Pamela Geller: My ad is not hate speech – it's love speech

In defense of truth, common sense, and the freedom of speech. "My ad is not hate speech – it's love speech," by Pamela Geller in WND, October 9:

We are Americans; we do not cower or reward barbarity and savagery. This was reaffirmed yet again on Friday, when a U.S. District Court judge ruled that my pro-freedom ads had to run in the Washington, D.C., subway system, despite attempts by the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) to suppress them for fear of what Islamic jihadist savages might do if they saw them. The “fears” of the WMATA validate the message and the necessity of our ads.

It was a close victory. At the hearing, Judge Rosemary Collyer of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia appeared to go out of her way to validate and substantiate WMATA’s ridiculous premise that the AFDI pro-freedom ad would endanger passengers on the D.C. subways and thus must not be posted, or at least delayed until some (fanciful) time when the jihad threat would subside. It was painful to watch Judge Collyer almost physically wrestling with the First Amendment, trying to tackle it and pin it to the floor.

But the First Amendment proved too strong. The judge must have read the case law and saw how utterly wrong she was. She just handed us a complete victory. Props to Judge Collyer for vetting all sides, perhaps playing devil’s advocate and ruling correctly, despite many a false premise.

Philip Staub, the lawyer for WMATA, invoked the international Muslim riots that have been blamed (falsely) on the Muhammad video and said WMATA had received an email threatening them if they posted our ad. He was, in other words, counseling submission to violent Muslim intimidation and the curtailing of the freedom of speech to appease savages. He made the laughable argument that if the ad ran after Nov. 1, the threat would have subsided by then, and all would be well – as if the jihad terror threat would completely die down by then.

Staub also argued that the ad constituted fighting words – but here Judge Collyer couldn’t go along with what he was saying, although she struggled mightily to do so. She gently pointed out to Staub – whom she treated with kid gloves and like a special-needs child the whole afternoon, leading him by the hand to the disbelief of the open court (in sharp contradistinction to her frequent interruptions and contradictions of attorney Robert Muise – stop making sense!) – that for the ad to constitute fighting words, there had to be an imminent threat of violence. But the ads have run without incident in San Francisco and New York – they were vandalized in New York in an attempt to shut down free speech, but there was no violence aside from Muslim Brotherhood poster girl Mona Eltahawy’s pink spray can – and so it was impossible for Staub or Collyer to sustain the idea that they constituted an imminent threat to the safety of the passengers. But Collyer certainly tried, coaching and coaxing Staub and at one point saying to him, “The imminence issue is hard for me to get to. Just trying to tell you where I am going.”

Collyer further coached Staub by saying that she assumed – assumed! – that he was arguing (since he was so inept at actually doing so, the point wasn’t clear) that the government’s “compelling interest” in refusing or delaying these ads was concern for the safety of the passengers. She then said, with obvious reluctance, that against that concern there had to be balanced “the very broadly read First Amendment,” and asked him how he thought this could be done.

Staub answered that the safety of the passengers could be balanced against the First Amendment by delaying the ads. He said that he thought things would cool down in Africa, Asia and the Middle East by Nov. 1, and that the ads could run then. Remember, guys, we’re talking about four little ads here, and the WMATA is talking about unrest on two continents. That’s how paralyzed with fear of savages the U.S. government has become....

Read it all.