It's a shame America had to learn the hard way, don't elect a community organizing greenhorn to run anything...
Robert Spencer on the War on the First Amendment
The ground we've lost during the Obama years -- and the dangerous consequences for national security.
January 4, 2017
Frontpagemag.com
Below are the video and transcript to Robert Spencer's speech at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s 2016 Restoration Weekend. The event was held Nov. 10th-13th at the Breakers Resort in Palm Beach, Florida.
Robert Spencer from DHFC on Vimeo.
Robert Spencer: Thank you very much. It's great to be here on this occasion. I'm here year after year and this is certainly the happiest Restoration Weekend I've been to and very happy to say we won't have Chick Nixon to kick around anymore. Come on. The fact is that Hillary Clinton's defeat is a very, very serious victory not only for the Second Amendment, but for the First and this is something that has been insufficiently appreciated in all the commentary before the election and after. Donald Trump, of course, he went after her many times saying Hillary Clinton is against the Second Amendment, she's going to stop the sale of lawful weaponry in every way she possibly can, but he never spoke about the threat that she posed to the First Amendment and that is an ongoing threat and a still existing threat and it's very important to bear that in mind because even though she was defeated, this threat has not gone away. The left is in a full court press and a year's long effort to destroy the First Amendment and essentially to criminalize any point of view that is not their own and this is a struggle that they are going to continue. Now, there are many, many facets of this. One is, of course, the most notable one I should say, is the organization of Islamic cooperation, which is 57 Islamic governments around the world, 56 states and the Palestinian Authority, the largest voting block at the United Nations, and they of course for years now since the publication of the Danish Cartoons of Mohammed in 2006 they have been working to restrict the freedom of speech and to compel Western states to restrict the freedom of speech at the UN.
I know a lot of you are familiar with that effort and that they have, under the guise of what they call "incitement to religious hatred," been trying to compel Western governments to criminalize essentially criticism of Islam. Obviously, when you talk about incitement through religious hatred, any kind of incitement, unless it's absolutely direct and explicit, is a subjective judgment in the first place. Secondly, nobody cares when people put crucifixes in jars of urine or mock Israel and Judaism. Nobody cares about those things. They only care about religious hatred in an Islamic context, and the most insidious aspect of this endeavor, this initiative, is of course that any honest discussion of how Islamic Jihadis use the texts and teachings of Islam to justify violence is classified explicitly by the OIC as incitement to religious hatred. So, what they want to do is criminalize any discussion of the motivating ideology behind Jihad terrorism and the goal of that, of course, is to enable Jihad terrorists to advance unopposed and unimpeded.
...
One example of course is our friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center, a group that actually did valid work in the '60s for civil rights, but now has completely gone off the rails and become a tool for the left. The Southern Poverty Law Center recently, as you may know, issued a report on the 15 top anti-Muslim extremists in the United States, which included of course David Horowitz and me, Frank Gaffney, Pamela Gellar, many others, 10 or 12 others obviously and two of the people on the list of these anti-Muslim extremists were a reformist Muslim from the UK, Maajid Nawaz and the ex-Muslim from Somalia, the famous freedom fighter Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Now, this made this all very interesting because Frank, David and I and the others we're used to being defamed in this way, although this was a new one. To call us anti-Muslim extremists, if you think about that for a minute, what does the Obama Administration call terrorists? Extremists. Their whole program to fight Jihad terrorism doesn't say "Jihad" or "Islam" because that's forbidden in the Obama Administration and it's called "countering violent extremism." So, to call us extremists the SPLC is saying we are terrorists. We are the equivalent of Baghdadi, the ISIS Caliph and Osama Bin Laden and Al Laki and all the rest of them. We are just the flipside of the coin. Now actually it's true. David and I do plan to fly a plane into a high-rise building later on tonight, but in the meantime, I do think that that is an absurd categorization, but what happened in the wake of this was that Maajid Nawaz, in particular because he is very prominent on the left and particularly popular among the atheist critics of Islam and Jihad, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and so on, the atheists' spokesmen who have actually spoken about Islam, there was a petition to get Maajid Nawaz and Ayaan off the list and of course the implication was it was perfectly fine for us racists and bigots to be on it, but now they had crossed the line. Now, there was a certain touching naïveté to this.
You see, these supporters of Maajid Nawaz and Ayaan Hirsi Ali were thinking that those 13, those terrible deplorables, they belong on the list, but our friends, they don't. These people, no, they're just unjustly maligning Maajid Nawaz and Ayaan. They're taking their statements out of context and misrepresenting them. They are claiming guilt by association, indicating that they have associations with unsavory types and they're questioning their motives and so on. Well, what do you think happened to the rest of us? This is just what the SPLC and its allied groups have been doing to us for years. It's exactly the same thing. It's all been a large-scale effort at peer pressure and shaming, making it so that we are toxic so that nobody else wants to speak out in the same way because they don't want to be toxic and the whole idea of speaking out is stigmatized so that everybody is mute and silent as the Jihad advances. It's very well thought out. I've really got to give them credit. It's a very skillful plan. It's very clever and very imaginative and deeply evil, but there's always a silver lining, and the uproar about Maajid Nawaz and Ayaan being included among us anti-Muslim extremists it woke up a lot of people who I think had no idea that the SPLC is just a propaganda machine, but it is part of this propaganda machine that is working to extend the peer pressure and shaming to every honest critic who explores the motivating ideology of the Jihad terrorists and so we see it in all kinds of contexts. Quite aside from the Southern Poverty Law Center. We even see it at ESPN.
...
George Soros-funded organizations paid those august, trusted news outlets, the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, you name it, they paid them for favorable coverage of the Iran nuclear deal. They paid them for favorable coverage of the Muslim migrant influx into Europe. They paid them for reports on the terrible Islamophobes. They probably paid for that Southern Poverty Law Center anti-Muslim extremist list, but they certainly paid for other reports about how David Horowitz and I and others are these terrible, hateful, evil people who no decent person should have anything to do with. And so we now know this is not news outlets at all. These are bought and paid for propaganda outlets and their hegemony has been broken. Even if Hillary Clinton had won, they would never have the hold that they had. They will never have it again. And so, we have every reason to be upbeat. This is an ongoing initiative, as I said, and it's not going to go away. There are going to be continued efforts to stigmatize us, continued efforts to smear Trump as he becomes president, as he does anything, continued efforts to say that this is just some anomaly, sunspots, an accident of the Electoral College, something happened so that this maniac got to be president, but he's still a maniac and any decent ordinary person will think he's a maniac. Nonetheless, the blades of grass have broken through the concrete, and it can't be repaired, and so there's every reason for hope.
But I will close with noting what exactly it is that we're up against, what the effect of this stigmatization really is. We have heard for decades now, and particularly after 9/11, that any honest discussion of how Islamic Jihadis use the text and teachings of Islam, which you can see in my Guide to the Koran and biography of Mohammed, available now, any honest discussion of that is hateful in itself, bigoted, racist, beyond the pale of acceptable discourse. No. This is how this works. A few years back there was a Jihad plot against Fort Dix in New Jersey, and a group of Muslims were going to go into Fort Dix and shoot as many American soldiers as possible before they themselves were killed because the Koran promises paradise to those who kill and are killed for Allah. It's the only promise of paradise in the Koran. It's Chapter 9, Verse 111 if you want to look it up, and it says you'll go straight to paradise if you kill and are killed. These Muslims were going to go into Fort Dix and kill and be killed and go straight to paradise. But they were foiled. Now, they were only foiled -- it was on a shoestring. As it happened, these guys were Islamic Jihadis. Islamic Jihadis love death. They always tell us that. They love death, they love bloodshed, they love gore. And they went to a video store because they had their bloody Jihad videos, their beheading videos and their bombing videos, they had them on VHS tapes, and so they asked the young man at the video store, 17-year-old boy, they asked him to transfer their VHS Jihad tapes to DVD. As he's doing the job, he saw what was on the tapes and he got alarmed, and he went to his boss, and he said, "Dude, I'm seeing some very weird shit on these videos. Should I call the police or would that be racist?" Now, I should tell you, these Jihadis were Albanians; they were Albanian Muslims. Albanians are blond-haired, blue-eyed white guys, so there was nothing remotely racist about what they were doing, not by any stretch of the imagination. The idea that turning them into the cops would be racist was just something that had been drummed into this young man's head all his life, that Muslims are victims and that any movement against Jihad terrorism, there's something wrong with it. And you think that that's outlandish; it's not.
A very successful program of surveillance in Muslim communities, a completely legal program that had been challenged in court and held up to the challenge, in New York City, was shut down by Mayor de Blasio on the grounds that it was hateful. Now, what's hateful about trying to defend ourselves against these people? If you think about it, you know, how Trump is Hitler because he had proposed a temporary moratorium on Muslim immigration. Now, you may recall the real Hitler, in 1940, he banned the immigration of Jews so that he could kill them. And Trump, not Hitler, wants to ban the immigration of Muslims so they won't kill us. Those two things are not exactly equivalent. But the idea that it's a terrible anti-Muslim thing completely obscures the fact that he doesn't have something against Muslims. He doesn't have something against brown people. That's the way it's always put. He does not have some racist agenda here because, for one thing, he's not saying let's have a ban on Hindu or Buddhist or any other kind of immigration of people of the same brownness as supposedly the Muslims are. The problem is that he's trying to address in suggesting this ban is that there are going to be Islamic Jihadis among the Muslims who get into the country. How do you keep them out? You can't tell the Jihadis from the peaceful Muslims. They don't carry membership cards in Al-Qaida. So how are you going to tell? There's no way to tell to distinguish the one from the other, so you either have mass immigration of Muslims into the United States or more Jihad massacres or you have a ban on the immigration, but the idea that it's racist and hateful is just more of this peer pressure and shaming that almost worked with that young man at Fort Dix. He did turn them in. He decided to go ahead and be racist, and so he saved a lot of people from being killed, but the stigma had already worked or he wouldn't have hesitated, and the stigma is what they are trying to apply to any and every form of resistance to Jihad terror, that it's anti-Muslim, it is hateful, and therefore, it must be ruled out of polite society.
Now, you understand, we still have the First Amendment. We still have the freedom of speech. But we now that there are certain things that can be said in the mainstream and certain things that will immediately be branded as hateful, and that is how Hillary Clinton's program of peer pressure and shaming works just absolutely so well, and is going to continue to do so, unfortunately, despite her defeat. The upshot is, however, that we do have every reason to be optimistic not just with Trump's election, but with the breaking of the stranglehold of the mainstream and the possibility that truth might now actually even breakthrough somewhere like CNN. I'm not counting on it. I suspect that these great news conglomerate industries will go out of business before they would moderate what they're doing, but the people have had enough and that is our hope. What we have is an ongoing struggle that we have to be very aware of and resolute in whatever fashion that we can be in our own sphere in life to resist, and to identify this as an insidious attempt at the peer pressure and shaming to stigmatize what is a legitimate point of view and indeed a necessary one for our common defense. And because, ultimately, we do have the truth on our side, we know that we will, in the final instance, be victorious. Thank you very much.
Question and Answer Session
...
Robert Spencer on the War on the First Amendment
Robert Spencer on the War on the First Amendment
The ground we've lost during the Obama years -- and the dangerous consequences for national security.
January 4, 2017
Frontpagemag.com
Below are the video and transcript to Robert Spencer's speech at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s 2016 Restoration Weekend. The event was held Nov. 10th-13th at the Breakers Resort in Palm Beach, Florida.
Robert Spencer from DHFC on Vimeo.
Robert Spencer: Thank you very much. It's great to be here on this occasion. I'm here year after year and this is certainly the happiest Restoration Weekend I've been to and very happy to say we won't have Chick Nixon to kick around anymore. Come on. The fact is that Hillary Clinton's defeat is a very, very serious victory not only for the Second Amendment, but for the First and this is something that has been insufficiently appreciated in all the commentary before the election and after. Donald Trump, of course, he went after her many times saying Hillary Clinton is against the Second Amendment, she's going to stop the sale of lawful weaponry in every way she possibly can, but he never spoke about the threat that she posed to the First Amendment and that is an ongoing threat and a still existing threat and it's very important to bear that in mind because even though she was defeated, this threat has not gone away. The left is in a full court press and a year's long effort to destroy the First Amendment and essentially to criminalize any point of view that is not their own and this is a struggle that they are going to continue. Now, there are many, many facets of this. One is, of course, the most notable one I should say, is the organization of Islamic cooperation, which is 57 Islamic governments around the world, 56 states and the Palestinian Authority, the largest voting block at the United Nations, and they of course for years now since the publication of the Danish Cartoons of Mohammed in 2006 they have been working to restrict the freedom of speech and to compel Western states to restrict the freedom of speech at the UN.
I know a lot of you are familiar with that effort and that they have, under the guise of what they call "incitement to religious hatred," been trying to compel Western governments to criminalize essentially criticism of Islam. Obviously, when you talk about incitement through religious hatred, any kind of incitement, unless it's absolutely direct and explicit, is a subjective judgment in the first place. Secondly, nobody cares when people put crucifixes in jars of urine or mock Israel and Judaism. Nobody cares about those things. They only care about religious hatred in an Islamic context, and the most insidious aspect of this endeavor, this initiative, is of course that any honest discussion of how Islamic Jihadis use the texts and teachings of Islam to justify violence is classified explicitly by the OIC as incitement to religious hatred. So, what they want to do is criminalize any discussion of the motivating ideology behind Jihad terrorism and the goal of that, of course, is to enable Jihad terrorists to advance unopposed and unimpeded.
...
One example of course is our friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center, a group that actually did valid work in the '60s for civil rights, but now has completely gone off the rails and become a tool for the left. The Southern Poverty Law Center recently, as you may know, issued a report on the 15 top anti-Muslim extremists in the United States, which included of course David Horowitz and me, Frank Gaffney, Pamela Gellar, many others, 10 or 12 others obviously and two of the people on the list of these anti-Muslim extremists were a reformist Muslim from the UK, Maajid Nawaz and the ex-Muslim from Somalia, the famous freedom fighter Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Now, this made this all very interesting because Frank, David and I and the others we're used to being defamed in this way, although this was a new one. To call us anti-Muslim extremists, if you think about that for a minute, what does the Obama Administration call terrorists? Extremists. Their whole program to fight Jihad terrorism doesn't say "Jihad" or "Islam" because that's forbidden in the Obama Administration and it's called "countering violent extremism." So, to call us extremists the SPLC is saying we are terrorists. We are the equivalent of Baghdadi, the ISIS Caliph and Osama Bin Laden and Al Laki and all the rest of them. We are just the flipside of the coin. Now actually it's true. David and I do plan to fly a plane into a high-rise building later on tonight, but in the meantime, I do think that that is an absurd categorization, but what happened in the wake of this was that Maajid Nawaz, in particular because he is very prominent on the left and particularly popular among the atheist critics of Islam and Jihad, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and so on, the atheists' spokesmen who have actually spoken about Islam, there was a petition to get Maajid Nawaz and Ayaan off the list and of course the implication was it was perfectly fine for us racists and bigots to be on it, but now they had crossed the line. Now, there was a certain touching naïveté to this.
You see, these supporters of Maajid Nawaz and Ayaan Hirsi Ali were thinking that those 13, those terrible deplorables, they belong on the list, but our friends, they don't. These people, no, they're just unjustly maligning Maajid Nawaz and Ayaan. They're taking their statements out of context and misrepresenting them. They are claiming guilt by association, indicating that they have associations with unsavory types and they're questioning their motives and so on. Well, what do you think happened to the rest of us? This is just what the SPLC and its allied groups have been doing to us for years. It's exactly the same thing. It's all been a large-scale effort at peer pressure and shaming, making it so that we are toxic so that nobody else wants to speak out in the same way because they don't want to be toxic and the whole idea of speaking out is stigmatized so that everybody is mute and silent as the Jihad advances. It's very well thought out. I've really got to give them credit. It's a very skillful plan. It's very clever and very imaginative and deeply evil, but there's always a silver lining, and the uproar about Maajid Nawaz and Ayaan being included among us anti-Muslim extremists it woke up a lot of people who I think had no idea that the SPLC is just a propaganda machine, but it is part of this propaganda machine that is working to extend the peer pressure and shaming to every honest critic who explores the motivating ideology of the Jihad terrorists and so we see it in all kinds of contexts. Quite aside from the Southern Poverty Law Center. We even see it at ESPN.
...
George Soros-funded organizations paid those august, trusted news outlets, the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, you name it, they paid them for favorable coverage of the Iran nuclear deal. They paid them for favorable coverage of the Muslim migrant influx into Europe. They paid them for reports on the terrible Islamophobes. They probably paid for that Southern Poverty Law Center anti-Muslim extremist list, but they certainly paid for other reports about how David Horowitz and I and others are these terrible, hateful, evil people who no decent person should have anything to do with. And so we now know this is not news outlets at all. These are bought and paid for propaganda outlets and their hegemony has been broken. Even if Hillary Clinton had won, they would never have the hold that they had. They will never have it again. And so, we have every reason to be upbeat. This is an ongoing initiative, as I said, and it's not going to go away. There are going to be continued efforts to stigmatize us, continued efforts to smear Trump as he becomes president, as he does anything, continued efforts to say that this is just some anomaly, sunspots, an accident of the Electoral College, something happened so that this maniac got to be president, but he's still a maniac and any decent ordinary person will think he's a maniac. Nonetheless, the blades of grass have broken through the concrete, and it can't be repaired, and so there's every reason for hope.
But I will close with noting what exactly it is that we're up against, what the effect of this stigmatization really is. We have heard for decades now, and particularly after 9/11, that any honest discussion of how Islamic Jihadis use the text and teachings of Islam, which you can see in my Guide to the Koran and biography of Mohammed, available now, any honest discussion of that is hateful in itself, bigoted, racist, beyond the pale of acceptable discourse. No. This is how this works. A few years back there was a Jihad plot against Fort Dix in New Jersey, and a group of Muslims were going to go into Fort Dix and shoot as many American soldiers as possible before they themselves were killed because the Koran promises paradise to those who kill and are killed for Allah. It's the only promise of paradise in the Koran. It's Chapter 9, Verse 111 if you want to look it up, and it says you'll go straight to paradise if you kill and are killed. These Muslims were going to go into Fort Dix and kill and be killed and go straight to paradise. But they were foiled. Now, they were only foiled -- it was on a shoestring. As it happened, these guys were Islamic Jihadis. Islamic Jihadis love death. They always tell us that. They love death, they love bloodshed, they love gore. And they went to a video store because they had their bloody Jihad videos, their beheading videos and their bombing videos, they had them on VHS tapes, and so they asked the young man at the video store, 17-year-old boy, they asked him to transfer their VHS Jihad tapes to DVD. As he's doing the job, he saw what was on the tapes and he got alarmed, and he went to his boss, and he said, "Dude, I'm seeing some very weird shit on these videos. Should I call the police or would that be racist?" Now, I should tell you, these Jihadis were Albanians; they were Albanian Muslims. Albanians are blond-haired, blue-eyed white guys, so there was nothing remotely racist about what they were doing, not by any stretch of the imagination. The idea that turning them into the cops would be racist was just something that had been drummed into this young man's head all his life, that Muslims are victims and that any movement against Jihad terrorism, there's something wrong with it. And you think that that's outlandish; it's not.
A very successful program of surveillance in Muslim communities, a completely legal program that had been challenged in court and held up to the challenge, in New York City, was shut down by Mayor de Blasio on the grounds that it was hateful. Now, what's hateful about trying to defend ourselves against these people? If you think about it, you know, how Trump is Hitler because he had proposed a temporary moratorium on Muslim immigration. Now, you may recall the real Hitler, in 1940, he banned the immigration of Jews so that he could kill them. And Trump, not Hitler, wants to ban the immigration of Muslims so they won't kill us. Those two things are not exactly equivalent. But the idea that it's a terrible anti-Muslim thing completely obscures the fact that he doesn't have something against Muslims. He doesn't have something against brown people. That's the way it's always put. He does not have some racist agenda here because, for one thing, he's not saying let's have a ban on Hindu or Buddhist or any other kind of immigration of people of the same brownness as supposedly the Muslims are. The problem is that he's trying to address in suggesting this ban is that there are going to be Islamic Jihadis among the Muslims who get into the country. How do you keep them out? You can't tell the Jihadis from the peaceful Muslims. They don't carry membership cards in Al-Qaida. So how are you going to tell? There's no way to tell to distinguish the one from the other, so you either have mass immigration of Muslims into the United States or more Jihad massacres or you have a ban on the immigration, but the idea that it's racist and hateful is just more of this peer pressure and shaming that almost worked with that young man at Fort Dix. He did turn them in. He decided to go ahead and be racist, and so he saved a lot of people from being killed, but the stigma had already worked or he wouldn't have hesitated, and the stigma is what they are trying to apply to any and every form of resistance to Jihad terror, that it's anti-Muslim, it is hateful, and therefore, it must be ruled out of polite society.
Now, you understand, we still have the First Amendment. We still have the freedom of speech. But we now that there are certain things that can be said in the mainstream and certain things that will immediately be branded as hateful, and that is how Hillary Clinton's program of peer pressure and shaming works just absolutely so well, and is going to continue to do so, unfortunately, despite her defeat. The upshot is, however, that we do have every reason to be optimistic not just with Trump's election, but with the breaking of the stranglehold of the mainstream and the possibility that truth might now actually even breakthrough somewhere like CNN. I'm not counting on it. I suspect that these great news conglomerate industries will go out of business before they would moderate what they're doing, but the people have had enough and that is our hope. What we have is an ongoing struggle that we have to be very aware of and resolute in whatever fashion that we can be in our own sphere in life to resist, and to identify this as an insidious attempt at the peer pressure and shaming to stigmatize what is a legitimate point of view and indeed a necessary one for our common defense. And because, ultimately, we do have the truth on our side, we know that we will, in the final instance, be victorious. Thank you very much.
Question and Answer Session
...
Robert Spencer on the War on the First Amendment
