The imam was suspended with pay for two weeks but not fired. Perhaps he does have the right to say anything he pleases as a citizen; perhaps his loss of this right might also endanger us all. My question is, what if he is indoctrinating a large population of criminals? Conversion to Islam, especially among African-American men in jail, is growing, both here and among North-and Caribbean-African men in Europe. Can we consider them truly rehabilitated if they hold such extremist views when they are released?
Further, what does it mean that Duke University and Georgetown University have recently defended the right of the Palestine Solidarity Movement to hold its annual conference at their respective campuses? Both institutions claimed that even if the hate speech against Jews, Israel, and America was false and inflammatory, it was still protected by the First Amendment and by academic freedom.
Let’s assume they are right. My question: At what point can we understand that such hateful teaching and preaching have the power to inflame someone like the Iranian student Mohammed Reza Taheriazar, who drove his rented SUV into a crowd of fellow students at the university of North Carolina, in Chapel Hill, injuring nine people? According to Daniel Pipes, this quiet and seemingly assimilated terrorist said that he wanted to “punish the American government for their actions around the world” and that he “wanted to avenge the death of Muslims around the world.”
Such ideas are rampant in the Islamic media. Just as the 2000 intifada against Israel has gone global, so too has hate speech against America, Israel, and the West become global and technologically magnified. The anti-American and anti-Zionist mosque sermons that have historically taken place locally every Friday have now also gone global and are available, via satellite, throughout the world, including in Europe.
Not to worry. Al Jazeera, the network to which Islamist terrorists send the videos of their beheadings, wants to open an office in Washington to “spin” the news in English for us. Luckily, like the Dubai Port deal, it has encountered some American resistance. There is no guarantee that such resistance will ultimately prevail.
But here is what really worries me: the same First Amendment, free speech, and academic rights that seem to work so well for Islamists do not seem to protect our right to criticize Islamic terrorism or Islamic religious and gender apartheid. Those of us who describe Islam/Islamism accurately are often slandered as “racists” and as “Islamophobic” and silenced by lawsuit or fear of lawsuit.
Members of Cincinnati’s Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) managed to shut down a production of a play by Glyn O’Malley about the first female suicide bomber. A group of Muslim students at De Paul University managed to get Professor Thomas Klocek fired or permanently “suspended” because, off-duty (just like the New York prison imam), he tried to tell the truth about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Muslim students, perhaps shocked that anyone would dare disagree with their anti-Israel views, reported him as a “racist.” Klocek’s pro-American and pro-Israel free speech is, apparently, not as protected as is that of another De Paul University professor, Norman Finkelstein, a notorious demonizer of Israel.
In Europe, lawsuits have been launched against those who tell the truth about Islam. A series of such lawsuits has kept Oriana Fallaci in exile from her native Italy and has made it dangerous for her to visit Switzerland. For similar reasons, the Israeli-American author Rachel Ehrenfeld cannot visit England, where a Saudi billionaire has won a default judgment against her. Ehrenfeld’s alleged crime? She wrote about his funding of terror – and she has counter-sued him here, under her First Amendment right to do so. Interestingly, while many major newspapers and booksellers, including Amazon, have written briefs on her behalf, no one but Ehrenfeld is funding the actual lawsuit in defense of our collective right to tell the truth about the Islamic funding of terrorism against us.