Memo to the Austrian Chancellor – Protect Free Speech

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

President Trump meets today with his Austrian counterpart, Chancellor Sebastian Kurz. While trade and U.S.-European relations are expected to top their agenda, Mr. Trump could strike an important blow for liberty if he’ll use the occasion to call out Austria’s suppression of free speech.

For most of a decade, Austrian prosecutors have been abusing their powers to harass, hector, intimidate, smear and impoverish a courageous woman named Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff. Her so-called “crime”? In a private setting in Vienna, Ms. Sabaditsch-Wolff accurately observed that the Prophet Mohammed had married a 6-year-old girl and consummated the marriage at 9. She asked rhetorically, if that’s not pedophilia, what would we call it?

Austria, like Europe more generally, is enforcing what amounts to Islam’s Sharia-blasphemy restrictions. This practice is fundamentally at odds with America’s commitment to freedom of speech – and to the survival of Western civilization.

This is Frank Gaffney.