An update on CAIR’s war on free speech at the American Library Association: CAIR op Ahmed Rehab admits that he was invited to join the panel on which I had been scheduled to speak — a detail Rehab conveniently left out of his article on this incident. Rehab, of course, did not appear on the panel; CAIR preferred to pressure the panelists into withdrawing and the ALA into canceling the panel altogether — all to prevent my speaking. This shows anew how desperately afraid CAIR is of being unmasked, and of the truths about jihad and Islamic supremacism getting out to the wider American public.
Rehab says:
I was NOT one of the original invitees to this panel.
No one ever claimed otherwise.
The full list of original invitee names are included in my article. Spencer was the fourth, since his addition was never revealed to the other panelists, we do not know exactly when he was added.
Rehab’s implication that I was added later via some act of skulduggery simply doesn’t tally with the facts. The ALA’s Myra Appel announced on June 15 that I was going to be on the panel.
Myra did “invite” me to the panel, but there is a little bit of detail Spencer conveniently ignores: she invited me THREE days before the panel, as opposed to the several months notice the other panelists were given the courtesy of. This came across to me as cynical, disrespectful, and a sloppy attempt by the ALA to try to save face after it was embarrassed by the public revelation of its failure to disclose Spencer’s invitation to the other panelists. They wanted me to bail them out from their unethical action which I had no intention of doing. Interestingly, even in this late “invitation” to me, they did not disclose that Spencer was invited, not knowing that by that time that I was fully up-to-date on the controversy.
Rehab is simply lying — as I said above, Appel sent around an announcement that I was on the panel on June 15. You can read it here. But his whining about being disrespected because he was invited onto the panel with only three days’ notice is laughable — and disquieting at the same time. Does he really think that I or any of the other panelists prepared for the panel for a month? In reality, I was preparing my remarks when Appel emailed me to cancel my appearance, three hours before I was scheduled to get on a plane to Chicago to appear on the ALA panel. Give me three days’ notice, I’ll be ready for anything.
Anyway, why is it disquieting? Because if anyone was on the way to being secretly added to the panel as a result of skulduggery, it was not I — it was Ahmed Rehab. Myra Appel issued this last-minute invitation to him in a quiet effort to placate CAIR after the defamed me in several press releases. And that raises the question why is the American Library Association colluding with an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas terror funding case? Why was the ALA so willing to accept the perspective of a group whose operatives have repeatedly refused to denounce Hamas and Hizballah as terrorist groups? Why did the ALA take seriously CAIR’s description of me and of the alleged damage that the panel would cause, when several former CAIR officials have been convicted of various crimes related to jihad terror? Several of its other officials have made Islamic supremacist statements — do any librarians know or care what the implications of that are for human rights and freedom?
So why was the ALA so happy to placate this group? Do its donors know it is kowtowing to such an unsavory organization as CAIR?
And why is the HuffPo giving a platform to a Hamas-linked organization?