Webinar: Best-selling author warns of growing threat to free speech

Islamophobia and the Threat to Free Speech is available on Amazon.com.

The increasing suppression of free speech in America has its roots in a decades-long campaign which invoked the specter of “islamophobia” to silence critics.

Webinar: Islamophobia and the Threat to Free Speech

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So says Center for Security Policy Senior Fellow Robert Spencer, a leading expert on Jihad and Islamic ideology and author of a new book, Islamophobia and the Threat to Free Speech. Spencer spoke with the Center’s Director of Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Kyle Shideler about the growing assault on American free speech rights.

Spencer related how the first shockwaves to rattle the Western view of free speech arose from the 1989 Rushdie affair, when Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa for the killing of Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses. Efforts to impose foreign blasphemy claims were largely unsuccessful. But decades later, during the War on Terror, a campaign under the auspices of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) worked to insinuate blasphemy laws into international forums and began to receive the buy-in of western leaders.

“It’s noteworthy that at the time Rushdie was very stoutly defended by a great many people in the West, but in the intervening decades there has only been a steady erosion of the support for the freedom of speech,” Spencer said.

As Islamic censors began to push for enforcement of blasphemy laws –and increasingly were prepared to enforce them with jihadist violence—they found that large elements of the western world was no longer committed to free speech as a first principle, but rather more than willing to ban speech if it was identified as hateful.

“The left’s focus for over a decade now has been on the concept of hate speech, which is now widely accepted and taken for granted. And yet it is an extremely pernicious, dangerous, concept because it has no objective content,” Spencer said, “one primary example is speech that is called Islamophobic.”

Spencer noted how the use of terms like Islamophobia were manipulated to include both actual reprehensible violence –like a recent attack in London, Canada where a Muslim family was killed—as well as simple analysis of the doctrine and ideology of jihadist terrorism.

One of the ways this alignment was achieved was by manipulating the concept of “incitement to violence” from a common-sense legal prescription which prevents deliberate, narrowly defined, and imminent calls to engage in violence into “incitement to hatred and hostility.”

From the targeting of students on college campuses, to government bureaucrats calling for the silencing of American citizens to Big Tech pressure targeting those who speak out, Spencer related how every major battle over free speech began first over “islamophobia,” before expanding to cover an ever-widening set of topics and issues.

“Now it is as if the Islamophobia initiative was used as a dry-run,” Spencer warned, “We were all tarred with this label and de-platformed as a result. And now the left is using that as a kind of a template, to silence all dissenters.”

Islamophobia and the Threat to Free Speech is available on Amazon.com.