FrontPage Magazine - Silencing Speech

FrontPage Magazine - Silencing Speech

There are those members of the radical Muslim community who wish to silence their opponents via legal means. The goal is to instill fear and to create an undue fiscal burden on those who speak out against them, so that the truth about their dangerous agendas will never reach the public.

“It is high time the type of [rhetoric] directed specifically at the Muslim community and its leadership by right-wing extremists and so-called terrorist experts stops. I think we can start the beginning of the end by initiating litigation that will force them into financial responsibility for their scurrilous and shameless acts against the Muslim community.”

These were the words of former member of Congress Walter Fauntroy, speaking for and defending Islamist activist Mahdi Bray, whose extensive criminal history had just been exposed by the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT), an organization headed by counter-terror authority Steven Emerson. The words are published on Bray’s personal blog.

Bray is the Executive Director of the MAS Freedom Foundation, the political wing of the Muslim American Society (MAS). MAS was established in 1992 by leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, Al-Ikhwan Al-Muslimun, the group responsible for the vast majority of the world’s terror outfits. Indeed, the international head of the Brotherhood, Mohammed Mahdi Akef, was amongst the organization’s founders.

Bray’s well documented support for terrorists, such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader Sami Al-Arian, is proof of MAS’s refusal to break from its extremist past. Bray has even traveled to Cairo to defend members of the Brotherhood, who were facing military tribunals for their actions against the Egyptian government.

When Bray depicts the Star of David (Jewish Star) as being the equivalent of the Nazi Swastika or posts photographs of the former Hamas spiritual leader Ahmed Yassin on his group’s website in his name (‘Mahdi Bray’s Photos’), it is his right to do so, but it is others’ right to point it out. However, exposing these facts or Bray’s felony rap sheet could result in legal action – frivolous though it may be – initiated by those who seek to bury the truth.

This has recently been the experience of this author.

In October 2007, I had a lawsuit and a restraining order brought against me by seven Dallas-area Islamic organizations, who objected to an article that I had written for FrontPage. Not one of the groups was mentioned in the article. It was concerning information I had personally discovered linking the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) to the financing of terrorism abroad. My allegations regarding this were and are backed up by irrefutable proof.

Yet seven groups who do not like me, who do not like the fact that I work to expose organizations and individuals tied to terror, are suing me, making the false claim that I wrote about them when I did not, and have obtained a restraining order against me, when I have never posed any threat to them – or anyone else for that matter. Only I received the threat.

They are suing me for seven dollars, one dollar for each group. And while that may seem like a small number, my legal bills, as of today, have totaled nearly $90 thousand. This, while the case hasn’t even gone to trial yet.

The goal – much like what Fauntroy said – is to bankrupt me and shut me up, so that I will never think again about writing about their colleagues, so that I will hide and not speak out against injustice, hatred and violence.

When all is said and done, they will find that I will not be going away. Nor should anyone else.

We must not allow a small but vocal segment of society the ability to deny us of our rights that we are privileged to have here in America and to a greater extent throughout the Western world. What I and others are going through must be rigorously defended. We cannot afford to let this go unanswered.

The groups which attempt to quiet us, themselves, enjoy their freedoms. But they object to and denounce others who try to exercise theirs. They cannot have it both ways.

Our liberties, our freedoms – Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Assembly, Freedom of Religion, Freedom of Press, Freedom of Expression – were paid for with the blood of those who valiantly fought to preserve them. And now that we have our freedoms, we must strive to protect them.

That is our right, and that is our duty!