By Frank Gaffney Jr. —— Bio and Archives December 29, 2014
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We also understand that, for 235 years, freedom of expression has been a universal right at the core of our democracy. So we are focused on promoting interfaith education and collaboration, enforcing anti-discrimination laws, protecting the rights of all people to worship as they choose, and to use some old-fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming, so that people don’t feel that they have the support to do what we abhor.In other words, if – to quote President Obama’s words – “producers, directors and others” don’t engage in self-censorship about jihad and other appalling attributes of Islamic supremacism, the Obama administration is prepared to use “peer pressure and shaming” to suppress them. [The OIC’s campaign to suppress freedom of expression and the Obama administration’s acquiescence to it is the subject of a terrific documentary, “Silent Conquest.” It features comments from many of those of us vilified by Islamic supremacists and their sympathizers as “Islamophobes.” This film surely would be an example of a documentary that needs to be seen, not suppressed, not least because it offends precisely the sorts of folks whose sensibilities, as the President put it, “need to be offended.”] Evidence of the successful application of this double-standard is not hard to find. For example, the Obama administration calls Nidal Hasan’s massacre at Fort Hood and the beheading of a grandmother in Oklahoma incidents of “workplace violence” and scarcely anyone in the mainstream press objects. Ditto with the President’s claim that the “Islamic State is not Islamic.” Ditto then-Homeland Security Advisor to the President John Brennan’s insistence that “we [do not] describe our enemy as ‘jihadists’ or ‘Islamists’ because jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one’s community.” At this writing, there is another instance of apparent self-censorship with respect to the coverage of Islamic supremacism that is playing out in real time. Somehow, in scrutinizing the social media postings of Ismaaiyl Abdullah Brinsley, the man who assassinated two police officers in Brooklyn over the weekend, the legacy press seems to have overlooked an item Patrick Poole at PJMedia found on Brinsely’s his Facebook page: an image reproducing the Quran’s Sura 8:60. (ed.– Breitbart News has published a report on Brinsely’s social media presence). It reads:
Against them make ready your strength to the utmost of your power, including steeds of war, to strike terror into (the hearts of) the enemies, of Allah and your enemies, and others besides, whom ye may not know, but whom Allah doth know. Whatever ye shall spend in the cause of Allah, shall be repaid unto you, and ye shall not be treated unjustly.Evidence that the cop-killer may not have been motivated simply by venomous attacks on law enforcement calling for the murder of police officers and officials pandering to race-baiters, but to jihadist sentiments that are about terror, not self-improvement, should actually be a central part of reporting on this weekend’s heinous murders. But not according to President Obama’s double-standard on freedom of expression. Here’s the bottom line: Our liberties like freedom of speech are unalienable rights from our Creator. Neither foreign powers, our president nor self-censorship can be allowed to suppress them, ever.
Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is the President of the Center for Security Policy and a columnist for the Washington Times.