Back in the early Fall of 2006, I was attending a university in my home state. Over three years before that, I had left Islam, and I wanted to do my little part to prevent others from being deceived by Muslims and their attempts at whitewashing what Islam actually taught. Facebook was very new to me, but I managed to find the head or representative of the Muslim Student Association at my school. I sent her a friendly message and asked if she might be interested in participating in a debate on campus about Islam. After finishing the message, I forgot it because of classes.

Approximately two or three days later, I was in my dorm room when I heard a knock at the door. I opened the door and was surprised to see a campus police officer standing there. I greeted him and he asked if I was me. Then he asked if I had sent a message to the Muslim woman in question. I confirmed that I had indeed done so, and asked what the problem was. The officer stated that the woman took my email merely asking if she would like to participate in a campus debate on Islam as a threat and contacted campus police. I explained to him that no threats of any kind were made, just a polite request. The officer said that due to the complaint, he would need to search my room for weapons. I agreed to allow this, but made it clear that it was wrong to make a complaint against me when no threats had been made. He did not respond, but did a quick look in the room and found nothing, of course. He thanked me for my cooperation and departed.

Years later, that incident had all but left my mind until I read Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch post today about the attempt by the Muslim Student Association to silence free speech by trying to organize a zero tolerance policy on speech they deem “Islamophobic.” I regret not making my own complaint to the university at that time, about that woman’s false claim of feeling threatened. I never replied to the woman or to anyone else, out of fear of being kicked out of school.

Knowing what I know now, however, I should have not remained silent. Stealth Jihad is at work in our country and in other Western countries. Part of that jihad is silencing dissent through claims of “Islamophobia,” “hate speech” and other false allegations against those who merely want to show the world what Islam really teaches. At my university, I was silenced, albeit not permanently, by tactics like these. The West must stand for the freedoms it claims to cherish so much. If hate speech is truly what the authorities want to address, they can find a Quran and collections of Hadith online. Our generous spirit of trying to look out for others can be our undoing if we don’t differentiate between the truly needy and those who actively seek the downfall of our civilization, as the Muslim Brotherhood says about its Stealth Jihad: it is “a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”