Pamela Geller, WND weekly column: My ad is not hate speech – it’s love speech

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My ad is not hate speech – it’s love speech_1349839815860

My ad is not hate speech – it’s love speech 
WND

Exclusive: Pamela Geller celebrates court win allowing anti-jihad message in D.C.

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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.

Even worse, Collyer said this of the ad (which reads “In any war
between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man.
Support Israel. Defeat jihad.”): “I see hate speech. When you defend
this ad as core political speech, I have a problem with that.”

The ad is not hate speech, it’s love speech. It’s love of life
speech. The ad speaks to the defense of freedom and individual rights
for all. There’s nothing hateful about it. 9/11 was hate. 3/11 in Madrid
was hate. 7/7 in London was hate. The Fort Hood jihadi was hate. The
Christmas balls bomber was hate. The Fort Dix Six was hate. Pushing back
against such hate is not hate. This poor woman hasn’t a clue as to the
jihadic doctrine that relentlessly seeks to violently impose Islamic law
and pursues jihad against non-Muslims.

In the midst of this nonsense, Muise kept acting like the one kid in
the sixth-grade classroom who was trying to keep his classmates from
running wild in front of the hapless substitute teacher: He kept trying
to remind Collyer (and Staub) of basic points of American law. He
reminded Collyer that there is no law against “hate speech” in America,
so that even if she did think the ad was “hate,” that should have no
bearing on her ruling. Speech is only considered inciteful, he said, if
the speech itself is calling for the lawless, violent action.

And WMATA’s argument about the threat this video posed to the safety
of the passengers, Muise pointed out, rested entirely on riots that took
place not in the U.S. but in Muslim countries, and not because of this
ad, but (supposedly) because of the Muhammad video. The video and the
ad, he said, did not have remotely the same content. There was one email
WMATA received that apparently contained threats related to this ad, he
said, but he explained that we cannot allow those who threaten violence
to restrict our First Amendment rights, and cannot have the government
acquiesce in the restriction of those rights in response to threats.

Anyway, in the end Collyer ruled properly. Muise commented, “Today,
Judge Collyer affirmed that our fundamental right to freedom of speech
cannot be suppressed by mob rule. This is not only a victory for our
clients, but it is a clear victory for all freedom-loving Americans.”
Yes, it is.

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Victoria
Victoria
11 years ago

Apparently the only thing that protected the first amendment was the low numbers of Muslims living in WDC. If there get to be enough devout Muslims who are willing to act violently, does that mean a threat will be imminent and therefore free speech in the subway not allowed?
Can the federal government be sued for letting in so many Muslim immigrants who will eventually force us to curtail freedom of speech? Thinking of all these naturalized Americans who want to wipe out freedom of speech makes me angry.

Janice
Janice
11 years ago

“The judge must have read the case law and saw how utterly wrong she was.” She was probably trying desperately to rule the way she really wanted to without it getting tossed in appeal but couldn’t find a way around the first amendment and the law. How frustrating for her…

Bohemond_1096
Bohemond_1096
11 years ago

BAN THE KORAN.
THE KORAN IS HATE SPEECH.

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Thanks for sharing!