Free Speech – For Some

According to the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), there is a grave threat to America that must be suppressed at all costs.  The threat is that Lieutenant General William “Jerry” Boykin might be allowed to exercise his constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech.

This proposition is bizarre on multiple levels.  For one, General Boykin, who is a friend and greatly admired colleague of mine, is one of the United States’ most accomplished and decorated military heroes.  He served in and led our most elite special forces units for decades, including in many of our most dangerous recent combat operations.  He also held a number of senior positions in the intelligence community, including as the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence.

For another, Jerry Boykin is also an ordained minister.  And the sorts of events CAIR has lately insisted he must not address include prayer sessions convened by the mayor of Ocean City, Maryland and the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

What makes the suppression of General Boykin’s right to express himself – and, for that matter, to enjoy freedom of religion – all the more outrageous is the nature of the organization demanding that he be silenced.  Four federal judges have affirmed that CAIR is associated with the Muslim Brotherhood and was spawned by one of its American affiliates – the Islamic Association for Palestine.  Indeed, we know from wiretapped conversations at the time of its founding that CAIR was established by Muslim Brotherhood operatives as a political arm and fundraising mechanism for Hamas, a designated terrorist organization and the Brotherhood’s franchise in “Palestine.”

Unfortunately, CAIR and its fellow Muslim Brotherhood fronts are not simply trying to muzzle Jerry Boykin.  They have gone after a number of other truth-tellers about the doctrine the Brothers seek to insinuate into this country – the totalitarian, supremacist politico-military-legal program the Islamists call shariah. 

For example, another colleague, former Congressman Fred Grandy, was removed from his position as one of Washington’s most popular talk radio show hosts when he refused to allow Muslim critics to dictate who could appear on his program and what they could say.

Last fall, Stephen Coughlin – one of the nation’s foremost non-Muslim experts on shariah – was similarly subjected to a CAIR-led effort to deny his ability to speak.  In that case, he was denied by the Obama administration the opportunity to provide training to Central Intelligence Agency personnel about what impels our enemies to engage in murderous and stealthy forms of jihad, namely shariah.

More recently, New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly has been subjected to a campaign of vilification by CAIR and its friends.  His offense?  Mr. Kelly gave an interview to the makers of a superb documentary, “The Third Jihad,” and allowed that film to be used in training his officers.

CAIR’s desire to suppress this film is not hard to understand.  After all, The Third Jihad brilliantly exposes what it and other Muslim Brotherhood fronts are up to in this country.  In the words of the Brotherhood’s own strategic plan, that is “a kind of grand jihad…in destroying and eliminating the Western civilization from within” by our own hands.

The movie’s narrator and central figure is Zuhdi Jasser.  Dr. Jasser happens to be one of the most prominent and courageous of American Muslims who oppose political Islam and its use of shariah to justify the subversion and destruction of our Constitution, form of government and society. 

Obviously, it is difficult to pillory Zuhdi Jasser the way CAIR et.al. attack such non-Muslims as Messrs. Boykin, Grandy, Coughlin and Kelly, namely as “Islamophobic.”  The Brotherhood and its official, multinational counterpart – the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) – brandish this term as a means of intimidating, smearing and silencing those who understand what they are about and oppose them effectively.  In fact, the more effective the opposition, the more intense are the Islamists’ efforts to silence those mounting it.

Dr. Jasser’s right to free expression is being subjected to a similar kind of suppression.  As he put it recently in the New York Post, “One of the chief ways that radical Islamists across the globe silence anti-Islamist Muslims is to publicly push them outside of Islam, to declare them non-Muslims, not part of the community (ummah), and so subject them to takfir (declaring them apostates). That is what the vicious distortions about this film do to my work and the work of so many others within the House of Islam who are trying to publicly take on the American Islamist establishment.”

Of particular concern is the fact that the U.S. government is now effectively encouraging what amounts to free speech for some – and abetting it.  Team Obama has begun according Islamophobia the status of a serious problem.  Worse yet, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has joined forces with the OIC in trying to find ways to suppress this fictitious problem by treating instances of what should be protected free speech as prosecutable “incitement.”   

To paraphrase the famous German pastor, Martin Niemöller, first they are coming for the “Islamophobes” and for Muslims who oppose shariah’s political agenda.  How soon will they decide that you have no right to speak freely, either?

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy (www.SecureFreedom.org), a columnist for the Washington Times and host of the nationally syndicated program, Secure Freedom Radio, heard in Washington weeknights at 9:00 p.m. on WRC 1260 AM.