Just a few weeks ago I wrote an article for PJ Lifestyle titled “5 Ways the Islamic War on Free Speech Advanced Last Week.” Since then, the Islamic supremacist enemies of the freedom of speech have racked up even more victories, in the United States as well as in Muslim countries.

5. Iran: British woman jailed for “insulting Islamic sanctities,” in danger of execution

A British-Iranian woman, Roya Saberi Negad Nobakht, has spent the last five months in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison for writing on Facebook that Iran’s government was “too Islamic.” Arrested during a visit to Iran to visit family members, she has been charged with “insulting Islamic sanctities.” British authorities are indignant about this affront to the freedom of speech.

The British government’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) is “urgently” examining Nobakht’s case, but why? In Britain (and America as well) it is a de facto crime to insult Islamic sanctities. A British man, Mark Stephenson, ripped pages from a copy of the Qur’an and threw them onto the ground at a soccer match. He was arrested and recently fined £235 for doing so. If Britons must therefore pay proper Sharia-dictated respect for the Qur’an or face monetary penalties, the British government has no leg to stand on in complaining about the Iranians’ prosecution of Roya Nobakht.

4. Many Muslim countries ban Noah film as “un-Islamic”

According to AFP, Malaysia, “Indonesia, Egypt and United Arab Emirates have banned the film because of scenes they say contradict Islam.” Qatar, Bahrain, and apparently Jordan and Kuwait have also banned the film.

It is not surprising that such states would ban a film that violates Islam’s prohibition on depicting prophets. A far greater cause for concern is the self-censorship that the Western media increasingly practices in regard to things that offend Muslims: for example, the near-universal unwillingness to reprint the Muhammad cartoons, which despite the furor they caused were actually quite bland. One university held a seminar on the Muhammad cartoon controversy but wouldn’t show the cartoons themselves. A publishing house put out a book about the controversy — without reprinting the cartoons.

A willingly Sharia-compliant media is the enemy of free people, and of freedom itself.

3. Hamas-linked CAIR intimidates ABC into dropping new show, Alice in Arabia



Variety reported that “just days after the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-LA) expressed concerns over potential stereotyping in the pilot for ABC Family’s Alice in Arabia’ and requested a meeting with execs, the network has decided not to pursue the show that had been announced Monday.” The show “centered on an American teen kidnapped by her Saudi Arabian family after tragedy befalls her parents.”

Ironically, the show’s creator, Brooke Eikmeier, lamented that the shows was not going to be “Islamophobic” at all. She said that “the intended series could have been a step in the right direction for all cultures and all women, sparking greater tolerance, understanding and empathy.” She said:

Success was easily within reach to achieve a goal many in the Muslim community want: a series that showed them fairly and with admiration and complexity, that would give opportunities to Arab writers and Arab actors.

But even that wasn’t acceptable to CAIR, which objected to the fact that publicity material for the show gave the impression that it would depict an American girl being kidnapped by relatives and forced to live in Saudi Arabia. Never mind the fact that children kidnapped and forced to live in Muslim countries is a real phenomenon (cf. Sally Field’s movie Not Without My Daughter, the ordeal of Pat Roush, an American woman who suffered the loss of her daughter to her Saudi Muslim husband, etc.); CAIR wants to preempt the possibility that any uncomfortable truths about Islam are aired, even in a mitigating and apologetic context.

2. CAIR intimidates universities into dropping film about honor killings

Fox reported on March 31 that CAIR “succeeded in shutting down a screening of the film, Honor Diaries, at the University of Michigan, Dearborn last Thursday night, claiming that the film is ‘Islamophobic.’ Honor Diaries is a recently-released documentary profiling nine Muslim women and their horrific experiences in Islamic societies living with practices such as female genital mutilation, honor violence, honor killings and forced marriage at young ages.”

Are honor violence and genital mutilation grim realities for all too many Muslim women? Certainly. Muslims commit 91 percent of honor killings worldwide. A manual of Islamic law certified as a reliable guide to Sunni orthodoxy by Al-Azhar University, the most respected authority in Sunni Islam, says that “retaliation is obligatory against anyone who kills a human being purely intentionally and without right.” However, “not subject to retaliation” is “a father or mother (or their fathers or mothers) for killing their offspring, or offspring’s offspring.” (‘Umdat al-Salik o1.1-2). In other words, someone who kills his child incurs no legal penalty under Islamic law.

The Palestinian Authority gives pardons or suspended sentences for honor murders. Iraqi women have asked for tougher sentences for Islamic honor murderers, who get off lightly now. Syria in 2009 scrapped a law limiting the length of sentences for honor killings, but “the new law says a man can still benefit from extenuating circumstances in crimes of passion or honour ‘provided he serves a prison term of no less than two years in the case of killing.’” And in 2003 the Jordanian Parliament voted down on Islamic grounds a provision designed to stiffen penalties for honor killings. Al-Jazeera reported that “Islamists and conservatives said the laws violated religious traditions and would destroy families and values.”

But CAIR objected to the fact that Honor Diaries was “produced by Jews,” and claimed that it was “Islamophobic.” One would think that a “moderate” Muslim group would welcome a movie exposing the grim reality of honor killing, which is all too often justified by Islamic texts and Muslim clerics, as it would oppose it as a manifestation of “extremism.” Once again, CAIR showed its true colors.

1. CAIR intimidates Brandeis University into dropping honorary degree for Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Brandeis University had planned to award an honorary degree to Ayaan Hirsi Ali at its commencement ceremony this year, but after yet another CAIR smear, on Tuesday the university issued a statement announcing the predictable result: the honorary degree would not be given.

Brandeis’s statement said:

Following a discussion today between President Frederick Lawrence and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ms. Hirsi Ali’s name has been withdrawn as an honorary degree recipient at this year’s commencement….We cannot overlook certain of her past statements that are inconsistent with Brandeis University’s core values. For all concerned, we regret that we were not aware of these statements earlier.

Hirsi Ali said in Time:

I wish to dissociate myself from the university’s statement, which implies that I was in any way consulted about this decision. On the contrary, I was completely shocked when President Frederick Lawrence called me — just a few hours before issuing a public statement — to say that such a decision had been made.

What’s more, the Brandeis statement did not say what Hirsi Ali had said that was “inconsistent with Brandeis University’s core values.” But probably it was referring obliquely to CAIR’s selective and misleading quotations from Hirsi Ali in its press release. Chief of these was a quote from Hirsi Ali in a 2007 interview, saying: “I think that we are at war with Islam.”

Yet CAIR spokesmen have said the same thing: “The new perception is that the United States has entered a war with Islam itself,” said then-CAIR Board Chairman Parvez Ahmed in July 2007. The only difference is that Hirsi Ali and CAIR are on opposite sides of the conflict.

As I show in my new book Arab Winter Comes to America, CAIR routinely blindsides officials and places them on the defensive by its attacks, and so simply to avoid controversy they usually give the “civil rights group” what it wants: the cancellation, demonization and marginalization of every speaker who is remotely critical of Islam, jihad terror, and Sharia supremacism.

And once they have succeeded in their work, there will be no one left to raise a whisper in protest against the next Islamic jihad attack. That is the ultimate – and insidious — objective of these campaigns against the freedom of speech.