The Complete Infidel's Guide to Free Speech (and Its Enemies)

Robert Spencer

• Publisher: Regnery
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781621576273
• eBook ISBN: 9781621576518
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Terrorism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

"JUST STAY QUIET AND YOU'LL BE OKAY."That's what Mohamed Atta told the doomed airline passengers on 9/11. And we still hear the exact same message today from the powerful but shadowy lobby that is working behind the scenes to gut the First Amendment and prohibit "hate speech"—or any criticism—of Islam. As bestselling author Robert Spencer shows in his startling new book, The Complete Infidel's Guide to Free Speech (and Its Enemies), aggressive Muslims and their appeasers have mounted a dangerous and disturbingly successful campaign against our constitutional rights. Spencer reveals:

• How social media behemoths Facebook and Twitter—not to mention student groups at American college campuses—are doing the bidding of anti-First Amendment Muslim activists
• Why core Islamic teachings make criticism of Islam punishable by death
• How American representatives at the United Nations have already agreed to limit freedom of speech
• How Curt Schilling and other outspoken conservatives have lost their jobs for criticizing Islam
• Why Twitter and Facebook now regularly censor speech critical of Islam—while allowing death threats against its critics
• How blasphemy laws in Muslim countries are used as a pretext for arresting, even lynching Christians
• How European "hate speech" laws are used to prosecute and harass critics of Islam
• Why appeasement of Islam is endangering our First Amendment freedoms and could lead to your prosecution for "hate speech"
• 
  If you value your First Amendment rights, you owe it to yourself to read The Complete Infidel's Guide to Free Speech (and Its Enemies). It will give you the information and tools you need to fight back—because Islam and its progressive fellow travelers have only begun their campaign to define what you can read, say, and think.

Chapter One

“JUST STAY QUIET AND YOU’LL BE OKAY”

Did you know?

• The Organization of Islamic Cooperation is making real progress toward imposing Islamic blasphemy law on the West

• An imam used inflammatory images never published by the Jyllands-Posten to gin up the Danish cartoon riots

• Core Islamic teachings make criticism of Islam punishable by death

The man who summed up the entire ethos of the war against the freedom of speech was none other than Mohamed Atta, the most prominent of the 9/11 hijackers.

On September 11, 2001, Atta boarded American Airlines flight 11 in Boston, bound for Los Angeles. Once he and his fellow jihadis had hijacked the plane, Atta told passengers: “Just stay quiet and you’ll be okay. . . . Nobody move. Everything will be okay. If you try to make any moves, you’ll endanger yourself and the airplane. Just stay quiet.”¹

The passengers heeded his warning and stayed quiet—but they weren’t okay. Atta flew American Airlines Flight 11 to New York City and crashed it into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

Atta had unwittingly uttered an epigram: the contrast between his words of reassurance and the passengers’ horrifying fate is emblematic of the global effort to destroy the freedom of speech.

As the global jihad advances, we are told in innumerable ways that if we just stay quiet, we will be okay.

Spearheading these efforts is a little-known organization that comprises most of the Muslim governments around the world today. The foremost foe of the First Amendment right to free speech, and of the freedom of speech in general, in the world today is the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).

The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (formerly the Organization of the Islamic Conference), which is made up of fifty-six member nations plus the Palestinian Authority and constitutes the largest voting bloc at the United Nations, has been working for years to try to compel the West to restrict the freedom of speech, and particularly the freedom to criticize Islam.

Essentially, they want to impose a key principle of Islamic Sharia law—which forbids blasphemy against Allah, Muhammad, and Islam—on the entire non-Muslim world. That prohibition explains why the Islam world has no tradition of free speech. The West does, and our tradition of freedom must be extinguished in order to advance the Islamic agenda worldwide.

“Muslims will never accept this kind of humiliation. The article has insulted every Muslim in the world. We demand an apology!”

The OIC’s initiative against free speech began in earnest in the wake of the publication of twelve cartoons of the Islamic prophet Muhammad in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten on September 30, 2005. The paper wasn’t trying to be gratuitously provocative; in the wake of the jihad murder of Theo van Gogh, Danish author Kåre Bluitgen had found it difficult to find an illustrator for his book about Muhammad: Danish artists were all too afraid of jihadis.² Frants Iver Gundelach, president of the Danish Writers Union, decried this submission to violent intimidation as a threat to free speech, and the largest newspaper in Denmark, Jyllands-Posten, took up the challenge. Flemming Rose, Jyllands-Posten’s culture editor, approached forty artists asking for depictions of Muhammad.

In response, Rose received the twelve drawings he published, nine of which were eminently forgettable—and immediately forgotten. The other three pointed out the link between Islam and violence; one of the three, a drawing of Muhammad with a bomb in his turban by Danish illustrator Kurt Westergaard, became notorious.

Editor-in-chief Carsten Juste explained his paper’s decision to publish the cartoons: “We live in a democracy. That’s why we can use all the journalistic methods we want to. Satire is accepted in this country, and you can make caricatures. Religion shouldn’t set any barriers on that sort of expression. This doesn’t mean that we wish to insult any Muslims.”³

Danish imam Raed Hlayhel was not mollified: “This type of democracy is worthless for Muslims,” he fumed. “Muslims will never accept this kind of humiliation. The article has insulted every Muslim in the world. We demand an apology!”⁴

Jyllands-Posten defended its publication of the cartoons by appealing to the core principles of the West: “We must quietly point out here that the drawings illustrated an article on the self-censorship which rules large parts of the Western world. Our right to say, write, photograph and draw what we want to within the framework of the law exists and must endure—unconditionally!”⁵ Editor-in-chief Juste added, “If we apologize, we go against the freedom of speech that generations before us have struggled to win.”⁶

Christians had already become accustomed to the mockery that Muslims were demanding protection from: in the United Kingdom, the secretary of an organization called Christians Against Ridicule complained in 2003 that “over the last seven days alone we have witnessed the ridicule of the Nativity in a new advert for Mr Kipling cakes, the ridicule of the Lord’s Prayer on Harry Hill’s TV Burp, the ridicule of a proud Christian family on ITV’s Holiday Nightmare and the opening of a blasphemous play at London’s Old Vic Theatre—Stephen Berkoff’s Messiah. . . . Rarely a day goes by today without underhand and insidious mockery of the Christian faith.”⁸ Christians Against Ridicule, however, issued no death threats.

Muslims in Denmark were not so sanguine. After the cartoons were published, Jyllands-Posten had to hire security guards to protect its staff, as threats came in by phone and email.⁹

“I will never accept that respect for a religious stance leads to the curtailment of criticism, humour and satire in the press”

The anger was not limited to threat-issuing thugs. In late October, ambassadors to Denmark from eleven Muslim countries asked Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen for a meeting about what they called the “smear campaign” against Muslims in the Danish press.¹⁰ Rasmussen declined: “This is a matter of principle. I won’t meet with them because it is so crystal clear what principles Danish democracy is built upon that there is no reason to do so.”¹¹ He later added, “I will never accept that respect for a religious stance leads to the curtailment of criticism, humour and satire in the press.”¹² The matter, he said, was beyond his authority. “As prime minister I have no tool whatsoever to take actions against the media and I don’t want that kind of tool.”¹³

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STICKS AND STONES MAY BREAK MY BONES, BUT WORDS WILL NEVER HURT ME

“Religious feelings cannot demand special treatment in a secular society. In a democracy one must from time to time accept criticism or becom[e] a laughingstock.”

—Jyllands-Posten culture editor Flemming Rose⁷

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As far as one of the ambassadors was concerned, that was the wrong answer. Egyptian officials withdrew from a dialogue they had been conducting with their Danish counterparts about human rights and discrimination. In addition, Egyptian Embassy councilor Mohab Nasr Mostafa Mahdy said, “The Egyptian ambassador in Denmark has said that the case no longer rests with the embassy. It is now being treated at an international level. As far as I have been informed by my government, the cartoon case has already been placed on the agenda for the Islamic Conference Organization’s extraordinary summit in the beginning of December.”¹⁴

The crisis escalated rapidly. By early November, thousands of Muslims in Denmark were marching in demonstrations against the cartoons.¹⁵ Two of the cartoonists went into hiding, fearing for their lives. The Pakistani Jamaate-Islami party offered fifty thousand Danish kroner (around $7,500) to anyone who killed one of the cartoonists.¹⁶ The Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) lodged a protest with the Danish government.¹⁷ To take a stand against the cartoons, business establishments closed—in Kashmir.¹⁸ Ghulam Nabi Azad, the chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, was reportedly “anguished” by the cartoons, and asked India’s Prime Minister to complain to the Danish government.¹⁹ And the most respected authority in the Sunni Muslim world, Mohammad Sayed Tantawi, Grand Sheikh of Al-Azhar University in Cairo, declared that the cartoons had “trespassed all limits of objective criticism into insults and contempt of the religious beliefs of more than one billion Muslims around the world, including thousands in Denmark. Al-Azhar intends to protest these anti-Prophet cartoons with the UN’s concerned committees and human rights groups around the world.”²⁰

“I find alarming any behaviors that disregard the beliefs of others. This kind of thing is unacceptable”

The UN, apparently uninterested in the principle of freedom of speech, was happy to take up the case. Louise Arbour, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, wrote to the OIC, “I understand your attitude to the images that appeared in the newspaper. I find alarming any behaviors that disregard the beliefs of others. This kind of thing is unacceptable.”²¹ She announced that investigations for racism and “Islamophobia” would commence forthwith.

Despite Arbour’s solicitude for Muslims’ sensibilities, the crisis continued to escalate. A Denmark-based imam, Ahmad Abu Laban, toured Middle Eastern co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Chapter One: “Just Stay Quiet and You’ll Be Okay”
• Chapter Two: “Tailored in an Appropriate Way”: Can Free Speech Really Be Restricted in the United States?
• Chapter Three: “Now Obviously This Is a Country That Is Based on Free Speech, but. . . .”: The U.S. Government vs. Free Speech
• Chapter Four: The “Hate Speech” Scam
• Chapter Five: “Peer Pressure and Shaming” to Rein in Free Speech
• Chapter Six: “Is That Being Racist?”: Americans Learn Self-Censorship
• Chapter Seven: “Irresponsibly Provocative”: The Erosion of Free Speech from Rushdie to Geller
• Chapter Eight: “Can’t We Talk about This?”: The Death of Free Speech in Europe
• Chapter Nine: Catholics against Free Speech
• Chapter Ten: “Not Conducive to the Public Good”: Free Speech Dies in Britain and Canada
• Chapter Eleven: The New Brownshirts
• Chapter Twelve: “The University Prides Itself on Diversity”: Administrators vs. Free Speech
• Chapter Thirteen: “Facing the New Totalitarianism”: Fighting Back for the Freedom of Speech
• Acknowledgments
• Notes