke up to the threat of "Sharia creep" too late. Muslims are now waging their global jihad against free speech in the U.S., using any means necessary to intimidate and silence people.
† Herndon, VA: CAIR Threatens Lawsuit Over Speech
Robert Spencer, who runs the JihadWatch.org Web site had been invited to give a speech on "The Truth about the Council on American-Islamic Relations" at the 29th National Conservative Student Conference, Young America’s Foundation. The day before his August 2nd speech, YAF president Ron Robinson received a fax from CAIR attorney Joseph E. Sandler threatening to sue if Spencer’s speech was not yanked from the program:
"You should be aware that Mr. Spencer, a well-known purveyor of hatred
and bigotry against Muslims, has a history of false and defamatory statements. Several of those statements have falsely accused CAIR of activity that would constitute a federal offense." …
"For these reasons, we demand that YAF cancel the subject session (at which Spencer is speaking), or else take steps to ensure that false and defamatory statements are not disseminated at that session. Our clients have instructed us to pursue every available and appropriate legal remedy to redress any false and defamatory statements that are made at the session. Please let us know by the close of business today whether you intend to comply with these requests."
Noting that the threatening letter does not cite even one "false and defamatory statement" by Spencer, investigative journalist Joel Mowbray points out that this is hardly the first time CAIR has sought to stifle free speech in America:
For years, CAIR has attempted to stifle debate and prevent inquiry into the domestic spread of radical Islam. Conservative columnist Cal Thomas was the latest target, when CAIR attempted to drum him out of his role as an official commentator at WTOP radio in Washington, D.C. The group was emboldened by its success in the same city two years earlier, when it got then-Disney-owned WMAL to can talk host Michael Graham. Similar such smear campaigns are legion. …
Political commentator and University of North Carolina (Wilmington) criminology professor Mike Adams writes:
This notion of preventing "offense" by forcing people to relinquish their First Amendment Rights is itself offensive. Certainly, when one of my Muslim friends offends me - by forcing his wife to leave the room without speaking as soon as I come over - I just let it go. But maybe I shouldn’t. Maybe I should start my own organization called CAIRS, The Council Against Islamic Repression and Sexism.
Adams urges people to join him "in the fight against Muslim censors (and the lawyers who love them)" by contacting Sandler (sandler@sandlerreiff.com; 202-479-1111) to "tell him to stop helping Muslim extremists wage a Jihad against the First Amendment in the United States of America."
In case you’re wondering, Spencer spoke as scheduled. Says YAF spokesperson Jason Mattera, "CAIR picked the wrong group to bully and intimidate."
† Oakland, CA: Newspaper Editor Gunned Down In The Street
In a scene eerily reminiscent of Armenian newspaper editor Hrant Dink’s assassination in broad daylight on an Istanbul street by a hate-filled teenage boy who got caught up in Turkey’s Nationalist movement, black journalist Chauncey Bailey was shot in broad daylight on an Oakland street by a hate-filled teenage boy who got caught up in the radical Black Muslim group.
In his confession, 19-year-old Devaughdre Broussard told detectives he considered himself "a good soldier" when he killed Chauncey Bailey for writing negative stories about Your Black Muslim Bakery, reports Inside Bay Area, adding:
Bailey had been working on a story about "the financial status of the organization" and the "activities of a number of people who were working in the organization," which included possible criminal activity.
When police raided the bakery and several adjacent houses, they found the shotgun that Broussard allegedly used to kill the 57-year-old editor of the Oakland Post, a weekly paper covering the black community. Broussard and six other people were taken into custody, including Yusuf Bey IV, son of the bakery's founder, the late Black Muslim leader Yusuf Bey.
In an eloquent editorial, The Washington Post notes that Bailey was murdered "while performing an essential task of democracy" … "doing his duty as a reporter."
† New York City: Author Shouted Down At Book Reading
At a Barnes & Noble bookstore on the Upper East Side in May, first-time author Margaret Ajemian Ahnert was answering questions after reading a passage from her book, "The Knock at the Door," which includes the story of how her mother survived the Armenian Genocide of 1915-1917 as a teenager and eventually came to the U.S.
Suddenly, a group of men that included Turkish immigrant Erdem Sahin, 41, started passing out leaflets denying the Armenian Genocide and shouting, "'This is a lie, this is a lie, this never happened." When they would not stop, audience member Mary Occhino, host of a call-in program on Sirius satellite radio told The New York Times she got up and said, "Enough! Her mother lived through the genocide - that's all she said."
Some 20 minutes later, police arrived at the scene to escort the men out of the bookstore. Sahin refused to leave and was charged with resisting arrest, inciting a riot, unlawful assembly, and disorderly conduct for disturbing a lawful assembly.
Ahnert told The New York Times, "It was the first time I had that ugliness," adding:
I was trying to tell the story of my mother, not making a political statement. It's a mother-daughter story, it's how it affected my life. It's not just about the Armenian genocide, it's about my mother growing up, my life, and events in her life that affected me. It's a mother-daughter memoir. I'm not making any historical statements. …
Someone in the middle of the back of the room stood up and said, 'That's not so.' Five or six men started to pass out fliers of denial. I thought, oh, my goodness sakes, it's like Holocaust deniers. I was completely taken aback.''
Among friends of the author’s attending the reading were former NY Gov. Hugh Carey and Manhattan district attorney, Robert M. Morgenthau, whose grandfather, Henry Morgenthau, chronicled the systematic annihilation of Armenians while he served as ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1913 to 1916.
† New York City: U.N. Genocide Exhibit Censored
In April, an exhibit on the 13th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide consisting of panels of graphics, photos and statements installed in the visitors lobby by the British antigenocide group Aegis Trust was dismantled on the insistence of the Turkish mission because of its objection to a single sentence explaining the genesis of the word genocide:
"Following World War One, during which 1 million Armenians were murdered in Turkey, Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin urged the League of Nations to recognize crimes of barbarity as international crimes."
Even after the Armenian ambassador to the U.N., Armen Martirosyan (whose name literally means "Son of Armenian Christian Martyrs", by the way), worked out a compromise that removed the words "in Turkey," so that the exhibit memorializing the 500,000 Tutsi victims could remain in place, but U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon ordered the exhibit dismantled anyway. A censored version opened three weeks later.
Addendum: CAIR mouthpiece Joseph Sandler, of the Washington law firm Sandler, Reiff, and Young, has now sent Mike Adams a letter threatening him with potential prosecution under federal statute 47 USCS § 223, "Obscene or harassing telephone calls in the District of Columbia or in interstate or foreign communications." Sandler demands that Adams take down the post on his Web site that exposes his role in assisting the enemies of free speech in the U.S. and provides his contact information so that Americans can exercise their First Amendment rights by telling him what they think about his attempts to silence YAR. The only way to fight enemies of free speech like Sandler and CAIR is for as many Web sites and blogs as possible to republish and/or link to this post and to Adams’ columns. Sandler and CAIR cannot silence us all.
Editorial Note: You can read previous installments in the series, "What Freedom Of Speech Means To Muslims," here and here (third item).
Turkey In The Straw
Mike Huckabee was the big winner in the 2007 IA straw poll, capturing the hearts of 2,587 voters (18.1 percent of the 14,302 votes cast). Sure, Mitt Romney got 4,516 votes (31 percent), but his first-place finish was so predictable that the Philadelphia Inquirer's Dick Polman wrote the lede of his straw-poll story in advance [Hat tip: Howard Kurtz]:
By busing in the most loyalists, and paying for their tickets, Mitt Romney defeated similar vote-buying strategies employed by his more modestly-financed rivals, including Mike Huckabee and Sam Brownback. But it's doubtful that this Saturday night event was an accurate barometer of anything, given the fact that, as in the past, it attracted only two percent of Republican voters statewide …
As with CPAC, Romney likely spent more on on the symbolic event than the rest of the field combined. As Huckabee pithily put it: "I’m not the best-funded candidate in America. I can’t buy you. I can’t even rent you."
In addition, the number of Iowans who cast straw ballots this year is down about 40 percent from the historical (and perhaps anomalous) high of 23,685 cast in 1999, no doubt because of the buzz-dampening effect of Rudy Giuliani, John McCain and Fred Thompson – all of whom handily beat Romney in national polls – being no-shows.
So what it comes down to is, the IA straw poll shows that Romney is the first among equals – that is, the also-rans. And that he’d better keep an eye on Huckabee.
Murdoch Has Feelings Too, You Know
Rupert Murdoch was so intent on acquiring The Wall Street Journal that he willingly spent "the better part of the past three months enduring criticism that is normally leveled at some sort of genocidal tyrant."
The Stiletto finds the 76-year-old media tycoon’s choice of words most interesting, considering that the WSJ has a shocking and shameful history of Armenian Genocide denial, and has several Armenian Genocide deniers on its payroll, including (but not limited to) Dennis Frantz, James Taranto and Tunku Varadarajan (third item).
In other WSJ-related news, at a press conference in Beijing last week editor-at-large Paul Steiger swore that the paper will not alter its coverage of China, now that it is owned by News Corp. If only the WSJ would change its fawning coverage of Turkey (second item), but that’s not likely to happen since Frantz was recently hired to head the paper’s Middle East bureau in Istanbul.
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