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Geller: Iran Arrests 29 Women for Appearing in Public Without a Hijab While Western Feminists Impose World Hijab Day
By Pamela Geller, Breitbart News, February 3, 2018:
The Daily Mail reported 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.
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 or Facebook.
Read my latest over at The American Thinker:
Jihad and the Media in an Age of Delusion
By Pamela Geller, American Thinker, April 1, 2019:
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.”
Read the rest here.
Another city bans free speech. Chilling. Read this.
Related:
Seattle Imposes Ad Ban to Annul Pamela Geller’s Free Speech Lawsuit Victory
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.
By: Edwin Mora, Breitbart, April 16, 2019:
“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.
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.
Geller: Iran Arrests 29 Women for Appearing in Public Without a Hijab While Western Feminists Impose World Hijab Day
By Pamela Geller, Breitbart News, February 3, 2018:
The Daily Mail reported 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.
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 or Facebook.
Read my latest over at The American Thinker:
Jihad and the Media in an Age of Delusion
By Pamela Geller, American Thinker, April 1, 2019:
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.”
Read the rest here.
Another city bans free speech. Chilling. Read this.
Related:
Seattle Imposes Ad Ban to Annul Pamela Geller’s Free Speech Lawsuit Victory
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.
By: Edwin Mora, Breitbart, April 16, 2019:
“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.
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.
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