Editorial: Hate messages disguised as free speech

DESPITE their astonishing ethnic diversity, Americans tend to have a fairly narrow worldview. Those who live in a sizable country as wealthy in natural resources and talent as the United States, might be forgiven for a lack of interest in the outside world. But this blinkered view is not without danger.
It is bad enough that prejudice, bred of ignorance, feeds the flames of Islamophobia among US citizens. It becomes totally unacceptable when a Zionist-supporting organization goes out of its way to play upon the ill-informed anxieties of ordinary people, by mounting a high-profile advertising campaign, which equates Muslims with terrorism.
This is what the overtly pro-Israeli organization, the American Freedom Defense Initiative has done on the New York subway system, paying $77,000 for advertisements on hoardings alongside 240 clocks on the network. Alongside the quote from the Holy Qur’an “Soon shall we cast terror into the hearts of the unbelievers,” is a picture of the Twin Towers in flames.
This loathsome travesty comes on top of a smaller campaign, mounted by the same bigots last December.
On that occasion, the subway advertisements portrayed Muslims as savages and urged people to “support civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat jihad.” The initial refusal by New York’s Metro Transit Authority to allow this garbage to be displayed, was struck down by a Federal Court, on the basis that it violated the US Constitution’s guarantee of free speech.
There is free speech and then there is incitement to murder. It must be hoped that Judge Paul A. Engelmayer of the Federal District Court in Manhattan, who ordered the MTA to allow the ad, deeply regrets his decision. This week, a woman, Erikia Menendez pushed an Indian immigrant off a subway platform to his death beneath a train, because, she said: “She hated Hindus and Muslims ever since 2001 when they put down the Twin Towers.”
It has to be suspected that Menendez had seen the original displays and felt somehow empowered by their poisonous message of hate. Tragically, this is only the latest is a spate of murders of people assumed, by the color of their skins, to be Muslims. Last November a Muslim was stabbed to death outside of his local mosque in Queens. The NYPD has also arrested a suspected serial killer of Brooklyn shopkeepers, all of Middle Eastern appearance. Back in August, a white supremacist gunned down and killed six Sikhs at their Wisconsin temple.
Even if Judge Engelmayer’s ruling that these bigoted subway advertisements should be run, in the name of free speech, did not lead directly to the murder by Menendez, the message his judgment sent out, seems sure to encourage further provocative advertisements and deadly hate crimes.
America has valued its freedom of speech, every bit as much as the constitutional right of its citizens to carry arms. The Newton primary school butchery finally awoke ordinary US citizens to the lunacy of their country’s gun laws. Yet, after countless mass killings, it took the massacre of tiny kids, to make them think and realize that somehow the law, if not the constitution itself, has to be changed.
What will it take to bring about the same revelation concerning the apparently strongly-rising tide of Islamophobia? Must some bigoted thug gun down a bunch of Muslim kids, before the United States wakes up to the vitriol that it is allowing to be injected into the minds of the ignorant, in the name of free speech?
There have been widespread protests, not simply among America’s eight million Muslims, but many concerned non-Muslims, at both of the American Freedom Defense Initiative’s despicable advertising campaigns. Even ardent advocates of free speech are deeply uncomfortable at the way this Zionist organization has been exploiting the law to get across its toxic message. There are heart-searching debates taking place.
But it ought to be easy to cut to the intellectual and moral chase. What would be the reaction of the Federal Court if a pro-Palestinian organization bought the same advertising space to carry ads citing some of the more bloody phrases of the Jewish Torah, alongside a picture of the torn bodies of Gazan women and children murdered during the Israeli assault on 2008? What if further ads described Jews as savages and called for their defeat?
We all know the answer. Whatever America’s devotion to the constitutional right of free speech, these advertisements would never be allowed. The US Zionist lobby would see to that.