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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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”?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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”?
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.
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.
Risking life and limb, the women of Iran have been center stage in the nascent freedom movement in Iran – the symbol of this historic moment is an image of a woman removing her hijab, derived from a video of a courageous young woman who took off her hijab on a city street and waved it on a stick in defiance of Iran’s Islamic authorities.
A woman was seen on tape declaring: “You raised your fists and ruined our lives. Now we raise our fists. Be men, join us. I as a woman will stand in front and protect you. Come represent your country.”
Strangely but consistently, American women, who have never really understood what it is to be denied their rights by a misogynist system of governance (sharia), have all but abandoned these women yearning to be free. But it’s worse than that. The leader of the women’s movement, chosen by the leftist elites, is a notorious pro-sharia, pro-terror anti-Semite, Linda Sarsour, who rather neatly plays a bait-and-switch game with Iran’s lack of freedom for women and their fight against death and oppression. Sarsour is trying to change the subject away from the Iran freedom movement to the supposed persecution of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, an utterly false and Islamic imperialist narrative.
Sarsour attacks those of us who stand in support of this growing movement in Iran. At the same time, fittingly enough, she is facing charges of aiding and abetting sexual harassment and abuse while she was director of the Arab American Association in New York City.
Meanwhile, regarding Iran, Senators Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, and Elizabeth Warren, leading hard-left feminist women’s rights advocates – have said nothing. Nada. Not a statement of support, not a tweet, not a word.
While women in Iran are ripping off their hijabs, the left elites in America are working furiously to impose this garment of oppression on women as if it were some symbol of empowerment. We have seen Hijab Days in public schools all over the country. Then there was the One Million Hijabs For Shaima Alawadi movement supposedly in defense of Muslim women after Alawadi, a hijab-wearing Muslima, was supposedly murdered by an “Islamophobe.” That movement utterly collapsed when Shaima’s murderer was discovered to be not a hijab-hating Islamophobe, but her devout Muslim husband, who murdered his wife because she was working towards living a freer life. One Million Hijabs For Shaima — a cruel joke, at the expense of women living under the boot of Islamic law.
Women in Iran are marching and dying for a chance to live a free life. American women should be marching in solidarity, with their vagina hats at full attention. Instead, these savage hypocrites are attacking those of us who actually stand for women’s rights and human rights, even daring to challenge the sharia oppression that they constantly ignore, excuse, minimize, or deflect attention away from.
Exalting the idea of wrapping women in a cloth coffin under the guise of freedom best illustrates how subjugated and morally bankrupt, as well as timid, the left has become.
The prospect of feminists fighting for the hijab also unmasks this entire fraudulent movement for what it really is. It is ridiculous on its face that feminists laughably claim to be pursuing justice and equality for women, while in fact, their true goal is the obliteration of justice. I am profoundly anti-feminist because it is a phony movement. It is rooted in Marxism-Leninism, and does not genuinely represent women.
The feminist abandonment of women in Islam — Iran, the honor killing victims, the subjugation and oppression of women, forced marriage, child marriage, clitoridectomies, the misogyny of sharia law — should be absolute cause for all women to reject and repudiate the long dead and destructive feminist movement.
The women in Iran may not just bring down the mullahcracy in Iran; they may also blow it up here in America as well.
Exclusive: Pamela Geller explains why D.C. Metro barred Christmas ad
The Washington Times reported last Tuesday that “the Catholic church is taking Metro to court after the Washington-area transit agency rejected an ad campaign promoting a website aimed at encouraging attendance at parishes throughout the D.C. area.” Why did the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority reject these ads? Because of the Geller Ban.
This goes back to June 2015, when my organization, the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), created a free-speech ad campaign defying the blasphemy laws under the Shariah. We put up 100 billboards around St. Louis, depicting the winning cartoon in our Muhammad cartoon contest that was fired upon by jihadis in Garland, Texas, under the headline, “SUPPORT FREE SPEECH.” The cartoon depicted Muhammad being drawn by an artist. Muhammad says, “You can’t draw me!” The artist responds: “That’s why I draw you.” It was an apt summation of the courage and refusal to be bullied that we need to have in the face of violent intimidation from Islamic jihadis.
The billboards featuring this Muhammad cartoon also went up in and around the northern tri-county area of Marion, Baxter and Boone counties in Arkansas. But in what could only called an end-run around the First Amendment, when we tried to run them in the Washington, D.C., subway, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) enforced the Shariah under the guise of banning all “political ads.” No other ad had compelled WMATA to take such drastic action. My ads violating Islamic blasphemy laws led to Shariah bans in New York, Boston, Miami, Chicago, Denver, San Francisco et al.
The ban itself is mutable and unclear. No contemporary medium of communication may pass the test of being merely commercial and non-political. The New York Times runs an editorial page every day – not to mention the slant of their “straight news” – and therefore, if they can advertise, so can the Village Voice, the Socialist Militant and Dabiq (ISIS’ four-color magazine), for that matter.
The WMATA threw in public safety for good measure, as if these craven quislings knew what was conducive to the public good. Color me skeptical. They said the buses would be a target for jihadis. Yet if we’ve learned anything since 9/11, it is that America is the target. The West is the target for Islamic terrorism. Abridging our freedoms so as not to offend savages is surrender and un-American. It results in more demands, more surrender, more capitulation to Shariah law (which is what WMATA did).
Running and hiding is no strategy in a war. Operation Fetal Position is a recipe for disaster.
No one cared when my ads were banned, but it was never about me. The enemedia makes it about me, monsterizes me, so that people run in horror at the bogeyman and say yes, yes, shut her up, shut her down. It’s covert totalitarianism.
The Catholic Church, of course, would not have dreamed of sticking up for my free-speech rights at the time the Geller Ban first was put into place. But it’s like the famous Martin Niemöller poem:
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out –
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out –
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out –
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak for me.
Now they have come for the Catholic Church, and who will speak up for their free-speech rights?
What most people don’t know is the Geller Ban is not unique to Washington, D.C. In fact, the Geller Ban is in effect in every major city in the United States: New York, Boston, Miami, Chicago, liberal San Francisco, Denver and more.
So who will speak up for the other organizations that want to run perfectly reasonable ads, as mine were, and run afoul of this ban?
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