Over at Frontpage, Jamie Glazov interviews my SIOA colleague Pamela Geller about the bus ad initiative in Miami:
Geller: Last Tuesday (April 13), Stop Islamization Of America and the Freedom Defense Initiative, the new organization I have begun with bestselling author and Jihad Watch director Robert Spencer, rolled out our “Leaving Islam” ad campaign on Miami buses. But on Friday (April 30), in an outrageous denial of our free speech rights, Miami-Dade Transit pulled our ads – because they might be “offensive to Islam.”
At the behest of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), an un-indicted co-conspirator in a Hamas funding case, Miami-Dade Transit took our SIOA ads off the buses in South Florida because they offended Muslims.
Miami-Dade Transit was bowing to Sharia, Islamic law, which forbids non-Muslims to insult Islam. But ultimately free speech won out: after we threatened a lawsuit, Miami-Dade Transit agreed to restore our ads and add them to twenty new buses at the cost merely of printing the new posters. Our lawyer, David Yerushalmi, did a superb job, with the aid of the Thomas More Law Center’s Robert Muise.
FP: What was the motive of your campaign?
Geller: Jamie, this campaign was and is in defense of religious freedom. Our ad asks, “Fatwa on your head? Is your family or community threatening you? Leaving Islam? Got questions? Get answers! RefugefromIslam.com.” This is the first time anyone offered public help to people threatened under Islam’s death penalty for apostasy. America is the land of the free, and apostates must know they are free here. Safe here. Government and law enforcement should be on this. But they aren’t. So we are. It is time for free citizens to stand for freedom — or lose it.
Miami-Dade Transit’s kowtowing to CAIR, even though it ultimately reversed itself, shows how close we are to losing it….