Pamela Geller, Human Events: Victory for Truth and Free Speech Over Islamic Supremacism

Victory for Truth and Free Speech Over Islamic Supremacism Human Events, Pamela Geller

A years-long battle is over, and Islamic supremacism has suffered a stunning and well-deserved defeat in its ongoing war against free speech and those who dare to tell the truth about Islam.  Omar Tarazi, a lawyer linked to the Hamas front group the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), has dismissed his frivolous, harassing $10 million libel lawsuit against me with prejudice, which means that it cannot be refiled.
 
This case was about much more than just Tarazi’s false charge that I libeled him.  His dismissal of the case is a huge victory for the First Amendment, truth and the anti-Sharia movement in this country, which is exposing an insidious cancer that brings progressives and Islamic supremacists together in the common cause of attacking anyone who criticizes Islamic supremacism with the threat of lawsuits, actual lawsuits, or even worse, violence.
 
Tarazi is a lawyer based in Columbus, Ohio.  He represented the parents of Rifqa Bary​, the teenage girl who fled from her home in fear for her life in 2009 after converting from Islam to Christianity.  He sued me for $10 million after I criticized him in a series of blog posts at my website, AtlasShrugs.com, pointing out his ties to Hamas-linked CAIR and his efforts to harass and demoralize Rifqa by, among other initiatives, denying her the Christmas cards that I had encouraged my readers to send to her.
 
The larger implications of Tarazi’s lawsuit were clear from the outset.  His lawsuit was filed as part of the Islamic supremacist “lawfare” campaign against critics of Sharia, jihad, Islam’s death penalty for apostates, and honor killings, and I refused to capitulate.  And at the end of the day, Tarazi blinked and folded.
 
Tarazi claimed that I had libeled him by linking him to CAIR, the Muslim Brotherhood​/Hamas front group that the Department of Justice named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation Hamas terror funding case.  But during discovery, my ace legal team, David Yerushalmi and Robert Muise, who works with the Thomas More Law Center, established that Tarazi did in fact have personal and professional links to CAIR, and that my statements therefore could not be defamatory, because they were true.
 
I had also reported information from other sources that were critical of Tarazi’s actions—including allegations that he had perjured himself in court filings in the Ohio juvenile proceedings on the Bary case.  Here again, however, my lawyers explained how Tarazi had indeed not been completely honest with the juvenile court, and that my statements were true.
 
Yerushalmi and Muise (who absorbed six-figure legal costs as they represented me pro bono, because of the important free-speech implications of the case) were steadfast when I held firm that no settlement would be reached in this attempt to enforce the blasphemy laws under Sharia and restrict free speech and truth.  They asked the court to dismiss Tarazi’s lawsuit entirely, and Tarazi, seeing that nothing was going his way, folded soon after.

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