Category: free speech

CAIR complains about CPAC Anti-Jihad conference

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This is so typical and so telling.  I told you the other day about the special session at the Conservative Political Action Committee annual conference in DC this week about how free speech is being muzzled around the world and in the US by Islamic supremacists.  So, it should be no surprise that the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) is now complaining about, what else, free speech in an attempt to kill the Freedom Defense Initiative event!

Read all about it at Atlas Shrugs, here.

Surely the controversy will bring out even more attendees than might initially have signed up!

Anti-jihad conference in conjunction with CPAC

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update February 21st:  Judy attended and wrote a review of the conference here.

Update February 19th:  I’ve heard first hand from attendees that the event was excellent.  However, Lawrence Auster makes some good points here about the squishiness of most to address the Muslim immigration question.

Update February 17th:  CAIR tries to kill this event!  Read all about it!

CPAC is the Conservative Political Action Committee that will be holding its annual gathering of Conservatives in Washington this week.  Check out their schedule of speakers and other events here.

Just as last year when Judy and I attended the event with Geert Wilders ( here and here are posts on that controversial event), it seems that anything to do with Islamic supremacism is always a side event for the inside-the-beltway Conservatives who make the decisions about CPAC’s agenda.

It’s not too late, if  you are in the DC area, to get to this important seminar on Islamic Jihad put on by a new group led by two of our favorite bloggers, Pamela Geller (Atlas Shrugs) and Robert Spencer (Jihad Watch), called the Freedom Defense Initiative.  Here is what they say in their recent press announcement:

The conference is designed to educate Americans about the Muslim Brotherhood’s infiltration at the highest levels of the U.S. government, as well as its war on free speech: its attempt to silence and discredit those who speak up against the jihad and Sharia encroachment in the West. Emphasis will be on the international character of the jihad against the West and on how the Islamic war on free speech (and the media’s self-imposed blackout on this issue, as in the Fort Hood massacre) is part and parcel of the same jihad against the West that terrorists are pursuing by violent means.

Go to the press release and check out the great list of speakers that you would not find in one place if it weren’t for the hard work of Spencer and Geller.  Note you must register in advance for this February 19th event!

Update:  Judy just sent me this link to an American Thinker article by Geller and Spencer with further clarification, including this:

This conference will be held at the Mariott Wardman Park Hotel, the site of CPAC, on February 19, from 10AM to noon. It is at the site of CPAC, but it is an independent event supplying the crucial information that the mainstream media (as well as the conservative establishment) ignores. We chose CPAC because it is the largest gathering of conservatives across America, and so it is the most appropriate place to end the near-universal silence about the true nature and magnitude of the jihad threat against our nation.

American free speech gets a boost

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

While Geert Wilders is dragged through court in the Netherlands for simply speaking the truth about the impact on the West of out-of-control Muslim immigration, an American judge has given free speech as it relates to Muslims in the US a shot in the arm according to World Net Daily:

A federal judge has dismissed an attempt by the Council on American-Islamic Relations to re-file a lawsuit against Air Force special agent P. David Gaubatz and his son Chris, the father-and-son team that investigated and exposed the group’s terrorist ties.

Defense lawyers are hailing the decision as a victory over CAIR’s alleged plan to “chill” free speech critical of the organization through an avalanche of court cases and legal costs.

“We briefed, counter-briefed, we spent thousands of dollars on the case,” said Daniel Horowitz, one of the three lawyers for the defense. “Only then did they file this new lawsuit, which would have effectively forced us to start all over.”

“But the new lawsuit didn’t have anything substantively new,” Horowitz told WND. “And yet, that’s their whole goal. They know they can’t win the case, but they can chill the First Amendment by making it so expensive to speak against them that no one can challenge Saudi-funded CAIR. In the end, they can just keep getting more and more money from overseas and burn out opposition with lawsuits.”

We first told you about the controversial book—Muslim Mafia— that is the centerpiece in this case, here.

A short symposium on the Geert Wilders trial

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I want to bring to your attention a symposium on National Review Online of knowledgeable conservatives giving their comments on the trial of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands for  “inciting hatred and discrimination toward Islam.”  It’s called Western Civilization on Trial and participants include experts on radical Islam like Robert Spencer, Daniel Pipes, and Bat Ye’or, as well as others. They’re all worth reading — and all are brief and to the point.  Here’s some of Robert Spencer’s contribution: 

The Geert Wilders trial ought to be an international media event; seldom has any court case anywhere had such enormous implications for the future of the free world. The case against him, which has all the legitimacy of a Stalinist-era Moscow show trial, is a manifestation of the global assault on free speech sponsored chiefly at the U.N. by the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC). If Wilders loses, the freedom of speech will be threatened everywhere in the West.

Even if he wins, a dangerous precedent has been set by the fact of the trial itself: It is a sad day for the freedom of speech when a man can be put on trial for causing another man offense. If offending someone were really a crime warranting prosecution by the civil authorities, the legal system would be opened up to absurdities even greater than the Wilders trial.

All of our posts on Geert Wilders are here.

A tremendous victory for free speech for citizens

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday’s Supreme Court decision doesn’t directly relate to refugees, but Ann and I have long been concerned with free speech, including threats to speech because of political correctness.  As bloggers we are always aware that there are those who would like to control the Internet in the interest of ideology.  The high court yesterday upheld, in Citizens United v. FEC, “the right to engage in free speech, particularly political speech, and the right to freely associate” by overturning major provisions of the McCain Feingold campaign finance reform law which restricted political advertising by corporations, among other things.

Almost all the commentary I’ve seen has been about how big money will now control elections — that is, corporations and the rich. Very few seem to understand the larger meaning of the decision. The suit was brought by Citizens United, not by Exxon or Wal-Mart. It was about the group’s right to show a film critical of Hillary Clinton during the campaign season. Citizens United is a corporation, as are most such organizations.

The worst thing about McCain Feingold was that it prevented ordinary people from banding together to influence elections by advertising. What could be more in line with the First Amendment than that? It is political speech, which was originally the very focus of freedom of speech as named in the Bill of Rights. Banning that kind of speech gave us the absurd situation in which nude dancing was held by the Supreme Court to be legitimate expression under the First Amendment, but pointing out a candidate’s good or bad points in an ad was not.

The only commentary I have seen so far which emphasizes this point is an excellent post by Hans von Spakovsky on the Heritage Foundation’s blog, The Foundry, from which I took the words in boldface above. Here’s a bit of it:

Almost every one of the many associations we have in this country (no matter which side of the political aisle they are on), from the NAACP to the Sierra Club to the National Rifle Association, are also corporations. Yet those corporate associations were prohibited under penalty of criminal and civil sanctions from expressing the views of their members in the political arena over which particular candidates should be elected to uphold the positions on important issues of public policy that their members believe in unless they complied with certain very restrictive, complex provisions.

For-profit corporations and labor unions were also prohibited from engaging in independent political activity even though their businesses and the jobs of their employees and members can be greatly affected, damaged, or even lost because of the actions taken by elected members of Congress. There is no rational reason why they should not be able to engage in independent political activity.

Von Spakovsky grounds the decision in basic principles:

It is no surprise that these rights are in the very first amendment in the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution. The Founders, who had fought a long, hard war with the English crown to establish our independence, knew that the ability to associate freely (think the Sons of Liberty) and to engage in political speech without being censored by the government were fundamental rights crucial to our republic. That is why the Supreme Court’s decision throwing out a federal ban on independent political expenditures by corporations (including non-profits) is a return to, as the Court said, “ancient First Amendment principles.”

Read the whole thing; it’s short and better than any other commentary I’ve read so far.

I believe that there will be ramifications of this decision far beyond what any commentary has touched on. Not being psychic or a legal wizard I don’t know what they are, but they might include an end to the IRS persecution of churches and other nonprofits for talking about elections, perhaps an end to the ban on lobbying by certain nonprofits, and many other things, as Americans exercise their traditional practice of exploring the meaning of their rights.