As the below analysis shows, our freedom to report on and criticize Islam is in serious jeopardy. Thus all our freedoms are at stake.
There is a major Demonstration for Free Speech being coordinated to counter the Department of Justice headlined event described below. This is taking place in Manchester, Tennessee, which is just off Interstate 24, almost midway between Nashville and Chattanooga. For more info, go here. If you live in Nashville, Chattanooga or Knoxville areas, I urge you to attend!
NEWS ANALYSIS:
Justice Dept Official: Criticism of Islam Not Protected Free Speech
Online postings that describe truthfully how teachings of Islam inspire violence may be considered violations of federal civil rights laws.
By Clare Lopez
Sun, June 2, 2013
The Department of Justice appears poised to move one step closer to enforcement of Islamic law on slander and blasphemy in America by threatening prosecution of citizens who exercise their First Amendment rights to free speech—if such speech dares to criticize Islam.
Bill Killian, a top Department of Justice (DOJ) official and the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Tennessee, is scheduled to headline an event [in Manchester TN] on June 4, 2013 entitled, “Public Disclosure in a Diverse Society” that’s sponsored by the American Muslim Advisory Council of Tennessee. The stated purpose of the meeting, according to the local Tullahoma News, is “increasing awareness and understanding that American Muslims are not the terrorists some have made them out to be in social media and other circles.”
Of course, the timing for the event would seem particularly ill-chosen in the wake of recent jihadist attacks and plots at the Boston Marathon (April 15, 2013), in the Iran-al-Qaeda plot against the Canadian Via Rail (April 2013) and the slaughter of British soldier, Lee Rigby, on a Woolwich, London street to the Islamic cry of, “Allahu Akbar!”
Nonetheless, based on statements made by the DOJ’s Killian to the Tullahoma News, online postings that describe truthfully how authoritative texts and teachings of Islam inspire jihadis to acts of violence, may henceforth be considered violations of federal civil rights laws. If such statements, however truthful, or apparently even original Islamic scriptural texts, are considered “inflammatory” by the FBI’s Muslim advisors, Killian wants American citizens to know “what federal laws are in effect and what the consequences are.”
This is a chilling and very direct threat to the First Amendment guarantee of the right to free speech. Even though the First Amendment also guarantees of freedom of religion, it does not limit critical discussion (“inflammatory” or otherwise) by private citizens of any ideological, legal, political or religious belief system, including Islam.
Killian and his FBI bosses ought to know that.
The implied threat to Americans’ right to criticize Islam (or any other ideology) puts Killian and the U.S. Justice Department wittingly or unwittingly in lockstep with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) “10 Year Programme of Action,” whose explicitly stated objective is to achieve international criminalization of criticism of Islam.
The legalized stifling of all criticism of Islam in America would bring U.S. law into compliance with Islamic law (sharia), which decrees that “slander” is “anything concerning a [Muslim] person that he would dislike” (including criticism about his religion).
Obviously, according to this definition, the scope for causes of Muslim rage is virtually limitless. Worse yet, as this writer noted in a December 2011 essay, the current U.S. administration, and specifically the Department of State, have been working assiduously through the so-called “Istanbul Process” and the United Nations Human Rights Council with its Resolution 16/18 to bend U.S. law more closely to conformity with this sharia definition of “slander” than anything currently on the books in American criminal law.
Which brings up the role of the Nashville, TN-based American Muslim Advisory Council (AMAC), whose less-than-transparent outreach and training activities for Tennessee law enforcement were highlighted in a February 15, 2012 article.
AMAC’s online website includes a mission statement dedicating the group to “[e]ngage and educate the law enforcement community and other agencies to better understand the Muslim community through an accurate understanding of religious and cultural traditions.”
Even more revealing, though, is its Home Page mission statement that commits the AMAC to serve “as a bridge between the Tennessee Muslim community and federal, state, and local law enforcement as well as other government and private agencies.”
Unfortunately for Tennesseans who prefer their liberty untrammeled by the bondage of Islamic law, AMAC knows what Killian does not: That, in the words of the Muslim Brotherhood’s senior theoretician, Sayyed Qutb, “The chasm between Islam and Jahiliyyah [the non-Islamic world] is great, and a bridge is not to be built across it so that the people on the two sides may mix with each other, but only so that the people of Jahiliyyah may come over to Islam.”
In other words, Islamic bridges like AMAC’s to U.S. law enforcement officers are meant for one purpose and one purpose only—to coax naïve FBI, police and sheriffs into implementing sharia in America all the while never even realizing they’re fulfilling the “civilization jihad” agenda of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Western vanguard of the forces of jihad and sharia.
DOJ moves against free speech in Tennessee bring American citizens ever closer to the sort of OIC-sponsored “hate speech” standards already in effect in Europe, which has never had the kind of free speech guarantee Americans enjoy under the First Amendment.
The agenda of the OIC (self-described representative of the Islamic ummah) is clear and leads in a straight line to the complete submission of Qur’anic verse 9:29:
“Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.”
Unbelievably, in the aftermath of the horrific Woolwich murder of a UK soldier by Islamic jihadis, British citizens were actually arrested for posting “offensive comments” about Islam on Twitter. Lest any think that couldn’t happen in America, listen carefully to what DOJ official Bill Killian says at the upcoming AMAC event in Tennessee.
Clare Lopez is a senior fellow at the ClarionProject.org and a strategic policy and intelligence expert with a focus on the Middle East, national defense and counterterrorism. Lopez served for 20 years as an operations officer with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).