"Hate Speech Is Not Free Speech" (What The .... ?) Robert Spencer On The War On The 1st Amendment

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January 4, 2017 Frontpagemag.com

The ground we've lost during the Obama years -- and the dangerous consequences for national security.  

Robert Spencer:
Thank you very much. It's great to be here on this occasion. I'm here year after year and this is certainly the happiest Restoration Weekend I've been to and very happy to say we won't have Chick Nixon to kick around anymore. Come on. The fact is that Hillary Clinton's defeat is a very, very serious victory not only for the Second Amendment, but for the First and this is something that has been insufficiently appreciated in all the commentary before the election and after. Donald Trump, of course, he went after her many times saying Hillary Clinton is against the Second Amendment, she's going to stop the sale of lawful weaponry in every way she possibly can, but he never spoke about the threat that she posed to the First Amendment and that is an ongoing threat and a still existing threat and it's very important to bear that in mind because even though she was defeated, this threat has not gone away. The left is in a full court press and a year's long effort to destroy the First Amendment and essentially to criminalize any point of view that is not their own and this is a struggle that they are going to continue. Now, there are many, many facets of this. One is, of course, the most notable one I should say, is the organization of Islamic cooperation, which is 57 Islamic governments around the world, 56 states and the Palestinian Authority, the largest voting block at the United Nations, and they of course for years now since the publication of the Danish Cartoons of Mohammed in 2006 they have been working to restrict the freedom of speech and to compel Western states to restrict the freedom of speech at the UN.

I know a lot of you are familiar with that effort and that they have, under the guise of what they call "incitement to religious hatred," been trying to compel Western governments to criminalize essentially criticism of Islam. Obviously, when you talk about incitement through religious hatred, any kind of incitement, unless it's absolutely direct and explicit, is a subjective judgment in the first place. Secondly, nobody cares when people put crucifixes in jars of urine or mock Israel and Judaism. Nobody cares about those things. They only care about religious hatred in an Islamic context, and the most insidious aspect of this endeavor, this initiative, is of course that any honest discussion of how Islamic Jihadis use the texts and teachings of Islam to justify violence is classified explicitly by the OIC as incitement to religious hatred. So, what they want to do is criminalize any discussion of the motivating ideology behind Jihad terrorism and the goal of that, of course, is to enable Jihad terrorists to advance unopposed and unimpeded.

Now, this has been going on for years. It's been going on since the Bush Administration and the Bush Administration at the UN vetoed these initiatives every year, but then of course came Barack Hussein Obama and twice the United States signed on to these initiatives and actually cosponsored one with Egypt in 2009 and even more notoriously signed on to Resolution 1618 of the UN Human Rights Council, which once again called upon UN member states to criminalize incitement to religious hatred and then had a little asterisk going to a footnote explaining that yes, the UN understood that there were certain countries that had protection for the freedom of speech and they would have to devise other ways to implement this initiative that would not collide with their laws. Now that was the most insidious aspect of the whole thing and Hillary Clinton explained what it was all about not long after that in a speech in Istanbul to the OIC. And she said, and I know many of you have heard this quote, many of you are very well aware of what she said in this, but I think that not many of you are aware of exactly how this initiative is proceeding. What she said of course was that we value the freedom of expression, which she doesn't, but she said that she did and that in light of protecting the freedom of expression as well as protecting religious sensibilities, in order to compel people not to do what we don't want them to do, we have to resort to, she said, old-fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming. Remember when she said that? This is exactly how the Western media has proceeded in order, essentially, not to criminalize, but to rule out of the realm of acceptable discourse any honest discussion of these issues.

What happened to Oleg in his presentation just now is actually a case in point. He's not facing a felony charge for using the wrong kind of glue. C'mon, we weren't born yesterday. We know that if he had been putting up posters for the Palestinians there would have been no problem at George Mason University, but because he was putting up pro-Israel posters from the David Horowitz Freedom Center suddenly all these rules about glue kick in and he goes to jail. Now, peer pressure and shaming is essentially a strategy that makes it impossible for us to discuss these matters because of exactly that kind of bias and favoritism. Only one point of view is acceptable and any other point of view is something that we're going to be shamed out of. You can just think about how many times Trump supporters were mocked, ridiculed.


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Thank You Mr Spencer and FPM.