Fighting for truth and free speech in the courts all over. “Pro-Israel Group Asks Court to Order SEPTA to Display ‘Stop the Islamic Jew-Hatred’ Advertisement,” American Freedom Law Center, October 2, 2014:
Today, the American Freedom Law Center (AFLC) filed a motion for a preliminary injunction in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, asking the court to order the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) to run a “Stop the Islamic Jew-Hatred” advertisement on its advertising space. The motion was filed on behalf of the advertisement’s sponsors, the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) and its co-founders, Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, and is part of a civil rights lawsuit filed against SEPTA last month.
In May, AFDI submitted the below advertisement for display on SEPTA’s advertising space:
SEPTA rejected the ad, claiming that it “tends to disparage or ridicule any person or group of persons on the basis of race, religious belief, age, sex, alienage, national origin, sickness or disability.”
In its court filings, AFLC argues that SEPTA’s speech restriction is content- and viewpoint-based in violation of the First Amendment. Citing to U.S. Supreme Court precedent, AFLC points out that:
Government censorship is repugnant to our Constitution, and for good reason. Indeed, if there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion. Permitting the government to restrict speech it deems uncivil and thus allowing it to take sides on important public issues directly undermines our profound national commitment to the freedom of speech.
David Yerushalmi, AFLC Co-Founder and Senior Counsel, commented,
“SEPTA’s conduct denying our clients’ ad is outrageous. The so-called ‘disparagement’ or civility standard is nothing short of refuge for government censorship. That the media and others in Philadelphia, the home of liberty, have not risen up in vocal protest over this patent violation of the First Amendment is shameful. Volumes have been written by historians and scholars about Islamic Jew hatred. Why not just permit some other government agency to ban these books and similar public displays on the same grounds? Are Philadelphians so passive to government censorship or is it that they’d prefer to abandon liberty to appease some unruly mob which threatens the world with violence over the smallest slight?”
Robert Muise, AFLC Co-Founder and Senior Counsel, added,
“AFLC has made it clear in lawsuits across the country—lawsuits we have litigated and won to protect the First Amendment—that this government conduct will not stand in the face of serious judicial scrutiny. The government’s policy and approach to calling Islamic terrorism ‘extremist violence’ or ‘workplace violence’ or ‘religious extremism’ may not become a dictate or mantra enforced upon the body politic. We are a free people who remain free because we possess the inalienable right to speak our minds freely in the public square about important issues of the day. AFLC stands ready, willing, and able to protect that liberty in the courts anywhere anytime.”

manuel-rafael says
Denial of Historical Facts ? The Holocaust did not happen and there is no tie between the moderate rebels and ISIS ISIL and IS. We are just not politically correct enough, the sharia police are set to pounce.
mortimer says
There are dozens of verses in the Koran that specifically call for hate and enimity towards Jews.
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/anti-semitism/koranjews.html
[2.88] And they say: Our hearts are covered. Nay, Allah has cursed them on account of their unbelief; so little it is that they believe.
[2.98] Whoever is the enemy of Allah and His angels and His apostles and Jibreel and Meekaeel, so surely Allah is the enemy of the unbelievers.
[2.98] Whoever is the enemy of Allah and His angels and His apostles and Jibreel and Meekaeel, so surely Allah is the enemy of the unbelievers.
[4.46] Of those who are Jews (there are those who) alter words from their places and say: We have heard and we disobey and: Hear, may you not be made to hear! and: Raina, distorting (the word) with their tongues and taunting about religion; and if they had said (instead): We have heard and we obey, and hearken, and unzurna it would have been better for them and more upright; but Allah has cursed them on account of their unbelief, so they do not believe but a little.
[5.13] But on account of their breaking their covenant We cursed them and made their hearts hard; they altered the words from their places and they neglected a portion of what they were reminded of; and you shall always discover treachery in them excepting a few of them; so pardon them and turn away; surely Allah loves those who do good (to others).
[5.51] O you who believe! do not take the Jews and the Christians for friends; they are friends of each other; and whoever amongst you takes them for a friend, then surely he is one of them; surely Allah does not guide the unjust people.
[5.60] Say: Shall I inform you of (him who is) worse than this in retribution from Allah? (Worse is he) whom Allah has cursed and brought His wrath upon, and of whom He made apes and swine, and he who served the Shaitan; these are worse in place and more erring from the straight path.
mortimer says
A March 29, 2010 story in The Washington Times (“Hate Crimes Force Jews Out of Malmo”) noted that of 115 bias-crimes in Sweden’s third largest city, reported in 2009, 52 were anti-Semitic, this notwithstanding that Malmo’s Jewish population numbers fewer than 700 (half of what it was two decades ago) in a general population of 280,000.
Thus, Jews represent less than .0025% of the city, but account for 45% of all hate crimes. Could that have something to do with Malmo’s 60,000 Muslims?
Malmo Rabbi Shneur Kesselman says: “In the past five years I’ve been here, I think you can count on your hand how many (anti-Semitic) incidents there have been from the extreme right. In my personal experience, it’s 99% Muslim.” Jewish resident Marcus Eilenberg, whose survivor grandparents found shelter in Malmo in 1945, says Jews there are confronting “a degree of hate that none of us – except those who survived the Holocaust – had experienced before.”
United Kingdom
About 2 out of 5 British Muslims believe Jews are “a legitimate target”
Nearly two fifths (37 per cent) [of Muslims] believe that the Jewish community in Britain is a legitimate target “as part of the ongoing struggle for justice in the Middle East”. Moreover, only 52 per cent think that the state of Israel has the right to exist, with 30 per cent disagreeing, a big minority. One in six of all Muslims questioned thinks suicide bombings can sometimes be justified in Israel, though many fewer (7 per cent) say the same about Britain. This is broadly comparable to the number justifying suicide attacks in ICM and YouGov polls of British Muslims after the July 7 attacks.
duh_swami says
I approve of every thing on the ad except the color, or rather lack of color. Possibly everything could be as it is except that ‘Stop the hate’ is blood red. Or something like that.
nacazo says
God bless you people at AFLC and AFDI! Protecting our freedoms.
mortimer says
Muslim eschatology emphasizes the Jews’ supreme hostility to Islam. Jews are described as adherents of the Dajjāl—the Muslim equivalent of the Anti-Christ—and as per another tradition, the Dajjāl is in fact Jewish. At his appearance, other traditions state that the Dajjāl will be accompanied by 70,000 Jews from Isfahan wrapped in their robes, and armed with polished sabers, their heads covered with a sort of veil. When the Dajjāl is defeated, his Jewish companions will be slaughtered— everything will deliver them up except for the so-called gharkad tree. Thus, according to a canonical hadith (Sahih Muslim, Book 40, Number 6985), if a Jew seeks refuge under a tree or a stone, these objects will be able to speak to tell a Muslim: “There is a Jew behind me; come and kill him!”
Not only are the Jews vanquished in the eschatological war, but they will serve as ransom for the Muslims in the fires of hell. The sins of certain Muslims will weigh on them like mountains, but on the day of resurrection, these sins will be lifted and laid upon the Jews.
Demonizing Israel and Jews—via motifs in the Koran and hadith—Hizbollah views the jihad against the “Zionist entity” as an annihilationist war intrinsic to broader conflicts: the struggle between the Islamic world and the non-Muslim world, and the historical struggle between Islam and Judaism. The most senior clerical authority for Hizbollah, Husayn Fadlalah has stated,
“We find in the Koran that the Jews are the most aggressive towards the Muslims…because of their aggressive resistance to the unity of the faith.”
Historian David Littman has made repeated appeals to the UN Human Rights Commission alerting its members to the dangers inherent in the binding Hamas Charter (circa 1988). Littman elucidated some of key the motifs of Islamic Jew-hatred contained in this document which amount to no less than a “direct and public incitement to commit genocide,” punishable under article 4 of the 1948 Genocide Convention.
Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi wrote these words in his 700 page treatise rationalizing Muslim Jew hatred, Banu Isra’il fi al-Qur’an wa al-Sunna [Jews in the Koran and the Traditions], originally published in the 1970s, and then re-issued in 1986:
[The] Koran describes the Jews with their own particular degenerate characteristics, i.e. killing the prophets of Allah, corrupting His words by putting them in the wrong places, consuming the people’s wealth frivolously, refusal to distance themselves from the evil they do, and other ugly characteristics caused by their deep-rooted lasciviousness…only a minority of the Jews keep their word….[A]ll Jews are not the same. The good ones become Muslims, the bad ones do not.
Tantawi’s doctoral thesis illustrates the prevalence and depth of sacralized, “normative” Jew hatred in the contemporary Muslim world which can no longer be ignored.
Tom W Harris says
I’m sure the ACLU will shortly join your free speech fight, haw haw haw.
Kathy Brown, Esq. says
Kudos Tom! Yes: I just can’t think what’s keeping the [largely self-hating-Jewish] law-yuhs at the ACLU from rushing to the defense of our wonderful Pam!
Since they’re generally atheists it can’t be that they’re tied up observing Yom Kippur or Rosh Hashanah.
paddy says
Jews ROCK…muslims SUCK
rabrooks says
Please correct me if I’m wrong. It’s really silly and hurt feelings. I think that while at medina, mad mo’ wished to be reckognized as a prophet, but his Jewish companions(yes he had jew friends) refused his dictates. Well he of course had them killed, and has been killing Jews ever since. Women hate rejection.