Update July 21st: Steve Emerson tell us what happened at the conference here.
Writing today at American Thinker, our friend Janet Levy points out the increasingly frightening attempts to thwart the speech of those warning against the spread of Shariah law while giving free rein to all those who wish to destabilize America. She begins with the conference we mentioned here on Friday—the Chicago ‘Fall of Capitalism and Rise of Islam’ conference that went ahead with apparently no problems over the weekend.
On July 19th, a conference entitled “The Fall of Capitalism and the Rise of Islam” took place as scheduled at the Hilton Hotel in Oak Lawn, Illinois, a Chicago suburb. There, in the heartland of a post 9/11America, Hizb-ut Tahrir, an international organization outlawed as a terrorist group in several European and Middle East countries, sponsored sessions focusing on strategies to end free enterprise and replace it with Shari’ah law.
Gagging those of us who speak against Shariah law.
It is remarkable enough that a conference of this nature by a group that advocates the overthrow of the U.S. government actually took place in an American city. Perhaps even more disturbing is the growing number of cancellations of events and conferences that feature the opposite point of view with material and speakers that seek to educate the public about the threat of radical Islam. Increasingly, our country’s prized right to freedom of speech seems to operate in only one direction, providing plenty of opportunities for our enemies to speak openly against us, yet, placing a gag over any discussion about the radical Islam threat.
Levy then goes on to list many cases, some we are personally familiar with, in which attempts were made (directly by Muslims or their lackies) to silence our point of view. She mentions the New English Review conference which I attended, the CPAC snub of Geert Wilders (a speech Judy and I attended), Grover Norquist’s role in blocking conservatives discussion of Shariah law, and the Muslim/Somali mess in Nashville (here is just one of many posts on Nashville) which we have covered extensively. Read the article where she lists many more cases of attempts to silence critics of Islam.
Levy wraps up her list with this:
It is unconscionable in 2009 that an acceptable forum in America today is a conference entitled, “The Fall of Capitalism and the Rise of Islam,” with a goal of strategizing the demise of the bedrock of our democracy – the free enterprise system – and the replacement of our constitution with a theo-political-legal system that subjugates women, murders homosexuals, confers non-person status on non-Muslims, permits slavery and kills apostates. At the same time, attempts to discuss Islamic doctrine and educate the American public about this very threat are increasingly verboten. In many recent instances, accurate speech is being deemed inflammatory due to fear of retaliation by those who want to silence critics of Islam who engage in legitimate discussion of a serious threat to our nation.