9/11 families were joined by immigrants from India, Russia, Egypt, Israel, Africa, Iran and Europe to show opposition to the construction of a mega-mosque at our protest at Ground Zero. Others flew in from overseas to speak or just to share their particular ethnic communities’ experiences at the hands of moslems. More photos here.
The news was buried under two dense paragraphs and five large photos in an article in New York YIMBY about a different project: “Construction has also yet to begin on 51 Park Place, which is slated to become a 71-foot-tall, 16,000-square-foot Islamic cultural center.” The infamous Ground Zero Mosque project, a long buried effort to build a triumphal mosque at the site of the worst jihad terror attack in American history, is back.
Construction has yet to begin, but it will: the shady developer behind the Ground Zero Mosque scheme, Sharif El-Gamal, has been working to build this sinister structure for years.
We defeated the Ground Zero Mosque project once before. The 16-story mosque that El-Gamal initially planned to build there has not been built. Our efforts in showing what an insult it was to the American people and to the victims of 9/11, and how many Muslims worldwide would inevitably view it as a triumphal mosque built on the site of a jihad attack, defeated it. Tens of thousands of people came out for our rallies in lower Manhattan against this celebration of this 9/11 attacks, and El-Gamal was beaten in the court of public opinion.
It was a long battle. President Obama announced his support for the mosque at an Iftar dinner, no less. Then-mayor of New York City and current presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg supported the mosque as well, claiming hysterically that “if we don’t build it, the terrorists will win!” The media actively campaigned for it — the elites in their increasingly fragile ivory towers relentlessly stumped for the Cordoba mosque (euphemistically called an Islamic center with a prayer space) for years.
And yet despite all this opposition and much more, the people stood up and fought the Ground Zero Mosque and won. An army of Davids.
But that wasn’t the end of the story. Crains New York reported on El-Gamal’s new project in 2015 in a story that demonstrated how the developer was hoping to sneak his triumphal mosque into existence: “Mr. El-Gamal’s Soho Properties has proposed a 667-foot condominium tower at lower Manhattan’s 45 Park Place. The glass skyscraper, which has yet to break ground, will include at least 15 full-floor units of 3,200 to 3,700 square feet, and average prices higher than $3,000 a square foot, according to plans released to Bloomberg by the developer.”
That sounded normal enough. But then the article added: “Adjacent to the tower, Soho Properties will build a public plaza connected to a three-story Islamic museum and prayer space.” An Islamic prayer space is a mosque. The article also said: “An Islamic museum ‘is just as much of an insult,’ Pamela Geller, a blogger and one of the center’s most vocal opponents, wrote in an email. ‘It will be like having a museum touting the glories of the Japanese Empire at Pearl Harbor.'”
I think an Islamic museum at Ground Zero dedicated to the half-billion victims of jihadi wars, land appropriations, sharia, cultural annihilations, enslavements, and sharia enforcement is an excellent idea, but is that what Sharif El-Gamal had in mind? Of course not. And how did El-Gamal plan to finance this? The answer was predictable. The New York Post reported in May 2016 that “the developer of the failed Ground Zero Mosque has nailed down ‘Sharia-compliant financing’ for a new, luxury condominium tower and Islamic cultural museum on the same site, he and his banking partners said.”
Then in May 2017, the New York Times ran a story entitled “Condo Tower to Rise Where Muslim Community Center Was Proposed.” The Times said that “45 Park Place, a 43-story condominium that will soon rise three blocks from the World Trade Center,” was “something of a consolation prize for the developer,” as it “replaces the developer’s 2010 plan to build a 15-story Islamic mosque and cultural center on this site, an idea that erupted into a national controversy and cable news network bonanza.”
In the last couple of years, there has been virtually no news about this “Islamic museum.” But the New York YIMBY story shows that the project has been advancing under cover of darkness. A 71-foot-tall structure is three stories high, as in the revised plans announced in 2015.
El-Gamal has many friends and allies among New York City’s political and media elites. It is likely that de Blasio city officials and the New York Times and other city papers all met with El-Gamal and agreed to keep the reporting on this project to an absolute minimum, so that it could get built without incurring the righteous anger of the public again. The first time around, they courted publicity and tried to make El-Gamal a hero. We demolished that and destroyed their plans. So now they’ve clearly decided to go ahead surreptitiously.
It is disgusting that El-Gamal continues to taunt Americans and poke at America’s most egregious recent memory. El-Gamal was there when we had tens of thousands in the streets opposing his Ground Zero mosque. He knows how angry and upset people get at these Islamic structures on the site of jihad war. The 9/11 Muslim terrorists extolled Allah no fewer than 90 times in their last letters. Will those letters be on display at this Islamic cultural center/museum?
There is an important lesson to be learned here — and one we would be wise to adopt. They never stop. No matter how absolutely they lose, how many setbacks they suffer, they keep on pursuing their supremacist goals.
The Ground Zero Mosque project was and is a middle finger to the American people. There has never been a mosque of reconciliation and healing built on the site of a jihadi attack. Ever. It is, on the other hand, an Islamic pattern to build triumphal mosques on the cherished sites of conquered lands. History is riddled with triumphal mosques built on the sites of jihad attacks or appropriated from other religions: the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque on the site of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, and innumerable mosques built on the sites of Hindu temples that were demolished by Muslims all attest to that.
And now it looks as if Sharif El-Gamal is going to be able to build his own triumphal mosque at Ground Zero after all.
Background: In 2008, I was in Florida covering Rifqa Bary’s court hearings to return her to her devout family who promised to kill to her because the teen had left Islam and converted to Christianity.
I was waiting on my ride to the courthouse when I saw this ad on a bus:
Thus began the very first of my many bus ad campaigns. I responded with this ad and the greatest putsch against free speech commenced:
Check out my latest at The Thinker:
After Ten Years, Court Strikes Down Ruling Banning Ads Offering Help to Those Leaving Islam
It took nearly twelve years, but we did it. My organization, the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), has just won an important victory for the freedom of speech.
Back in 2009, the Detroit area’s SMART transit refused to run our AFDI ads offering help to people who were in fear for their lives for wanting to leave Islam or having left it. After an incredibly protracted court battle, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals just stood up for the First Amendment and completely reversed the judgment banning our ads. It’s a total victory for freedom: we won our free speech lawsuit in Detroit by a unanimous decision.
Our ad read: “Leaving Islam? Fatwa on your head? Is your family or community threatening you? Got Questions? Get Answers! RefugefromIslam.com.” That’s all it said. It offered a life-saver for those who were completely and utterly alone with no system of support or help.
Islamic law mandates death for those who leave Islam; even in the United States, those who leave the religion live in fear that a devout Muslim might decide to apply this penalty. So we were offering help. That is all. But as Eugene Volokh explains at The Volokh Conspiracy, “Michigan’s Suburban Mobility Authority for Regional Transportation (SMART) rejected this ad under two of its speech restrictions. The first prohibits ‘political’ ads; the second prohibits ads that would hold up a group of people to ‘scorn or ridicule.'”
Our ad was not political and didn’t scorn or ridicule anyone. It’s ridiculous to say saving lives is a political act, and so of course we won the initial case. The first judge who ruled on this case, Judge Denise Page Hood, understood the law and so ruled in favor of our free speech rights. She understood the First Amendment. Therefore, although she was clearly not sympathetic to us, she had to rule for us.
But then SMART appealed. SMART adamantly refused to run outreach ads that might have helped Muslims living in dangerous households and appealed to the notoriously leftist Sixth Circuit. You might have thought the Muslim Brotherhood was running SMART. It was astounding. And consider the fact that Detroit was bankrupt around this same time. Sharia adherence was still more important to the broken city’s failed leaders than were the freedom of speech and fiscal responsibility.
And so SMART continued to refuse our ads and appealed in the notoriously leftist Sixth Circuit. The court called our religious ads political and created a new narrative out of whole cloth. Our ads were never actually rejected on political grounds. Individually and in her official capacity, Beth Gibbons, marketing program manager of SMART, said our ads were rejected because they were controversial — not because they were political. It was always understood that these were religious ads. Gibbons testified that she saw “nothing about [the advertisement] itself that was political[.] … I knew that [the fatwa advertisement] was of concern in that there is controversy on both sides of the issue on whether they should be posted.” That was the position of SMART. In fact, that was the agency’s official testimony.
We in turn appealed. In 2013, I was deposed and harassed for six hours by a small, profane blowhard attorney — all billable hours to fight an ad created to help Muslim girls escape honor violence. And the deposition was so hostile that you would think I had committed a heinous crime. Apparently, blasphemy in America is.
The case dragged on and on. But now, in American Freedom Defensive Initiative v. Suburban Mobility Auth. for Regional Transp. (6th Cir.), the court makes the correct ruling, noting that “the Free Speech Clause limits the government’s power to regulate speech on public property. The government has little leeway to restrict speech in ‘public forums.'” Accordingly, “SMART’s ban on ‘political’ ads is unreasonable for the same reason that a state’s ban on ‘political’ apparel at polling places is unreasonable: SMART offers no ‘sensible basis for distinguishing what may come in from what must stay out.’ Likewise, SMART’s ban on ads that engage in ‘scorn or ridicule’ is not viewpoint neutral for the same reason that a ban on trademarks that disparage people is not viewpoint neutral: For any group, ‘an applicant may [display] a positive or benign [ad] but not a derogatory one.'” Consequently, the court declared: “We thus reverse the district court’s decision rejecting the First Amendment challenge to these two restrictions.”
This is all common-sensical and clear even to those with no legal training or experience, but it has taken an incredibly long time to get here. The American Freedom Law Center, whose ace lawyers David Yerushalmi and Robert Muise fought long and hard to win this case, noted: “AFDI’s religious freedom advertisement was rejected even though SMART had no problem accepting and running an anti-religion ad sponsored by an atheist organization. That approved ad stated, ‘Don’t Believe in God? You are not alone.'” However, now “the Sixth Circuit ruled unanimously in favor of AFLC, finding that SMART’s rejection of the ad was unreasonable and [a] viewpoint based in violation of the First Amendment. This is a final ruling.”
Bottom line: Everyone has the same right to a free life. The Sixth Circuit agreed.
If you weren’t reading this, you would likely never know that it had happened at all. No media covered it. If we had lost, then you would have heard about it, because the media would have been popping open bottles of champagne and running huge pieces on how sharia restrictions on speech are altogether reasonable — as heads roll (literally).
Jessica Mokdad, an honor killing victim living in that area at the time, might have been saved. We know that the ads have helped Muslims — they told us. The ads save lives. Contribute here.
Pamela Geller is the president of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), publisher of The Geller Report, and author of the bestselling book FATWA: Hunted in America as well as The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America and Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance. Follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
I was suspended for saying the e l e c t i o n was s t o l e n.
The Dem’s objective is to make it verboten, silence us completely, like it never happened, make people afraid to talk about it – like Soviet Russia or communist China. That’s why we have to keep saying it. pic.twitter.com/NrOsFWwdCU
In an article that was picked up by the Mercury News, Ethan Baron of the Bay Area News Group wrote Tuesday that “A week after false claims of a stolen U.S. presidential election drove a deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Twitter is allowing a far-right supporter of President Donald Trump to claim the election was stolen.” Baron’s intention was clear: he wants Twitter to ban me, as it banned Trump, for telling truths they want buried. His article shows how monstrous and totalitarian the left really is: leftists think they can publicly call for the censuring and banning of someone whose views they hate, and just like that, you disappear.
The left and its propaganda arm, the establishment media, are now working hard to make it illegal, and get you banned from social media, to state the obvious fact that the election was stolen. The Democrats are seeking to criminalize and penalize anyone who says theelection was stolen. Their “insurrection” hoax, and impeachment of the president without due process or giving him the chance to defend himself, is designed to shut down any and all talk of their infamous election fraud. This is not the behavior of people who know they won fair and square and are watching their opponents have a tantrum about it. This is the action of the guilty.
That said, the election was stolen. The mountains of evidence of election fraud were never examined in any court, and then we were told that there was no evidence at all, or if there was any, it had already been dismissed in court challenges. The court cases were all dismissed on technicalities and procedural issues, not because there was no evidence of voter fraud. That evidence has still not been examined.
But it is a hallmark of the rapidly advancing totalitarianism of our age that thumbsuckers like Ethan Baron think they can kill you with righteous indignation. He wrote: “Anti-Muslim activist Pamela Geller, in a tweet Monday about banks freezing political donations after a pro-Trump mob stormed the seat of the U.S. government, said the banks’ decision was, ‘Further proof the election was stolen.’” I am not “anti-Muslim” any more than foes of the Nazis were “anti-German,” but that’s another story. Baron offered no counterargument to my contention about the banks. He just presented it as if it were self-evidently false and egregious.
Baron knew, of course, that he didn’t have to show that what I said was inaccurate. All he had to do was point out that I had deviated from the leftist line, and the jackbooted neo-fascists who run Twitter and the other social media platforms would spring into action.
It was reminiscent of the media outrage that was directed at me in May 2015, when I hosted the Muhammad Art Exhibit and Cartoon Contest in Garland, Texas that was the site of the first ISIS attack on American soil. I was raked over the coals not just on CNN, but also on Fox, which hadn’t yet switched sides then, and by conservative spokesmen who should have known better. I was defending the freedom of speech against violent intimidation. We never saw the hate and attacks that were directed at me in the wake of that event in Garland directed at the Fort Hood jihadi, the Times Square jihad bomber, the Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony jihad bomber, the Boston Marathon jihad bombers, the New York subway jihad bomber, or any other jihadis.
We have never seen the media hatred and anything like the attacks that were directed at me directed towards the jihadists who beheaded journalist after journalist (their own!), or towards those who beheaded hundreds of Christians, executed them because they were non-Muslims, or towards the perpetrators of the ongoing genocide of non-Muslims and secular Muslims in Muslim countries.
If we had a responsible media, they would stand for the freedom of speech as we did in Garland. If we had a responsible media, it would be applauding the fact that some people are still standing up and telling the truth about the election despite the immense pressure from powerful forces to stop doing so.
How do these people not understand this most basic, elemental concept of freedom?
I didn’t start this war for the freedom of speech, but I won’t lie down and submit, either. Twitter and the rest may heed Baron and ban me. But even then, this isn’t over. What remains to be seen is whether the free world will finally wake up and stand for the freedom of speech, or instead kowtow to this evil and continue to denounce me and others like me. What’s really frightening and astonishing about this assault on our freedom of speech is the number of people cheering on the silencing of dissent from the establishment line. I never expected that from my fellow Americans. But if the darkness of totalitarianism does come to the United States, it will be thanks to them and to the likes of Ethan Baron.
By Pamela Geller, Breitbart News, February 3, 2018:
The Daily Mailreported Thursday that “Tehran police have arrested 29 women for appearing in public without a headscarf as protests against the dress code in force since the Islamic revolution of 1979 intensify,” citing Iranian police.
“Those arrested were accused of public order offences and referred to the state prosecutor’s office, Iranian nnews [sic] agencies reported without elaborating,” the report noted.
Thursday was also “World Hijab Day,” which its organizers say is designed to “fight discrimination against Muslim women through awareness and education. It is a day on which women of diverse backgrounds and persuasions are encouraged to wear the Islamic head veil in solidarity with Muslim women.”
And so under the hashtag #StrongInHijab, Islamic supremacists and their willing gophers on the left – middle-class Western feminists – observed the first annual “World Hijab Day” yesterday. In one of the most pathetic and destructive shows of “virtue signaling,” non-Muslim women were urged to wear the garment of oppression, subjugation, and misogyny. While women are fighting and dying for their most basic rights in countries ruled under Islamic law, left-wing goons in the West are working to impose the misogyny of the sharia.
Look, no cares if you wear the hijab. No one cares if you wear purple hair, for that matter. But what about the women forced to wear the hijab. American girls like Jessica Mokdad, Amina Said, Sarah Said, Noor Almaleki, and so many others who were honor murdered for not wearing the hijab, for wanting to live free. Who speaks for them? The real world recognition day should be in tribute to women who are forced to wear the hijab, beaten and/or arrested if they don’t.
One campaign fighting against the enforced hijab in Iran set up by Ms. Masih Alinejad is My Stealthy Freedom. It is “dedicated to Iranian women inside the country who want to share their ‘stealthily’ taken photos without the veil,” and aims to be a “living archive” of their fight.
For years, my work in defense of Muslim women wanting to live free, be free, out from under the boot of sharia misogyny, was smeared, mocked, labeled “Islamophobic.” Girls such as Rifqa Bary and the now-dead girls, including Aqsa Parvez, Amina and Sarah Said, Jessica Mokdad, Noor Almaleki, et al, wanted to be free not to wear the hijab – in America. Our calls for such an elemental freedom were viciously attacked amid the constant cries of “racism” (Islam is not a race) and absurd claims that we were making it hard for Muslim women to wear the hijab. That was laughable, of course, because I never so much as addressed Muslim women and their choices, no matter how submissive and subdued, but this was uniformly repeated and chanted by Islamic supremacists and their leftwing lapdogs, most especially in the “feminist movement.”
And now we see an entire nation of women, Muslim women, standing up against the hijab. Are they, too, “Islamophobes”?
Remember: the Islamic Republic of Iran is the country that the Democrats are fighting for today, opposing President Trump’s efforts to stop Iran from arming itself with nuclear weapons.
As David Kurten in Breitbart News points out, punishments for removing a hijab can be brutal – Islamic regimes are known to physically beat women for non-compliance with their dress codes. This is true not only in the Middle East, but increasingly on a local level in the West.
A brave headteacher in a London primary school recently took action to ban children under the age of eight from wearing hijabs in her school. The school is in an area of east London that has undergone almost total population replacement of the white working-class there 50 years ago to mostly people of Bangladeshi and Pakistani Muslim origin today. The response of the local community was to organize a campaign of intimidation against her until she backed down.
World Hijab Day is a stunning indictment of the hypocrisy of the evil left as much as choosing the sharia-promoting, forced marriage advocate Linda Sarsour for their leader. The real “feminists” are the women who are fighting for a fraction, a sliver of the freedoms their Western “sisters” enjoy.
Here it is: the whole story of how, over the past six months, I worked to get a free speech panel at CPAC — the battles, their ensuing cowardice, and Terry Schilling, a particularly evil liar.
Co-opting my ideas (stealing, really). Terry Schilling’s organization (American Principles Project — the irony) says they’re organizing the panel anyway, without either me or Hoft. In reality, I organized the panel and gave it its focus; the APP had no hand in it. This is the height of irony: a panel on free speech from which not one, but two speakers have been banned. How can they claim to stand for free speech after dropping a speaker because of pressure from the authoritarian left? What value can a free speech panel have when two free speech leaders were banned from that panel?
The panel is now bitterly ironic. Social media censorship discussed in a heavily censored event.
With less than a week to go before the event, the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) finally agreed to give my organization, the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), a room for a panel discussion on how social media is censoring conservatives.
BY PAMELA GELLER, BREITBART NEWS, February 22, 2018:
This was the culmination of a process that began last September, when I first contacted Matt Schlapp of the American Conservative Union (ACU), CPAC’s sponsoring organization, and asked to become a CPAC sponsor so that I could host an event. I was willing to pay the full price for this sponsorship. CPAC did not allow that, but months later they did finally give me a room – and then put numerous obstacles in my way, finally pulling the plug altogether.
The deal they ultimately offered me came with a number of strings attached. One of their ACU sponsors, the American Principles Project (APP), had a room it was not using and would let us use it. But even then, this would not have been an event sponsored by AFDI. CPAC would not allow that. Instead, they said that my event had to be sponsored by the APP, a group I had never heard of before.
My unfamiliarity with the APP was of no import. The issue of social media censorship was paramount — the most critical issue facing conservatives today. So it was great news. We moved forward.
In nailing down the final details with CPAC, I put up with a great deal. CPAC officials put up one roadblock after another. They gave us a room, but after we announced where the event would be, they told us that room was not available. They moved us from a room for 150 people to a room for 70.
CPAC then told us that the featured speakers at my event would have to buy tickets to get in – and tickets were not cheap, running upwards of $300. Then late Tuesday night, I received a call from Terry Schilling, the ACU board member who runs the APP, demanding that I remove one of the speakers from the panel. I refused.
A panel on free speech is not going to drop a speaker for saying something that offended the left.
It was Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft they wanted banned, because of his post on the Florida shooting, arguing that some of the pro-gun control students who got so much media attention had likely been coached. For that, Hoft was attacked by the likes of Chelsea Clinton and Paul Krugman – and CPAC folded.
Whenever a leftist is attacked, the left circles the wagons and defends its own. Whenever the left attacks a conservative, the establishment right throws that conservative to the wolves.
Yet our panel had generated enormous interest. It was the most talked about panel at CPAC. The announcement on Breitbart had thousands of comments.
Schilling told Breitbart News that the cancellation was “completely Pamela’s call and completely avoidable.”
Yet by banning a speaker, APP effectively canceled the panel. They would not allow the panel without him, and they knew that I would never do the panel without him. They made it unavoidable.
Schilling also said: “I’m scrambling right now to put together a new panel on this, because she sabotaged it.”
What is he talking about? They never had a panel. They had an empty room. That’s how it was offered to me – as an empty room in which I could put a panel discussion. It was a small available space that came with APP’s CPAC sponsorship package. It was offered this past Monday. APP had nothing going on, “no new panel to put together.” I organized the entire event.
The Breitbart article further quoted Schilling: “‘I didn’t want the entire conversation to be about Jim Hoft. And guess what? Now it is.’” Yet the APP signed off on Jim when I sent Schilling the entire speaker list on Monday. Even worse, Breitbart reports that Schilling “acknowledged that Hoft had helped his father, Robert Schilling, in his successful run for Congress in 2010 — notably, by exposing the incumbent Democrat’s lack of regard for the U.S. Constitution — but said that ‘personalities’ should not be the focus of the panel.”
Schilling added: “This has nothing to do with CPAC. This was my call.”
Schilling is CPAC — he is an ACU board member. He and Dan Schneider cobbled together this last minute solution. And it was Schilling who made this all about Hoft, when Tucker Carlson and others have pointed out the same things Hoft has. CPAC is not going to throw Tucker under the bus. But Hoft and me? Sure.
This is just the latest in how CPAC has worked to sabotage true conservatives. Longtime Geller Report and AFDI members are familiar with my decade-long struggle with CPAC. This year’s imbroglio is unlike how the conference has shut me out in previous years. After I hosted wildly successful events there every year from 2008 through 2012, they began to bar me, coming up each year with new excuses. Last year they even told me that I was being denied because of the “negative press coverage” I had previously given them over being barred in the years before that.
It’s ironic. In a conversation last week with Dan Schneider of the ACU, I asked that we bury the hatchet and said that we had to unify and have a “big tent” if we were to defeat our common enemy. I said that of course we won’t agree on all issues, but that’s not who we are – that’s who the left is, marching in collectivist lockstep. I was respectful, deferential even. I was only concerned with the mission — to get this essential message to the grassroots. Those of us who have been at the front of the firing lines in the information battle-space must communicate with like-minded lovers of freedom — we must build an army. What could possibly be the motive of the ACU in blocking that?
Schneider told me that there were four qualifiers for acceptance and I passed them all, except that I had been critical of CPAC within the past year. I said that was a year ago, after the last CPAC. I was a couple of days before the one-year deadline. And it couldn’t be that CPAC did not permit dissent. He said of course it does, but CPAC didn’t like my “choice of words.”
And clearly, with all the roadblocks they constructed to make sure my event this year wouldn’t happen, they still don’t like dissent.
This issue — the suppression of the freedom of speech on social media — affects all of us on the right. In fact, it is the most critical issue of the day: if we are stripped of the means to communicate with one another, it’s all over. It was free people speaking freely on social media, outside of the reach of the media establishment, that got Donald Trump elected President of the United States.
The Democrats were onto the power of social media with Obama’s 2008 election, and here we are ten years later and the RINOs are still fighting not against the left, but against the most effective leaders on the right. The work my organization and I do is critical and singular. It addresses the most serious issues of our time. CPAC should be inviting us, not banning us.
We cannot accept the silencing of our colleagues. We can disagree, of course, and debate. But banning and shutting us down? No, that’s what the left does. That is not who we are.
Is there no limit to how low CNN will sink? CNN’s Don Lemon hosted a panel Thursday night featuring leftist turncoat Peter Beinart and “conservative” commentator Ben Ferguson, to discuss incoming National Security Adviser John Bolton’s supposed “anti-Muslim ties.” Beinart was on the warpath, attempting to smear Bolton by association with me, because he wrote the foreword to my 2010 book The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America, (written with Robert Spencer) and spoke at several of my rallies.
Beinart couldn’t tell the truth, which is that in The Post-American Presidency I accurately exposed Obama’s hatred for Israel, post-American internationalism, opposition to the freedom of speech, and much more — long before they became obvious to the world. So instead, Beinart, calling me “the most notorious anti-Muslim bigot,” lied repeatedly, claiming that in the book I said that Barack Obama was trying to impose Sharia law in the United States, and that Obama was a Muslim.
Neither of those claims is true. I wrote, accurately, that Obama was enabling the spread of Sharia in the U.S. by strong-arming communities into accepting mega-mosques in residential areas and using his Justice Department to fight for special privileges in workplaces and schools. He blamed the First Amendment for what he knew to be an al-Qaeda attack on our consulate in Benghazi, by falsely claiming it was a reaction to a YouTube video criticizing Muhammad. And his FBI had an undercover agent at the free speech event my organization organized in Garland, Texas in 2015, but no team there to stop the jihadis from attacking. (It was local police who stopped a potential massacre.)
In the book, I also detailed the fact that his father and stepfather were both Muslims (and in Islamic law, if your father is Muslim, you are, too), and that he clearly has an affinity for the Islamic faith. But that was all. Beinart had to distort and exaggerate what I said beyond recognition — all in his desperation to smear Bolton by association with me.
Did anyone on that panel actually read my book? Almost certainly not. After Beinart lied brazenly about what the book said, the “conservative” panelist Ben Ferguson said that he would not have advised Bolton to write the foreword. Why not? Why is Ferguson sanctioning and validating the smear job of the kind that the left has carried out on every effective voice for freedom and individual rights this country? That book was prescient. I was right about everything I wrote — the book was an unheeded warning.
Ferguson should have done his homework and have been ready to tell Beinart and the CNN audience what my book actually said, and how leftist smear organizations such as the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) have for years been spreading the lies that Beinart repeated Thursday night. Ferguson could have mentioned how the SPLC is trying to destroy legitimate conservative organizations by lumping them in with the KKK and neo-Nazis as “hate groups,” and that it refuses to classify the violent leftists of Antifa as a “hate group.” But don’t expect a CNN house conservative to know how to fight back hard with the truth in the face of the endless barrage of lies.
The last panelist, Keith Boykin, was even worse, asking why we should highlight Muslim extremism, and why should we even talk about it, since “we have horrible relations with Muslim countries.”
The CNN segment bordered on the comical when Beinart, with his record of anti-Israel polemic, said, “I’m saying this as a Jew” — and of course this, too, went unchallenged.
Beinart called my rallies against the Ground Zero Mosque — a project which 70% of Americans opposed — an “anti-mosque rally,” and acted as if they were some egregious offense. Another lie from Beinart was that I posted vile videos of Muslims having sex with animals. I never posted any such videos. And he also claimed that I “repeatedly called Muslims savages.” This was another outright lie. Most likely this smear merchant was referring to an ad that my organization, the American Freedom Defense Initiative, won free speech court battles several years ago to display in the New York subway system and on buses in New York City and elsewhere. The ad read: “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat jihad.”
The savages referred to in the ad, as I explained repeatedly when the ad first appeared, are clearly the Palestinian jihadis who murder Israelis on buses and in restaurants, and while enjoying a Shabbat dinner in their homes — and the other Palestinians in Gaza who pass out candies to celebrate these slaughters. If someone thinks that I was referring to all Muslims, they must think that all Muslims support this savage behavior — in which case, it is they who are “Islamophobic,” not I.
Beinart likened me to KKK leader David Duke, saying I was the “equivalent of David Duke for Muslims.” Why is that? Why wouldn’t the equivalent of David Duke for Muslims be Osama bin Laden or Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi? Why are those who shine a light on Islamic texts and teachings that incite Muslim to wage jihad the enemy? We work with Muslims who wish to live free — how is that like David Duke?
Of course, CNN would never have dreamed of actually having me on to defend myself against these charges.
I demand a retraction. Don Lemon allowed a libelist to defame me repeatedly on his show. Has CNN departed so completely from any sense of fairness and accuracy that they not only air these libels without any effective opposition, but will allow them to stand unchallenged? President Trump was absolutely right when he labeled CNN “fake news,” and their lying about me and the positions I have taken in order to smear John Bolton is just the latest example among many of CNN’s cavalier attitudes toward the truth and eagerness to disseminate the wildest falsehoods in pursuit of its leftist agenda.
At this point, CNN has about as much credibility as Weekly World News, the supermarket tabloid that claims, among other things, that numerous Congressmen and Senators are space aliens.
The New York Timespublished a piece Thursday, “Can Islamic and European Civilizations Coexist?” and it is incredible (as in beyond belief, hard to believe, far-fetched, implausible).
The headline leads you to believe that, finally, maybe there might be a discussion of this existential question with a (sadly) obvious answer, but that would be delusional. In reality, the Times is not asking the question. It mocks you into thinking the question is a legitimate one. The real title should be: “Muslim Grievances, Why We Are Right to Whine After Jihadis Attack.”
The piece is not written by a legitimate, reasoned, and brilliant scholar of Islam like, say, Ibn Waraq, Bat Ye’or, or Robert Spencer. No, this absurd propaganda is by one of the Times’ resident shills for Islam, Atossa Araxia Abrahmian, coming in form of a review of Journey Into Europe: Islam, Immigration, and Identity, the latest installment in Islamic studies professor Akbar Ahmed’s series on Muslims around the world.
The finger-pointing at the infidel for the violence and holy wars of devout Muslims is at its apex in this indictment of Western compassion and open borders. And Muslims, of course, are the real victims:
The bulk of Ahmed’s research comes from a listening tour he embarked on with a team of researchers between 2013 and 2017. They interviewed imams, community leaders, activists and ordinary people across the continent about the challenges European Muslims face today. Their findings are predictably grim. Across the board, interviewees reported feeling marginalized, stereotyped and prevented from professional advancement because of their background. Despite their multitude of experiences, they ended up lumped into the crude categories that conflate terrorists, Muslims and refugees; Arabs, Persians and Africans; recent immigrants with no facility in the local language and second-generation doctoral students fluent at the highest level.
“Many patterns of discrimination,” Ahmed notes, “are rooted in colonial legacies that vary by country[.]”
Ah, yes colonial legacies – nothing about Islamic imperialism and annihilationism. Nothing about the centuries of jihadi wars, land appropriations, cultural annihilations, and enslavements. Robert Spencer’s much anticipated tome on Islamic history, The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS, details this very thing and should be part of every school curriculum in the country.
This whole piece is an extraordinary lie, and the Left’s relentless promotion of the big lies have rendered us ill-prepared for what’s coming.
In this “book review,” Abrahamian tells us that the author was invited to speak at a mosque in Athens.
What he saw there took him aback. The facility was less a house of God than an underground parking lot “of a particularly sinister aspect[.]”
“These men had nothing to lose, and I could imagine the most desperate among them prepared to lash out in an unpredictable and even murderous manner,” Ahmed writes in Journey Into Europe. “This, I felt, was Europe’s ticking time bomb.”
Oh yes, because the mosque in Athens, Greece — a country whose suffering at the hands of Muslim invaders is incalculable and little spoken of (like the Armenians) — is not pretty, it only makes sense that the Muslims destroy Europe. Are we to believe that if the Greeks built shrines to their executioners, all would be well?
So the jihad in Europe is the Greeks’ fault, but Christians in Muslim countries who can’t pray and whose houses of worship are systematically destroyed have no recourse, no voice, no New York Times article that speaks the truth of their oppression and destruction. On the contrary, in the view of the New York Times, the Christians are the problem.
The complaining and the whining continues. Ahmed, in this book, says:
Pakistanis in Britain are better integrated than, say, French citizens of Algerian and Moroccan descent. But even absent empire, many of the Muslims he speaks to find it hard, if not impossible, to fit in. “In Denmark they strangle you slowly, slowly,” one interviewee proclaims.
Pakistanis in the UK are better integrated? Thousands of English girls are groomed by Muslim rape gangs which the police never pursued for fear of being perceived as “islamophobic.” Daily acts of jihad written off as some generic form of extremism. This passes for integration?
Ahmed “hopes Europeans can form new, hybrid identities that broaden the criteria for who belongs.” Where have Muslim societies ever allowed a hybrid of identity? What he is saying is, he hopes that Europeans will go quietly into the cold Islamic night.
Using Islamic historic lies, Abrahmian bolsters his argument:
Europe happens to have a homegrown example of this philosophy in medieval Andalusia, when people of multiple faiths in parts of modern-day Portugal and Spain enjoyed convivencia, a state of relative pluralism, peace and prosperity under Muslim rule. “The answer to the violence and tensions between religions in Europe today and the sense of alienation and confusion in Muslim youth is to revive and strengthen the Andalusian model as an alternative to that of a monolithic tribal society,” Ahmed writes.
Andalusia was hardly golden for the Christians and Jews living under Islamic rule:
Islamic Spain was far from being a paradise. Cordoba was no “ornament of the world.” Maimonides had to flee the city because of the persecution of the Almohads, but even before the Alhomads the treatment of non-Muslims was dismal. When the Jewish viziers Samuel ibn Naghrela and his son Joseph were both murdered, and then the entire Jewish community of Grenada was massacred as well – yes, in Grenada, home of the “Alhambra” of which Washington Irving sung — it was not something without deep Islamic roots. (more here)
Abrahmian closes with this pearl:
The fundamental message of “Journey Into Europe” is that throughout history, Islamic and European civilizations have often been not just compatible, but complementary. It’s crucial to acknowledge their shared past to reject today’s resurgent tribalism. The stakes, as Ahmed puts it, are “Andalusia or dystopia.”
Intellectually, his conclusion is hard to argue with. But since 9/11, popular perceptions of Islam in the West have been informed by emotion, not facts or reason.
That’s true. And this New York Times article is more of that emotional, fact-free propaganda.
This is an outrage, but it is common nationwide: the Daily Caller News Foundation reports that Mountain Ridge Middle School in West Virginia is “instructing junior high students to write the Islamic profession of faith ostensibly to practice calligraphy.” Students are made to write out the Shahada, which states: “There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.”This is exactly what I warned about in my book, Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance, in the chapter “The Mosqueing of the Public Schools.”In order to convert to Islam, one says the shahada. Saying the shahada makes you a Muslim. The shahada is what is on the black flag of jihad.
No non-Muslim student should be forced to write or say the shahada without the qualifier “Muslims believe that…” This is because it is a statement of faith. If the school exercise is requiring students to write it, it should be clear from the wording of the exercise that this is Islamic faith, not the student’s faith. That distinction has been glossed over in many, many school textbook presentations.
This is in West Virginia, not Baghdad. And it’s a problem not just in West Virginia – it’s a national problem.
Rich Penkoski, the father of a Mountain Ridge student, contacted me and explained the situation further. He sent me the packets the school gave out for the Jewish and the Christian lessons and commented:
Notice no bible verses, no reciting the 10 commandments or the Lord’s prayer. No practicing writing in Hebrew (not even the 10 commandments) as compared to the Islamic packet.
There are no statements of faith, nothing asking the students to write it or practice in any of the Jewish or Christian rituals.
Furthermore the principal of Mountain Ridge Middle School Dr. Branch has used my words against me by saying the teacher did tell the students about the Lord’s prayer (my daughter as well as 1 other said this is false)[.] He is using my arguments I made to him yesterday to protect the teacher.
The teacher today told the students the assignment was optional. My daughter as well as other students were under the impression all the packet assignments were mandatory (the Jewish one and the Christian ones were mandatory).
I wrote to Dr. Branch to share with him the resource that Miss Hinson used and point out that the material she gave the students did not include all the faith aspects for Christianity. The students received 2 pages for Christianity from this resource while all the Islamic sections were left intact.
Here’s the link for you to review. You will notice all the faith elements were left out for Judaism and Christianity while the Islamic section was left the way it’s presented.
So she decided to use the extra resources for Islam and the school is saying that’s not indoctrination or proselytizing? The faith aspects and the same considerations were not given to the others as they were for Islam. This actually further proves my point that Islam was afforded special privilege over the others.
The school is backtracking and being deceptive to try and weasel out of this. The teacher today clarified things for the students but that still does not excuse the fact that they are teaching the Islamic faith and asking the kids to participate in Sharia. Look at the Islamic packet again. They are asking the kids to write the beginning of Surahs. The teacher still has not corrected the error that calligraphy was started by the arabs.
They are doubling down and only after being called on it are they trying to backtrack.
Rich Penkoski is hardly the first to protest this egregious submission to the most vicious and brutal ideology on the face of the Earth. In Volusia County, Florida, hundreds protested Islamic lessons in their “World History” text, a Common Core-approved high school history textbook.
With an entire chapter dedicated to the virtues of Islam and not a single chapter for Christianity, the textbook had Floridians in a frenzy. And who is the biggest pusher of Common Core besides leftist progressives? The Islamic Society of North America, a Muslim Brotherhood front group, along with the Hamas-tied Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). In Florida, CAIR is on the offensive (more here).
We have seen the increasing Islamization of the public-school curriculum. History lessons in Islam are dawah – proselytizing for Islam. Large public-school publishers have been bought by the Saudis.
In West Virginia, it gets even worse. Rich Penkoski has alerted me to the latest development in the forced Islamization of his children’s school curriculum: after the Daily Caller and Geller Report exposed what was happening, Mountain Ridge administrators and teachers began messaging parents who were sharing the story, asking them to remove their posts.
What do they have to hide? Apparently, a great deal.
Worse still, Penkoski is now being threatened by students who attend the school with his daughter. (And who is behind them? Unidentified “adult friends.”)
He sent this message to me:
A student in the school threatened to get her adult friends to come to my home and kill me by stabbing me in the chest and ripping my organs out. They told my daughter “we are gonna get some people and kill your dad.” This student, who is known to me but whom I cannot name because she is a minor, has given students our address and is encouraging them to come to my home over this whole thing. Another student told my daughter that she and the first student and her adult friends are going to kill me and carve a satanic star in my chest and rip out my organs.
They then threatened to hang my 3-year-old and 1-year-old and kidnap my 14-year-old.
All this in school today because of the articles.
This is not a joke and needs to be investigated. I have contacted the school’s principal, Dr. Branch, and I trust that he will take this matter seriously and deal with it appropriately.
Is the principal acting on this? And do the police have any interest in this? Or would that be “islamofauxbic”?
An article, “What the Red Pill Means for Radicals,” published on June 7 in the ironically named publication Fair Observer might have passed unnoticed as yet another uninformed, biased and ideologically motivated attack on all who ever get labeled “extremists.” The piece is so riddled with non-sequiturs and wild generalizations that it seems almost cruel to rip it to shreds.
But the author is Bharath Ganesh. A little online research reveals that Ganesh is currently working at the Oxford Internet Institute — at the esteemed Oxford University — on a research project funded by the European Union to devise ways to disrupt the “far right” online. The project in question is under the banner of the Vox-Pol Network of Excellence, which “is designed to comprehensively research, analyse, debate, and critique issues surrounding violent online political extremism (VOPE).”
This research group is only interested in violent extremism – according to their website. “The qualifier ‘violent’ is therefore employed here to describe VOX-Pol’s interest, which is in those that employ or advocate physical violence against other individuals and groups to forward their political objectives. The extremist nature of the politics in which VOX-Pol is interested is thus not decided upon by project participants, but by the decision of those involved in particular types of politics to advocate or employ violence to advance their goals.”
Note the claims – utterly disingenuous, as it turns out – that the labeling of certain people or groups as “violent extremists” is entirely due to their own behavior; in other words, don’t worry, folks, it’s all scientifically objective.
This research is being used to advise companies who host online platforms, such as Facebook, as well as governments, on how to stamp out online radicalization – using strategies such as working out ways of preventing people from seeing material posted that is deemed unsuitable in some way, or offering them alternative “nice” things to look at. This is a seriously important issue. The people and political powers behind such initiatives are manipulating behavior online and literally controlling how people think and get information. They are the appointed guardians of the online hoi polloi.
But who guards the guardians?
For if Dr. Ganesh is in charge, we have some very worrying questions to ask. One could start from the observation that the article is certainly not an academic piece, and gives no concrete evidence for any of the sweeping claims it makes about the so-called “alt-right” and the “manosphere”; nor does it, as any academic should do, attempt to test ideas and consider alternative explanations. (Oddly enough, this makes it rather like the groups it claims to criticize.)
And the label of “violent extremist” turns out to be used very generously. Ganesh makes wild leaps and inferences. He talks of Darren Osborne, the perpetrator of the vehicular attack on Finsbury Park Mosque. This was a heinous crime, and should rightly be condemned. But why did Osborne do this, according to Ganesh? The attack “was executed after he had become indignant after watching a BBC broadcast on child sexual exploitation and turned to social media to make sense of it. He found a narrative from British counter-jihad groups closely aligned with the alt-right, such as Britain First and the founder of the English Defence League Tommy Robinson.” The British counter-jihad movement is thus swept into the same group of violent extremists as Osborne, because Ganesh “knows” they encouraged him.
The BBC broadcast was the drama based on real life, Three Girls, which showed real-life events of three of the (very many) victims of the Rochdale Muslim rape gangs. Ganesh somehow knows precisely what went on in Osborne’s mind. Rather than thinking that it was outrage at the behavior of the gangs of Muslim men of Pakistani background who abused the girls portrayed in Three Girls that caused Osborne to lose his mind and commit his terrible crime, Ganesh blames Obsorne’s act on the likes of Tommy Robinson. Yet Robinson explicitly fights AGAINST political violence. What “narrative from British counter-jihad groups” can one find which suggests driving vehicles into innocent Muslims standing outside a mosque? I’m sure if there was any, Ganesh would, as a researcher at an elite institution, be able to find it. But there is none offered – only surmise and Ganesh’s mindreading techniques. I suppose if you’re paid to fight online extremism, you’d better find it, or you’re out of a job and short of academic publication.
We have also the ridiculous idea that Tommy Robinson is “alt-right.” He, in fact, describes himself as a centrist – he’s said he agrees with Labour on some things, the Tories on other things, and he left the EDL precisely because he didn’t like the infiltration by the far right. He shows no hint of racism or of white supremacism.
The writer of this shoddy article is working at one of the most elite universities in the world, on research funded by the European Union, and giving advice based on this sloppy thinking to those who are in charge of manipulating and policing the communications and information we have online.
We have to ask. Is it simply a coincidence that Tommy Robinson is now in prison, and that a “researcher” who presents such a misleading account of Robinson is currently actively engaged in consultation with Oxford University and the European Union in advising how to disrupt Robinson’s activities, reinforcing the lies and misrepresentations about him to those in power?
There’s more. Bharath Ganesh’s profile tells us this: “During his Ph.D., Bharath was also a Senior Researcher at Tell MAMA, a national project dedicated to mapping and monitoring anti-Muslim hate in the United Kingdom. He has given evidence in the Houses of Parliament on governance, extremism, gender, and hate crime and authored a number of reports in this area.”
Is it simply a coincidence that this “researcher,” prior to coming to Oxford University, worked for Tell Mama, that factory for the production of bogus claims about Islamophobia?
Who runs the Internet runs the world. Is this a partnership between Europe’s governments, the Internet giants, and Islamic influence?
Things don’t just happen. They are made to happen. There is a network of linked actors promoting this “far right/Islamophobia” discourse.
Not only has “islamophobia” become the default argument for any criticism of jihad slaughter and sharia brutality but Islamic terror attacks have become welcome windows of opportunities for Islamic supremacists to stage mass media islamophobia attacks in the press in concert with dawah proselytizing.
Conservative individuals and groups frequently report that they are banned, blocked, or shadowbanned from social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Many of these people frequently complain that they are labelled “far right” when in fact, they are not even right-wing, let alone “far right.” It is increasingly being realized that there is a serious problem here. So let’s look at some details of how this is achieved, and how deep the problem goes. Many in academia are fully in collusion with this.
An article published this month demonstrates without a shadow of a doubt how deeply embedded the lazy and erroneous ideological assumptions of many academics are. “The transnationalisation of far right discourse on Twitter: Issues and actors that cross borders in Western European democracies“ is typical of many such articles. It could well pass unnoticed by all but a few scholars, especially since it’s locked behind an expensive paywall, written in academic gobbledygook, and littered with mysterious diagrams reminiscent of the work of the alchemists. Yet this article is worth scrutiny, for it’s one piece of the puzzle of how the trick of labelling people as “far right” and as “Islamophobic” is pulled off by the “intelligentsia” and the establishment. It’s easy to assume “academics are locked in their Ivory Towers doing little other than talking to each other, so let’s ignore them.” But not all are. Some are talking to governments and some are talking to tech companies, and there are consequences.
The islamization of the Ivys: Historic revisionism and Jew-hatred:
Pamela Geller: Brown University Celebrates ‘Palestinians’ on ‘Indigenous Peoples’ Day’
Last week, Brown University’s Office of Diversity and Multicultural Affairs sent out greeting for “Indigenous Peoples’ Day Weekend,” which has replaced Fall Weekend — Columbus Day weekend — in the uber-politically correct academic environment. Brown’s action is part of the larger effort by the academic left to cast Columbus as a villain and focus on Native Americans as sainted martyrs.
But as if this celebration weren’t politicized enough, Brown made it poisonously so by including the “Palestinians” among the “indigenous people” whose plight was being observed. But what makes this story extra insidious is the fact that the school took this anti-American movement and attempted to turn it into an anti-Israel day as well. The left is so desperate to attack Israel that they twisted their own attack on the U.S. to do so.
“Indigenous Peoples’ Day (IPD),” explained the Office of Diversity and Multicultural Affairs, “celebrates the resilience and accomplishments of Indigenous people and acknowledges the contemporary struggles indigenous communities face today. Further, IPD is an intervention against erasure, a principle barrier to the improvement of indigenous sovereignty and health status.”
The struggling indigenous people in question, according to the Diversity Office, included “567 Federally Recognized tribes, 61 State Recognized tribes,” as well as “Hawaiians and the people indigenous to its territories in the Caribbean and Pacific Oceans.” Many of these groups, the announcement went on, “experience profound disparities in health care access and health status compared to the general population, resulting in elevated rates of diabetes, liver disease, and other chronic diseases,” which are “exacerbated by a significant shortage of primary care physicians in Indigenous communities and a long-standing mistrust of the American health care system rooted in a history of genocide and forced assimilation.”
After speaking exclusively of the difficulties of indigenous people in the United States and its territories, however, the Office of Diversity and Multicultural Affairs suddenly included an oblique and gratuitous swipe at Israel: “From Standing Rock to Palestine, Indigenous communities across the world continue to experience the pernicious effects of settler-colonialism on their sovereignty, their health, and their access to their traditional lands and practices.”
Zulfi Hoxha is reportedly “a senior commander of Islamic State and one of the faces of the group’s recruitment efforts.” He was also “the son of an Albanian-American pizza-shop owner from New Jersey.”
By Pamela Geller, Breitbart, January 14th, 2019:
Zulfi Hoxha, a.k.a. Abu Hamza al-Amriki, who was involved in the plot to behead me for daring to defend the freedom of speech and stand up to violent intimidation by sponsoring a Muhammad cartoon contest, is still at large. And a year after a series of shocking revelations about his activities and the jihad network in America, nothing has been done.
It was an extraordinary article to have appeared in the left-wingAtlantic: “A New American Leader Rises in ISIS,” by Seamus Hughes, Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, and Bennett Clifford, published on January 13, 2018. What made it extraordinary was that it exploded so many of the core assumptions about the jihad terror threat, assumptions held not only by the media but also by the law enforcement establishment.
For example, it explodes the omnipresent myth that jihadis in the U.S. and Europe are “radicalized” on the Internet: “While it is often tempting,” the article says, “to assume that individuals are ‘radicalized online’ through their consumption of propaganda, this is rarely the case. More commonly, the internet allows people to make contacts with and plug themselves into pre-existing, real-world recruitment and radicalization networks.”
Hughes, Meleagrou-Hitchens, and Clifford also revealed that a “shared interest in video games may have been one of the first things that brought Hoxha together with David Wright,” who was sentenced to 28 years in prison for his role in the plot to behead me.
The video games were not an idle pastime:
Islamic State’s 2015 instructional manual for its Western supporters, “How to Survive in the West,” includes references to video games as a method of training to join the group. More importantly, it may have brought together Wright and Hoxha, who unlike Wright successfully followed through on his intentions to support the Islamic State using violence… During Wright’s trial, prosecutors argued that he used several video games, including Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare and other titles to “virtually prepare” for jihad. His defense attorneys, however, painted Wright, who weighed over 400 pounds at the time of the conspiracy, as a “fat, failed loser” who used video games as a substitute for real-life violent activity, according to the trial transcript. Unfortunately, one can be both a gamer who veers towards violence and weigh in at 400 pounds of loneliness and isolation.
This makes sense of what happened: Wright spent his days playing video games and thus appearing to everyone around him to be a fat loser — when, in fact, he was training for jihad.
The “fat, failed loser” Wright also financed Hoxha’s flight to Syria to train with ISIS: “The court records show that prior to Hoxha’s departure, David Wright put him in touch with another American Islamic State supporter, his uncle Usaamah Rahim, and together they began helping Hoxha as he prepared to travel in the spring of 2015. The two men raised money for Hoxha’s plane ticket to Istanbul by selling Rahim’s laptop on Craigslist.”
Their interactions revealed that these were trained jihadis, not idiots or pikers: “Rahim contacted Wright on Skype with instructions from Hoxha. ‘AsSalaamu A’laikum Zulfi asked me if you could delete his name off Skype,’ Rahim writes. ‘But before you do it, if you have any saved messages to him go to “tools,” go to “options,” then click on “privacy,” and click “clear history.”’ These steps removed the interactions between Hoxha and Wright on Skype, but did not clear the metadata that would later be used in Wright’s trial.”
Yet “at the time of his death, Rahim was portrayed as just another incompetent ‘lone wolf’ Islamic State supporter with no serious connections to any real-world group members,” the authors continue.
Even after investigators arrested Wright, who at the time was unemployed and essentially immobile due to his weight, and [fellow jihadi Nicholas] Rovinski, who had cerebral palsy, this “cell” of Islamic State supporters is still viewed largely as an isolated group of three friends acting on deluded fantasies. While Rahim, Wright, and Rovinski were undoubtedly amateurs, we now know that they formed part of a wider network that was in communication with Islamic State operatives in Syria and had facilitated the travel of Hoxha, who would go on to rise in the group’s ranks.
Far from being “losers,” jihadis from America are generally skilled and sophisticated: “High-ranking and capable American members of the group present a unique threat. It is these figures who often act as nodes for terrorist networks, using their connections and influence to help recruit as well as plan attacks in their home countries.”
The article, in sum, was a complete refutation of everything that has been said and reported about the plot to behead me, and about much more that is assumed about jihadi “lone wolves” in the West and how they are “radicalized.” Loser “lost youth” don’t go on to attain senior rank in the Islamic State without having some specialized acumen. “Islamic State’s American commanders may be limited in number— but the trajectory of the group shows that small numbers can wreak great damage.” Yes, indeed.
Abu Hamza al-Amriki is still out there. Where is he? Are our intelligence and law enforcement agencies still too hamstrung by political correctness and wishful thinking to pursue him in any serious way?
Activist/blogger Pamela Geller is escorted into Associated Press headquarters for an interview, Thursday, May 07, 2015 in New York. Since September 11, 2001, the self-described apolitical mother of four who once paid little mind to world affairs, has become one of the nations most outspoken critics of Islamic extremism, taking the hard-edge view that such extremism sprouts not from fringe elements but the tenets of the religion itself. (AP Photo/Peter Morgan)
Pamela Geller: Dallas Billboard Company Refuses My Ad Offering Help to At-Risk Muslim Girls
Mark Lennihan/AP; Insets: ICNA, Pamela Geller
It is quickly becoming impossible to criticize any aspect of Islam, no matter how violent or repressive, in the public square. My latest billboard battle is a case in point.
A month ago, a number of concerned Texans wrote me about a hijab promotion campaign on Outfront (previously known as CBS Outdoor) billboards running in Dallas. Local media wrote it up in glowing terms, of course.
KERA News ran a puff piece with the enthusiastic headline “Billboard Campaign In Dallas Aims To Dispel Misconceptions About Islam And The Hijab.” It featured a large photo of the billboard itself, which read “Respect – Honor – Strength. HIJAB. The Dress of Modesty.” It also offered a phone number for those with “questions about Islam and women.” Not a word, of course, about the many girls and women who have been threatened and even killed for not wearing the hijab in a practice commonly known as “honor killing.” This ad’s use of the word “honor” is especially cynical.
And then, of course, comes the post-ad followup describing horrific responses to the ad. The New York Post just ran yet another Muslims-are-victims-of-Islamophobia piece: “Muslim call center gets hundreds of hate calls for promoting hijabs on billboard.”
American media companies run these ads without hesitation, for fear of violating Islamic mores and traditions and appearing “Islamophobic” — a thought-crushing device designed to silence criticism of Islam, thereby enforcing sharia. The ads garner media attention, paint Muslims as victims, admonish Americans for things they haven’t done, and decry a non-existent epidemic of Islamophobia.
This billboard is the handiwork of the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA). Neither KERA News nor any other news outlet that ran glowing coverage of this billboard bothered to mention that ICNA, according to terrorism expert Steven Emerson, and a report by Discover the Networks, is linked to radial Islamic movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood, the pro-Sharia organization from which Hamas and al-Qaeda come.
Says Emerson: “The ICNA’s hatred of the Jews is so fierce that it taunted them with a repetition of what Hitler did to them… The ICNA openly supports militant Islamic fundamentalist organizations, praises terror attacks, issues incendiary attacks on western values and policies, and supports the imposition of Sharia.”
ICNA’s January 2019 conference, with 20,000 attendees, featured a disquieting roster of participants and speakers with extremist views on slavery, homosexuality and Jews.
My organization, the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), on the other hand, is a human rights group dedicated to freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and individual rights. We have been targeted for death multiple times and escaped death in recent assassination attempts because of our work in defense of freedom.
AFDI submitted an ad to run on Dallas billboards right next to ICNA’s hijab “honor and respect” ad. But as of this writing, I have had to revise the ad over a dozen times to comply with Outfront (CBS) Outdoor’s constantly changing ad policy.
The first ad I submitted featured photos of a number of Muslim girls who were honor-murdered by their families for refusing to wear the hijab. Above the photos was the legend, “Muslim Girls Killed By Their Families Because They Refused Hijab,” and underneath, “Are you forced to wear hijab? Is your family threatening you? We can help. Go to FightforFreedom.us.”
Outdoor wouldn’t allow that; its General Manager Zack Danielson wrote me: “Good morning. I just received word that we cannot accept this copy due to the top tag line ‘Muslim Girls Killed By Their Families Because They Refused Hijab’. Is there any way you all can remove that line and leave everything else as is? Thank you.”
I responded: “But they were honor murdered by their families because they did not want to wear hijab – they wanted to be free. If I take that line out nobody understands who those girls are and by the way there from America and Canada. So what would be acceptable? ‘Honor killed by their families’ Would that work?”
To that, Senior Account Executive Sammy Tamporello replied: “I understand what you are saying, but as mentioned below whether I agree or not ultimately I cannot post creative that goes against our companies [sic] policy/approval process. Anything with the killed, murdered, or type of violence is not going to get approved.”
So I changed the top line to “Muslim Girls Who Refused the Hijab – R.I.P.” Tamporello responded: “Thanks for your assistance. If you all can eliminate the RIP, we will be good to go and I can send over the contract.” I said: “Sammy, I cannot eliminate the RIP – those girls are dead. How else would you have me convey that message? How about, ‘Rest in peace.’” Then I sent in a new ad reading: “In Memory of the Muslim Girls Who Refused Hijab.”
That was refused as well. Tamporello wrote: “Our corporate office just informed me that the top line needs to be removed or needs to not include a ‘death reference’ i.e. In Memory, RIP, or Condolences, etc.”
Then I wrote: “Sammy, Can you explain how Outfront is running a campaign promoting the hijab but refuses to allow a campaign offering help to Muslim girls who don’t want to wear the hijab? Why? Why would Outftont take sides against freedom in Texas of all places. What wording would Outfront if not in memoriam? Is there a decision maker I can speak with?” To that, Zack Danielson wrote: “We are happy to seek approval for your campaign with a message that is positive in nature. If you would like to send me the revised creative I would be happy to pass it along to our legal team.”
I answered: “Zack, Isn’t the message positive? We offer sanctuary to girls whose life is in dangerous. Saving a life. What could be more positive than that?” Danielson responded: “How about offering a positive message that speaks to that exactly, with a tagline that reads: We offer a sanctuary to young woman / girls who may feel that there life is in danger.” Note that in Danielson’s “positive” ad, all reference to the girls being in danger because they refused to wear hijab was removed.
This is in Texas, where Amina and Sarah Said were honor-murdered in cold blood by their father, according to police. But we can’t talk about it. Nothing remotely critical of Islam can be discussed.
Finally, I submitted an ad reading: “Are you forced to wear hijab? Is your family threatening you?” And underneath the photos: “These girls could have been saved.”
To that updated submission, Outdoor has not yet responded.
Our ad is a public service announcement, and public service ads offering help to women threatened by domestic violence run all the time. But when it comes to the cause of Islamic honor, suddenly we must be “positive” and show “respect.”
We’re not going to let these appeasers and useful idiots stop us.
NBC News reported Thursday that “several Democratic presidential candidates will skip the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s policy conference this year after a prominent progressive group called on them to boycott the event.” This has been a rapid descent. In 2017, Kamala Harris said it was “an honor” to speak before AIPAC. But as quickly as the Democrats’ Jew-hatred is being normalized now, it has also been a long time coming. I warned about it over ten years ago.
The candidates who are boycotting AIPAC include senators Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and Bernie Sanders, as well as Beto O’Rourke, Pete Buttigieg, Julian Castro, and Howard Schultz. According to NBC, “the candidates’ decisions to skip the prominent pro-Israel lobbying group’s conference come one day after liberal group MoveOn.org called on all 2020 presidential candidates to steer clear of the event.”
The Democrats are now officially the party of Jew-hatred. This is largely due to the disastrous presidency of Barack Hussein Obama. It was Obama, with his consistently shabby treatment of Benjamin Netanyahu and relentless demonization of Israel, who mainstreamed and normalized anti-Semitism among the Democrats.
I warned about it all. In May 2008, before Obama was elected, a reader invited me to a senior-level AIPAC event at Cipriani’s. I went up to the Executive Director, Howard Kohr, and said that I understood AIPAC was “nonpartisan, but Obama will be lethal for the Jews.” Kohr scoffed. I went on to relate all that I had unearthed in my two years of relentless investigation of Obama, and I laid it out, point by point, fact by fact, with as little hyperbole as possible. Kohr shook his head. He would have none of it. We are nonpartisan, he insisted. To what point are you nonpartisan? If there is a candidate, a party, an official that is a Jew-hater, do you maintain neutrality, like Switzerland? He just smiled and walked away.
I meticulously documented Obama’s Jew-hatred, and his entourage of Jew-haters, in my book The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War On America. I noted in that book that the American Jews who voted so overwhelmingly for Obama could have and should have seen his anti-Semitism and how he would normalize Jew-hatred in the Democrat Party. Take, for example, of a March 2007 account by the pro-Palestinian blogger Ali Abunimah at the the Electronic Intifadah website. Abunimah recounted how Obama had adopted a pro-Israel position as a matter of political expediency as his national aspirations developed. “The last time I spoke to Obama,” Abunimah recalled, “was in the winter of 2004 at a gathering in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood. He was in the midst of a primary campaign to secure the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate seat he now occupies. But at that time polls showed him trailing.”
When Abunimah greeted him, Obama “responded warmly,” and volunteered an apology for not being more outspoken against Israel: “Hey,” said the candidate to Abunimah, “I’m sorry I haven’t said more about Palestine right now, but we are in a tough primary race. I’m hoping when things calm down I can be more up front.” Abunimah added: “He referred to my activism, including columns I was contributing to the The Chicago Tribune critical of Israeli and US policy, ‘Keep up the good work!’”
Abunimah’s piece — and Obama’s numerous anti-Semitic associations — got little attention. Throughout his life Barack Obama has been close friends with numerous virulent anti-Semites: Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, Khalid al-Mansour, Rashid Khalidi and others.
It may be an old cliché, but it’s true: show me your friends, and I’ll show you who and what you are.
American Jews should have noted this, and noted it well. Instead, they fell for Obama’s smooth talk. But when Obama became president, he was true to his word to Abunimah, and turned viciously against Israel. And the whole world should have seen it coming.
Everything that is happening now in the Democratic Party — the relentless pandering to the Jew-haters Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the abject failure and collapse of the effort to rebuke Omar for her Jew-hatred, even indirectly, the boycott of AIPAC by the presidential candidates — I predicted and warned about. All my warnings are coming true. What does Howard Kohr have to say now?
On Sunday the BBC reported about another horrible news story from London: a knifeman went on a stabbing spree of “defenceless” people in London. The story revealed less about the incident it was purporting to report on than it did about our age of anti-reality and delusion.
In this age, it is not difficult to step back and observe almost indiscernible but seismic historical shifts in the making — not in the big-bang news events, but in the nitty-gritty details of the social fabric of our daily lives, where life happens. It is usually not so easy to detect such subtleties, let alone observe the silent measures a nation or a civilization takes when it quietly but most decidedly has… given up. One need not be an anthropologist to detect seismic changes in human behavior or societies.
First, it’s language. Language is key. Subtle and not-so-subtle restrictions are placed on what would offend the invading force with its hair-trigger sensibilities. These restrictions are rigorously enforced by quisling societal institutions — media, academia, and so forth. So, for example, “Muslim” is replaced with “South Asian” or “Asian,” with no fear that the “South Asians” or “Asians” will bomb a pop concert, mow down scores of families on a national holiday such as Bastille day or Halloween or Christmas, shoot up a gay nightclub, and so forth. Actual South Asians and Asians have held demos against the media using them to cover for jihadis, but no media reported on them, of course. Only the small, sagacious group of readers who follow websites such as the Geller Report were aware of the South Asian community’s opposition to the wrongful blame.
Every time there is an attack by a jihadi, all apologies are extended by the host Western country, with admonitions of impending “phobia” of Islam and backlash, and so the cycle of self-flagellation begins and builds with each ensuing attack (all 34,800 since 9/11).
In initial reports of all jihad attacks, we are told “it is not terror related.” The shifting definition of terror is slippery but expected. Then President George W. Bush dropped the ball on September 20, 2001, when he danced around whether “A is A,” decidedly avoiding jihad and Islam. Even with the thick, acrid smell of burnt blood and flesh, ash and steel in the NYC air, Bush opted instead for the vague, blame-free “War on Terror.”
Officials who oversee Seattle’s transit system moved to ban political, religious, and other ads from its facilities and public transportation vehicles soon after Pamela Geller’s American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) prevailed in a freedom of speech lawsuit against the city, earning the right to run FBI’s Most Wanted terrorist posters, Breitbart News has learned.
“People should realize that this is a struggle for the very foundation of any free society: the freedom of speech. If there is a group you can’t criticize, then that group can impose tyranny over you. If we lose this free speech battle, all our other freedoms are lost” Geller recently told Breitbart News via email.
She argued the advertisement ban sidestepped the September 2018 U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruling in AFDI’s favor, which allowed the group to advertise the Most Wanted terrorist list in Seattle.
However, the new restrictions, dubbed the “Geller ban” and instituted in December 2018 by the King County Department of Transportation’s Transit Division that oversees Seattle’s public transportation system, have ended up preventing AFDI from running the terrorist wanted ads, Geller pointed out, noting that her free speech lawsuit victory was bittersweet.
Before the appeal court’s ruling, judges had denied AFDI the right to place public service ads featuring images of the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists on Seattle’s public transportation system, due to a perceived disparagement of Islam.
The city’s rejection prompted AFDI to sue the King County Metro system for its suppression of free speech.
“We won the right to run the FBI wanted terrorist poster that Seattle prevailed upon the FBI to withdraw [ in 2013]. And as soon as we triumphed, Seattle transit imposed the infamous Geller ban, banning political, religious and cause-related ads in Seattle (following NY, Washington DC, Boston, Miami, Chicago, San Francisco, etc),” Geller told Breitbart News in the email.
In a document outlining the transit agency’s advertising restrictions, King County officials noted that the policy bans advertising on transit facilities and vehicles that fall within the categories of political, religious, government (except for the county’s), and other forms of “speech.”
“They banned all political ads, as that was the only course of action they could possibly take in order to continue to avoid running my ads,” Geller said. “They’re so determined to continue whitewashing Islam and denying and obfuscating the roots of jihad terror that they are willing to lose immense amounts of revenue from all political advertising.”
Transit agency officials argued that their “viewpoint neutral” ban seeks to prohibit “advertisements that interfere with and divert resources from transit operations, that detract from transit purposes by creating substantial controversy, and/or that pose significant risks of harm, inconvenience, or annoyance to transit passengers, operators, and vehicles.”
“Such advertisements create an environment that is not conducive to achieving increased revenue for the benefit of the transit system or to preserving and enhancing the security, safety, comfort, and convenience of its operations,” the officials added.
Responding to the agency’s argument Geller noted, “I see ads that annoy me all the time. If that is the criterion [for the ban], whose annoyance counts, and whose doesn’t, and why?”
She told Breitbart News that King County’s decision to ban FBI wanted posters featuring some jihadis amounts to the “enforcement of Sharia blasphemy law in another American city.”
King County officials described the transit agency’s advertising ban as“restrictions” that “foster the maintenance of a professional advertising environment that maximizes advertising, revenue, and protects the interests of the captive audience that uses Metro’s transit services.”
In other words, the county’s transportation department believes that banning certain ads will allow the county to generate more revenue.
“The ban will, obviously, drastically curtail their ad revenues. To argue otherwise is plain deception” Geller noted.
Nevertheless, the county asserted that the advertising policy intends to fulfill the following goals:
Maximizing advertising revenue; maintaining a position of neutrality and preventing the appearance of favoritism or endorsement by the county; preventing the risk of imposing objectionable, inappropriate or harmful view on a captive audience; preserving the value of the advertising space; maximizing ridership and maintaining a safe environment for transit customers and other members of the public; avoiding claims of discrimination and maintaining a non-discriminatory environment for riders; preventing any harm or abuse that may result from running objectionable, inappropriate, or harmful advertisements; [and] reducing the diversion of resources from transit operations that is caused by objectionable, inappropriate or harmful advertisements.
Geller vowed to keep fighting for free speech all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary to ensure Seattle upholds the appeal court’s ruling.
Daoud Wright is a former Islamic State (ISIS) operative in Boston who was the ringleader of a plot to behead me. In December 2017, he was found guilty on five counts in this terrorist plot against me, which involved Wright maintaining close contact with and even financing a major American ISIS leader, Zulfi Hoxha. Yet late Wednesday afternoon, one of those convictions was overturned. Federal Appeals Court Justice David J. Barron said Wright “could have been simply been ‘role-playing’ with respect to following ISIS’s direction.”
Back when Wright was convicted, the jury didn’t think Wright was just “role-playing.” They brought the verdict in swiftly: according to WBUR, they “reached five verdicts in six hours.” Acting U.S. Attorney William Weinreb said: “Mr. Wright is a terrorist, an ISIS supporter and recruiter who intended to wage war against the United States by beheading people and killing Americans.”
Barron, in contrast, clearly has embraced the claim of the defense during the trial, that Wright was just a fat fantasist sitting in his mother’s basement playing video games and dreaming of glory. But in an extraordinary article that appeared in the left-wing Atlantic in January 2018 entitled “A New American Leader Rises in ISIS,” Seamus Hughes, Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, and Bennett Clifford revealed that a “shared interest in video games may have been one of the first things that brought Hoxha together with David Wright.” The video games were not an idle pastime:
Islamic State’s 2015 instructional manual for its Western supporters, “How to Survive in the West,” includes references to video games as a method of training to join the group. More importantly, it may have brought together Wright and Hoxha, who unlike Wright successfully followed through on his intentions to support the Islamic State using violence… During Wright’s trial, prosecutors argued that he used several video games, including Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare and other titles to “virtually prepare” for jihad. His defense attorneys, however, painted Wright, who weighed over 400 pounds at the time of the conspiracy, as a “fat, failed loser” who used video games as a substitute for real-life violent activity, according to the trial transcript. Unfortunately, one can be both a gamer who veers towards violence and weigh in at 400 pounds of loneliness and isolation…..
Last Friday, I spoke at the Eagle Council in St. Louis, where both the speaker roster and the audience were full of stalwart, indomitable patriots. One of the patriots there was Mark Schneider, President of Gen IV Nuclear Inc. in Chesapeake, Virginia. He served for twenty years was on the ground in Iraq and Kuwait, and he offered a disquieting insight into an important but overlooked reason why our lengthy military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have borne so little fruit.
Schneider was in the United States military from 1998 to 2018, years during which the primary threat that our nation faced was the global jihad, which was, after all, the reason why we had our forces in Iraq and Kuwait, as well as Afghanistan, in the first place. We had a long and fascinating conversation, but the most important takeaway was this: I asked him, “In all that time, from 1998 to 2018, were you given one class, or even one lesson, or were recommended one book, anything at all, that discussed Islam’s doctrine of warfare against and the subjugation of unbelievers?
No. Not one.
Instead, all his training revolved around not offending Afghans’ cultural sensitivities. Schneider went for detention operations; his cultural training included subjects such as “What is Ramadan?” He and other American personnel were told not to eat or drink during the day, even though none of them were Muslim. They were allowed to eat and drink during the day when they were on military bases, but not off; American personnel were discouraged from consuming food while off military installations.
The other thing that Schneider and other American troops were taught was that if they were anything other than Muslim or Christian, they had to say they were Muslim or Christian, because, they were told, the Afghans “didn’t like other religions.” They were only allowed to say they were adherents of the religions of the God of Abraham, although of course they were not to mention Judaism.
They were also told not to wave at people with their left hand or ever touch anyone with that hand, as it was considered unclean. Also, men were warned not to speak directly to women.
That was about it. Nothing, nothing whatsoever, on why the enemy was fighting against us. Nothing about how the enemy viewed the world and what he was trying to achieve. The first rule of warfare is “Know your enemy,” and our troops have been and are woefully ill-equipped in that regard. They know how not to wave at the enemy, but they know nothing about his motives and goals.
That’s why we are negotiating with the Taliban now, as if we could come to some kind of viable agreement with them. This is a ridiculous idea, and amounts to rewarding Islamic terrorism. The Taliban was the most prolific and deadliest group during Ramadan this year, while those negotiations were going on. And yet the Afghan government recently released 490 Taliban (Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan) fighters and commanders from its prisons in June, as part of a goodwill gesture to persuade the bloodthirsty jihadis to come to stay at the negotiating table.
The desire to negotiate with the Taliban and the complete absence of any training in the enemy ideology both proceed from the same willful ignorance, an ignorance to which far too many people at the upper levels of our government are still committed. Mark Schneider’s story ought to be taken as a cautionary tale (although it will almost certainly not be). During World War II, our soldiers were all given instruction in the Nazi ideology, so that they knew the magnitude of the evil they were facing, and would understand the mindset of those they were facing on the battlefield. For the last twenty years, by contrast, our troops have been flying blind, going into highly dangerous situations without having a clue of what they were up against.
The Dearborn Public Schools website states it matter-of-factly: “Dearborn Public Schools ensures all meats served in our schools are certified Halal.” Now one courageous mother is fighting back, challenging Dearborn public school officials to explain why they have done this and to provide options for students who object to halal food.
The mother wrote to Dearborn schools superintendent Glenn Maleyko, noting, “Schools have never changed lunches to fit any other religious needs. If one needed a special diet due to religion or health, they did what all other students do, bring a lunch from home.”
Maleyko responded: “The decision was based on operational considerations only, not religion. By implementing an all Halal meat option we have increased the number of students that we are serving[.] … It would cost a lot more to provide both Halal and non-Halal meat.”
In the long run, the superintendent will find it far, far costlier to have capitulated to Islamic supremacism and set this precedent.
Dearborn’s actions here should be a matter of concern for all free people. This is a manifestation of the Left’s absolute march, without consideration or question, toward exclusionary, supremacist practices that any genuinely pluralistic society should reject. Dearborn Public Schools officials are demonstrating a totalitarian assuredness in the delusional comfort of enlightenment, diversity, and inclusion. They’re in for an unpleasant surprise: they’re accommodating a radically non-diverse, non-inclusive
Dearborn’s policy is discriminatory against non-Muslim students of numerous perspectives, some having to do with different faith traditions. There may be any number of reasons why people don’t want halal meat. They may object to halal slaughter for humanitarian reasons or because they are concerned for animal rights. Evangelical Christians may consider it meat sacrificed to idols, as discussed in the New Testament. Jews are obliged to keep kosher, not eat halal food. Still others may object to the fact that many halal certification organizations have links to jihad terror groups.
In light of all this, Dearborn should rescind its halal-only policy so as to make its schools truly inclusive and diverse, accepting of all students, not just Muslim students.
But that is unlikely to happen. This initiative is already very far advanced. If you’re in Europe, and in many areas in America as well, the meat you are eating is probably halal, unless you’re keeping kosher. In a little-known strike against freedom, yet again, we are being forced into consuming meat slaughtered by means of a barbaric, torturous and inhuman method: Islamic slaughter.
Where were the PETA clowns and the ridiculous celebs who pose naked on giant billboards for PETA and “animal rights”? They would rather see people die of cancer or AIDS than see animals used in drug testing, but torturous and painful Islamic slaughter is OK.
Many people have written to me saying they simply won’t eat halal meat, as they object to the methods used to slaughter the animal. And I agree. The sharia term for halal slaughter is dhakat. Dhakat is to slaughter an animal by cutting the trachea, the esophagus, and the jugular vein, letting the blood drain out while saying, “Bismillah allahu akbar” — in the name of Allah the greater.
Seventy percent of New Zealand lamb imported into the United Kingdom is halal. It is not labeled as such, so people are eating halal without even knowing it. But people there are fighting back: when halal food was imposed on public schools in the United Kingdom in 2007, parents were in an uproar. And in March 2010, Stop Islamization of Europe (SIOE), the sister organization to my group SIOA, called for the cessation of mandatory consumption of halal meat on the continent.
In the United States, a great deal of meat sold in this country is already halal but is not labeled is such. It’s a scandal, but an established practice: meatpackers generally do not separate halal meat from non-halal meat and not do not label halal meat as such. We attempted to right that wrong. But the U.S. Department of Agriculture has for four years now ignored, shelved, or just plain refused to rule on our petition.
As many Americans do not, for a variety of reasons, wish to eat halal meat, back in February 2012, my organization, the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), filed a citizen petition with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, asking that a regulation be enacted to ensure that all halal food be clearly labeled as halal. In April 2012, we agreed not to publicize our petition in order to give the agency some space to review the document without any pressure from the public.
On May 11, 2012, we had a face-to-face meeting in the USDA offices with top FSIS officials. We discussed this petition and the need for halal meat to be clearly labeled. Present at this meeting was Dan Engeljohn, a longtime USDA official who is now assistant administrator for the Office of Policy and Program Development (OPPD) in the FSIS. This position made him responsible for FSIS regulations.
Engeljohn and company had years to rule on our petition. They never did a thing. They just let it die on the table and stonewalled our repeated requests for an explanation.
As far back as October 2010, I reported on little noted but explosive revelations that much of the meat in Europe and the United States was being processed as halal without the knowledge of the non-Muslim consumers who bought it.
Then, in November 2011, I penned an article that caused a firestorm across the political spectrum, revealing that Butterball turkeys were all halal but were not labeled as such. Heads exploded on the Left — not over Butterball’s deception, but over my having the audacity to reveal it. The clueless and compromised on the right were enraged as well: John Podhoretz tweeted, “I’d tell Pamela Geller to put a sock in it, but the sock might be halal.”
I was, of course, excoriated as a racist Islamophobic anti-Muslim bigot. In reality, however, we have no objection to halal meat being sold, as long as it is clearly labeled as such, and as long as non-halal meat is available.
And now, all these years later, halal meat is being imposed on non-Muslims. The Dearborn mother responded to Maleyko’s bland rejection of her concerns but at press time had not heard back from the superintendent. Will he respond? Will he take her concerns seriously? And even more importantly, is this diversity? Is this inclusion? This is Islamic supremacism and totalitarianism.
A concerned mother is challenging an all halal-certified meat policy imposed by the Michigan public school district that includes the Dearborn region, dubbed the “Arab capital of North America,” Breitbart News learned from conservative commentator Pamela Geller.
According to the school district’s official website, “Dearborn Public Schools ensures all meats served in our schools are certified halal.”
Halal, which translates to “permissible” in Arabic, refers to a Muslim practice governed by sharia law that completely bans pork and follows Islamic requirements on the preparation of other meat.
The school district’s policy is in accordance with “Islamic Rites,” the halal certificate of the processing plant that provides the meat, it declared, noting, “We certify that the processing facilities … have been inspected and approved by our Islamic organization for processing, packing, and labeling of Halal Beef Products by applying our procedures according to the Islamic Rites.”
A mother of one of the district’s students has taken issue with the all-halal meat policy.
“One courageous mother is fighting back, challenging Dearborn public school officials to explain why they have done this, and to provide options for students who object to halal food,” Geller, the president of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), revealed in an article published by American Thinker on Monday.
The mother reportedly sent a letter to Dearborn schools Superintendent Glenn Maleyko, noting, “Schools have never changed lunches to fit any other religious needs. If one needed a special diet due to religion or health, they did what all other students do, bring a lunch from home.”
In responding, Maleyko described the policy as a cost-cutting measure.
“The decision was based on operational considerations only, not religion. By implementing an all Halal meat option we have increased the number of students that we are serving….It would cost a lot more to provide both Halal and non-Halal meat,” he said.
Geller called on the district to rescind its policy. The measure amounts to a capitulation to “Islamic supremacism” and sets a dangerous precedent, she argued.
“Dearborn Public School officials are demonstrating a totalitarian assuredness in the delusional comfort of enlightenment, diversity, and inclusion. They’re in for an unpleasant surprise: they’re accommodating a radically non-diverse, non-inclusive population,” she also said.
Revoking the policy would make schools “truly inclusive and diverse, accepting of all students, not just Muslim students,” she pointed out.
Nevertheless, Geller pointed out that Dearborn is “unlikely” to rescind its all-halal meat policy, adding:
This initiative is already very far advanced. If you’re in Europe, and in many areas in America as well, the meat you are eating is probably halal unless you’re keeping kosher. In a little-known strike against freedom, yet again, we are being forced into consuming meat slaughtered by means of a barbaric, torturous, and inhuman method: Islamic slaughter.
The Dearborn region is reportedly home to the largest concentration of Muslims in the United States.
9/11 families were joined by immigrants from India, Russia, Egypt, Israel, Africa, Iran and Europe to show opposition to the construction of a mega-mosque at our protest at Ground Zero. Others flew in from overseas to speak or just to share their particular ethnic communities’ experiences at the hands of moslems. More photos here.
The news was buried under two dense paragraphs and five large photos in an article in New York YIMBY about a different project: “Construction has also yet to begin on 51 Park Place, which is slated to become a 71-foot-tall, 16,000-square-foot Islamic cultural center.” The infamous Ground Zero Mosque project, a long buried effort to build a triumphal mosque at the site of the worst jihad terror attack in American history, is back.
Construction has yet to begin, but it will: the shady developer behind the Ground Zero Mosque scheme, Sharif El-Gamal, has been working to build this sinister structure for years.
We defeated the Ground Zero Mosque project once before. The 16-story mosque that El-Gamal initially planned to build there has not been built. Our efforts in showing what an insult it was to the American people and to the victims of 9/11, and how many Muslims worldwide would inevitably view it as a triumphal mosque built on the site of a jihad attack, defeated it. Tens of thousands of people came out for our rallies in lower Manhattan against this celebration of this 9/11 attacks, and El-Gamal was beaten in the court of public opinion.
It was a long battle. President Obama announced his support for the mosque at an Iftar dinner, no less. Then-mayor of New York City and current presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg supported the mosque as well, claiming hysterically that “if we don’t build it, the terrorists will win!” The media actively campaigned for it — the elites in their increasingly fragile ivory towers relentlessly stumped for the Cordoba mosque (euphemistically called an Islamic center with a prayer space) for years.
And yet despite all this opposition and much more, the people stood up and fought the Ground Zero Mosque and won. An army of Davids.
But that wasn’t the end of the story. Crains New York reported on El-Gamal’s new project in 2015 in a story that demonstrated how the developer was hoping to sneak his triumphal mosque into existence: “Mr. El-Gamal’s Soho Properties has proposed a 667-foot condominium tower at lower Manhattan’s 45 Park Place. The glass skyscraper, which has yet to break ground, will include at least 15 full-floor units of 3,200 to 3,700 square feet, and average prices higher than $3,000 a square foot, according to plans released to Bloomberg by the developer.”
That sounded normal enough. But then the article added: “Adjacent to the tower, Soho Properties will build a public plaza connected to a three-story Islamic museum and prayer space.” An Islamic prayer space is a mosque. The article also said: “An Islamic museum ‘is just as much of an insult,’ Pamela Geller, a blogger and one of the center’s most vocal opponents, wrote in an email. ‘It will be like having a museum touting the glories of the Japanese Empire at Pearl Harbor.'”
I think an Islamic museum at Ground Zero dedicated to the half-billion victims of jihadi wars, land appropriations, sharia, cultural annihilations, enslavements, and sharia enforcement is an excellent idea, but is that what Sharif El-Gamal had in mind? Of course not. And how did El-Gamal plan to finance this? The answer was predictable. The New York Post reported in May 2016 that “the developer of the failed Ground Zero Mosque has nailed down ‘Sharia-compliant financing’ for a new, luxury condominium tower and Islamic cultural museum on the same site, he and his banking partners said.”
Then in May 2017, the New York Times ran a story entitled “Condo Tower to Rise Where Muslim Community Center Was Proposed.” The Times said that “45 Park Place, a 43-story condominium that will soon rise three blocks from the World Trade Center,” was “something of a consolation prize for the developer,” as it “replaces the developer’s 2010 plan to build a 15-story Islamic mosque and cultural center on this site, an idea that erupted into a national controversy and cable news network bonanza.”
In the last couple of years, there has been virtually no news about this “Islamic museum.” But the New York YIMBY story shows that the project has been advancing under cover of darkness. A 71-foot-tall structure is three stories high, as in the revised plans announced in 2015.
El-Gamal has many friends and allies among New York City’s political and media elites. It is likely that de Blasio city officials and the New York Times and other city papers all met with El-Gamal and agreed to keep the reporting on this project to an absolute minimum, so that it could get built without incurring the righteous anger of the public again. The first time around, they courted publicity and tried to make El-Gamal a hero. We demolished that and destroyed their plans. So now they’ve clearly decided to go ahead surreptitiously.
It is disgusting that El-Gamal continues to taunt Americans and poke at America’s most egregious recent memory. El-Gamal was there when we had tens of thousands in the streets opposing his Ground Zero mosque. He knows how angry and upset people get at these Islamic structures on the site of jihad war. The 9/11 Muslim terrorists extolled Allah no fewer than 90 times in their last letters. Will those letters be on display at this Islamic cultural center/museum?
There is an important lesson to be learned here — and one we would be wise to adopt. They never stop. No matter how absolutely they lose, how many setbacks they suffer, they keep on pursuing their supremacist goals.
The Ground Zero Mosque project was and is a middle finger to the American people. There has never been a mosque of reconciliation and healing built on the site of a jihadi attack. Ever. It is, on the other hand, an Islamic pattern to build triumphal mosques on the cherished sites of conquered lands. History is riddled with triumphal mosques built on the sites of jihad attacks or appropriated from other religions: the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque on the site of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, and innumerable mosques built on the sites of Hindu temples that were demolished by Muslims all attest to that.
And now it looks as if Sharif El-Gamal is going to be able to build his own triumphal mosque at Ground Zero after all.
Background: In 2008, I was in Florida covering Rifqa Bary’s court hearings to return her to her devout family who promised to kill to her because the teen had left Islam and converted to Christianity.
I was waiting on my ride to the courthouse when I saw this ad on a bus:
Thus began the very first of my many bus ad campaigns. I responded with this ad and the greatest putsch against free speech commenced:
Check out my latest at The Thinker:
After Ten Years, Court Strikes Down Ruling Banning Ads Offering Help to Those Leaving Islam
It took nearly twelve years, but we did it. My organization, the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), has just won an important victory for the freedom of speech.
Back in 2009, the Detroit area’s SMART transit refused to run our AFDI ads offering help to people who were in fear for their lives for wanting to leave Islam or having left it. After an incredibly protracted court battle, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals just stood up for the First Amendment and completely reversed the judgment banning our ads. It’s a total victory for freedom: we won our free speech lawsuit in Detroit by a unanimous decision.
Our ad read: “Leaving Islam? Fatwa on your head? Is your family or community threatening you? Got Questions? Get Answers! RefugefromIslam.com.” That’s all it said. It offered a life-saver for those who were completely and utterly alone with no system of support or help.
Islamic law mandates death for those who leave Islam; even in the United States, those who leave the religion live in fear that a devout Muslim might decide to apply this penalty. So we were offering help. That is all. But as Eugene Volokh explains at The Volokh Conspiracy, “Michigan’s Suburban Mobility Authority for Regional Transportation (SMART) rejected this ad under two of its speech restrictions. The first prohibits ‘political’ ads; the second prohibits ads that would hold up a group of people to ‘scorn or ridicule.'”
Our ad was not political and didn’t scorn or ridicule anyone. It’s ridiculous to say saving lives is a political act, and so of course we won the initial case. The first judge who ruled on this case, Judge Denise Page Hood, understood the law and so ruled in favor of our free speech rights. She understood the First Amendment. Therefore, although she was clearly not sympathetic to us, she had to rule for us.
But then SMART appealed. SMART adamantly refused to run outreach ads that might have helped Muslims living in dangerous households and appealed to the notoriously leftist Sixth Circuit. You might have thought the Muslim Brotherhood was running SMART. It was astounding. And consider the fact that Detroit was bankrupt around this same time. Sharia adherence was still more important to the broken city’s failed leaders than were the freedom of speech and fiscal responsibility.
And so SMART continued to refuse our ads and appealed in the notoriously leftist Sixth Circuit. The court called our religious ads political and created a new narrative out of whole cloth. Our ads were never actually rejected on political grounds. Individually and in her official capacity, Beth Gibbons, marketing program manager of SMART, said our ads were rejected because they were controversial — not because they were political. It was always understood that these were religious ads. Gibbons testified that she saw “nothing about [the advertisement] itself that was political[.] … I knew that [the fatwa advertisement] was of concern in that there is controversy on both sides of the issue on whether they should be posted.” That was the position of SMART. In fact, that was the agency’s official testimony.
We in turn appealed. In 2013, I was deposed and harassed for six hours by a small, profane blowhard attorney — all billable hours to fight an ad created to help Muslim girls escape honor violence. And the deposition was so hostile that you would think I had committed a heinous crime. Apparently, blasphemy in America is.
The case dragged on and on. But now, in American Freedom Defensive Initiative v. Suburban Mobility Auth. for Regional Transp. (6th Cir.), the court makes the correct ruling, noting that “the Free Speech Clause limits the government’s power to regulate speech on public property. The government has little leeway to restrict speech in ‘public forums.'” Accordingly, “SMART’s ban on ‘political’ ads is unreasonable for the same reason that a state’s ban on ‘political’ apparel at polling places is unreasonable: SMART offers no ‘sensible basis for distinguishing what may come in from what must stay out.’ Likewise, SMART’s ban on ads that engage in ‘scorn or ridicule’ is not viewpoint neutral for the same reason that a ban on trademarks that disparage people is not viewpoint neutral: For any group, ‘an applicant may [display] a positive or benign [ad] but not a derogatory one.'” Consequently, the court declared: “We thus reverse the district court’s decision rejecting the First Amendment challenge to these two restrictions.”
This is all common-sensical and clear even to those with no legal training or experience, but it has taken an incredibly long time to get here. The American Freedom Law Center, whose ace lawyers David Yerushalmi and Robert Muise fought long and hard to win this case, noted: “AFDI’s religious freedom advertisement was rejected even though SMART had no problem accepting and running an anti-religion ad sponsored by an atheist organization. That approved ad stated, ‘Don’t Believe in God? You are not alone.'” However, now “the Sixth Circuit ruled unanimously in favor of AFLC, finding that SMART’s rejection of the ad was unreasonable and [a] viewpoint based in violation of the First Amendment. This is a final ruling.”
Bottom line: Everyone has the same right to a free life. The Sixth Circuit agreed.
If you weren’t reading this, you would likely never know that it had happened at all. No media covered it. If we had lost, then you would have heard about it, because the media would have been popping open bottles of champagne and running huge pieces on how sharia restrictions on speech are altogether reasonable — as heads roll (literally).
Jessica Mokdad, an honor killing victim living in that area at the time, might have been saved. We know that the ads have helped Muslims — they told us. The ads save lives. Contribute here.
Pamela Geller is the president of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), publisher of The Geller Report, and author of the bestselling book FATWA: Hunted in America as well as The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America and Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance. Follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
I was suspended for saying the e l e c t i o n was s t o l e n.
The Dem’s objective is to make it verboten, silence us completely, like it never happened, make people afraid to talk about it – like Soviet Russia or communist China. That’s why we have to keep saying it. pic.twitter.com/NrOsFWwdCU
— ???????? GELLER REPORT ???????? (@PamelaGeller) January 17, 2021
In an article that was picked up by the Mercury News, Ethan Baron of the Bay Area News Group wrote Tuesday that “A week after false claims of a stolen U.S. presidential election drove a deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Twitter is allowing a far-right supporter of President Donald Trump to claim the election was stolen.” Baron’s intention was clear: he wants Twitter to ban me, as it banned Trump, for telling truths they want buried. His article shows how monstrous and totalitarian the left really is: leftists think they can publicly call for the censuring and banning of someone whose views they hate, and just like that, you disappear.
The left and its propaganda arm, the establishment media, are now working hard to make it illegal, and get you banned from social media, to state the obvious fact that the election was stolen. The Democrats are seeking to criminalize and penalize anyone who says theelection was stolen. Their “insurrection” hoax, and impeachment of the president without due process or giving him the chance to defend himself, is designed to shut down any and all talk of their infamous election fraud. This is not the behavior of people who know they won fair and square and are watching their opponents have a tantrum about it. This is the action of the guilty.
That said, the election was stolen. The mountains of evidence of election fraud were never examined in any court, and then we were told that there was no evidence at all, or if there was any, it had already been dismissed in court challenges. The court cases were all dismissed on technicalities and procedural issues, not because there was no evidence of voter fraud. That evidence has still not been examined.
But it is a hallmark of the rapidly advancing totalitarianism of our age that thumbsuckers like Ethan Baron think they can kill you with righteous indignation. He wrote: “Anti-Muslim activist Pamela Geller, in a tweet Monday about banks freezing political donations after a pro-Trump mob stormed the seat of the U.S. government, said the banks’ decision was, ‘Further proof the election was stolen.’” I am not “anti-Muslim” any more than foes of the Nazis were “anti-German,” but that’s another story. Baron offered no counterargument to my contention about the banks. He just presented it as if it were self-evidently false and egregious.
Baron knew, of course, that he didn’t have to show that what I said was inaccurate. All he had to do was point out that I had deviated from the leftist line, and the jackbooted neo-fascists who run Twitter and the other social media platforms would spring into action.
It was reminiscent of the media outrage that was directed at me in May 2015, when I hosted the Muhammad Art Exhibit and Cartoon Contest in Garland, Texas that was the site of the first ISIS attack on American soil. I was raked over the coals not just on CNN, but also on Fox, which hadn’t yet switched sides then, and by conservative spokesmen who should have known better. I was defending the freedom of speech against violent intimidation. We never saw the hate and attacks that were directed at me in the wake of that event in Garland directed at the Fort Hood jihadi, the Times Square jihad bomber, the Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony jihad bomber, the Boston Marathon jihad bombers, the New York subway jihad bomber, or any other jihadis.
We have never seen the media hatred and anything like the attacks that were directed at me directed towards the jihadists who beheaded journalist after journalist (their own!), or towards those who beheaded hundreds of Christians, executed them because they were non-Muslims, or towards the perpetrators of the ongoing genocide of non-Muslims and secular Muslims in Muslim countries.
If we had a responsible media, they would stand for the freedom of speech as we did in Garland. If we had a responsible media, it would be applauding the fact that some people are still standing up and telling the truth about the election despite the immense pressure from powerful forces to stop doing so.
How do these people not understand this most basic, elemental concept of freedom?
I didn’t start this war for the freedom of speech, but I won’t lie down and submit, either. Twitter and the rest may heed Baron and ban me. But even then, this isn’t over. What remains to be seen is whether the free world will finally wake up and stand for the freedom of speech, or instead kowtow to this evil and continue to denounce me and others like me. What’s really frightening and astonishing about this assault on our freedom of speech is the number of people cheering on the silencing of dissent from the establishment line. I never expected that from my fellow Americans. But if the darkness of totalitarianism does come to the United States, it will be thanks to them and to the likes of Ethan Baron.
Read my latest over at The American Thinker. We are seeing an unprecedented erosion in our First Amendment rights, increasingly prohibiting the flow of ideas and free expression in the public square (social media). Run by left-wing self-possessed snowflakes, social media giants are indulging their worst autocratic impulses. And because they can, it is getting worse. “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Having grown up in the 1970s, I can tell you it was a vastly different country then. It was free. But we aren’t any no longer, and it is time we took back what is ours — our unalienable freedoms.
January 30, 2018
The Urgent Case for Legislation against Facebook and Google
Having been one of the early targets of social media censorship on Facebook, YouTube et al, I have advocated for anti-trust action against these bullying behemoths. It is good to see establishment outlets such as the Wall Street Journaland National Review coming to the same conclusion, or at least asking the same questions.
Just this week, Facebook launched its latest of many attacks on my news site, the Geller Report. It labeled my site as “spam” and removed every Geller Report post — thousands upon thousands of them, going back years – from Facebook. It also blocked any Facebook member from sharing links to the Geller Report. The ramping up of the shutting-down of sites like mine is neither random nor personal. The timing is telling. The left is gearing up for the 2018 midterm elections, and they mean to shut down whatever outlet or voice that helped elect President Trump, the greatest upset in left-wing history.
In fighting this shutdown, we had to go back to the drawing board in our lawsuit against these social media giants. The basis of our suit was challenging Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) under the First Amendment, which provides immunity from lawsuits to Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, thereby permitting these social media giants to engage in government-sanctioned censorship and discriminatory business practices free from legal challenge.
[the_ad id=”104820″]
Facebook and Google take in roughly half of all Internet ad revenue. According to the Wall Street Journal:
In the U.S., Alphabet Inc.’s Google drives 89% of internet search; 95% of young adults on the internet use a Facebook Inc. product; and Amazon.com Inc. now accounts for 75% of electronic book sales. Those firms that aren’t monopolists are duopolists: Google and Facebook absorbed 63% of online ad spending last year; Google and Apple Inc. provide 99% of mobile phone operating systems; while Apple and Microsoft Corp. supply 95% of desktop operating systems.
Both companies routinely censor and spy on their customers, “massaging everything from the daily news to what we should buy.” In the last century, the telephone was our “computer,” and Ma Bell was how we communicated. That said, would the American people (or the government) have tolerated AT&T spying on our phone calls and then pulling our communication privileges if we expressed dissenting opinions? That is exactly what we are suffering today.
Ma Bell was broken up by the government, albeit for different reasons. But it can and should be done.
It’s not a little ironic that, according to Breitbart:
AT&T has called for an “Internet Bill of Rights” and argued that Facebook and Google should also be subjected to rules that would prevent unfair censorship on their platforms.
AT&T, one of the largest telecommunications companies, called for Congress to enact an “Internet Bill of Rights” which would subject Facebook, Google, and other content providers to rules that would prevent unfair censorship on Internet Service Providers (ISPs) such as Comcast or AT&T as well as content providers such as Facebook and Google.
AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson wrote, “Congressional action is needed to establish an ‘Internet Bill of Rights’ that applies to all internet companies and guarantees neutrality, transparency, openness, non-discrimination and privacy protection for all internet users.”
Stephenson posted the ad in the New York Times, Washington Post, and other national news outlets on Wednesday.
We must get behind this — all of us — and fast. Because what is happening is being engineered at the government level. A chief officer from a major American communications company went to the terror state of Pakistan to assure the Pakistani government that Facebook would adhere to the sharia. The commitment was given by Vice President of Facebook Joel Kaplan, who called on Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan. “Facebook has reiterated its commitment to keep the platform safe and promote values that are in congruence with its community standards.”
Why the block? Because under Islamic law, you cannot criticize Islam. Facebook adhering to the most extreme and brutal ideology on the face of the earth should trouble all of us, because Mark Zuckerberg has immense power. He controls the flow of information.
Early last year, I wrote: “The US government has used anti-trust laws to break up monopolies. They ought to break up Facebook. Section 2 of the Sherman Act highlights particular results deemed anticompetitive by nature and prohibits actions that ‘shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations.’ Couldn’t the same be applied to information? The United States government took down Standard Oil, Alcoa, Northern Securities, the American Tobacco Company and many others without nearly the power that Facebook has.”
NRO has come to that same conclusion:
Tech companies such as Google and Facebook are also utilities of sorts that provide essential services. They depend on the free use of public airwaves. Yet they are subject to little oversight; they simply make up their own rules as they go along. Antitrust laws prohibit one corporation from unfairly devouring its competition, capturing most of its market, and then price-gouging as it sees fit without fear of competition. Google has all but destroyed its search-engine competitors in the same manner that Facebook has driven out competing social media.
Clearly Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt, and Jeff Bezos are contemporary “robber barons.” So why are they not smeared, defamed, and reviled like the robber barons of yesteryear? Says NRO:
Why are huge tech companies seemingly exempt from the rules that older corporations must follow? First, their CEOs wisely cultivate the image of hipsters. The public sees them more as aging teenagers in T-shirts, turtlenecks, and flip-flops than as updated versions of J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, or other robber barons of the past. Second, the tech industry’s hierarchy is politically progressive.
In brilliant marketing fashion, the Internet, laptops, tablets, and smartphones have meshed with the hip youth culture of music, television, the movies, universities, and fashion. Think Woodstock rather than Wall Street. Corporate spokesmen at companies such as Twitter and YouTube brag about their social awareness, especially on issues such as radical environmentalism, identity politics, and feminism. Given that the regulatory deep state is mostly a liberal enterprise, the tech industry is seen as an ally of federal bureaucrats and regulators. Think more of Hollywood, the media, and universities than Exxon, General Motors, Koch Industries, and Philip Morris.
The groovy t-shirt-turtleneck vibe may keep the great unwashed under their spell, but it’s the shared political ideology with the left that keeps these corporate managers free from accountability. The WSJ writes that antitrust regulators have a narrow test: Does their size leave consumers worse off? Surmising that if that’s the test, “there isn’t a clear case for going after big tech.”
I disagree. The consumer is far worse off. If we are not free to speak and think in what is today’s Gutenberg press, than we could not be worse off.
On Thursday, I got yet another notice from the LinkedIn’s “Trust & Safety Team”: “Your post goes against our policy on misinformation. It has been removed and only you can access it.” The post that LinkedIn found objectionable was from my website, the Geller Report, and was entitled
“CORPORATE STATE: Domestic Terror Group Black Lives Matter Received Nearly $83 Billion from Corporations.”
My post consisted of an excerpt from a Breitbart article plus three lines of my own commentary. LinkedIn didn’t dispute the accuracy of anything in my post or its source; it just doesn’t want it said. This comes after LinkedIn had banned me from their platform for nearly three years for posting accurate and well-sourced information that goes against the leftist narrative.
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