Last week, Boston's Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority, or MBTA, restored vicious anti-Israel ads that had been removed. They were taken down because of the fallacious libel they advanced, falsely claiming that Israel has been steadily expanding into "Palestinian" territory. The Jew-haters strong-armed the MBTA to put them back up. We, of course, countered the libel with truth. I submitted our pro-Israel ads to the MBTA last week.
Our pro-Israel ads read, "In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat jihad." Our message is that any war on innocent civilians is savagery. Sept. 11 was savagery. July 7 in London. March 11, 2004, in Madrid. The jihad against the Jews is savagery.
Yet the MBTA denied our ad, claiming that it was "disparaging and demeaning." To whom? Savages? Any war targeting innocent civilians is savagery. And the war on the Jewish people is a war on innocent civilians. Whether it's targeting schools with missiles from Gaza or the bloody wholesale slaughter of a Jewish family in the middle of the night, the Fogel family, it's savagery. The bloody hacking to death of the Fogel family was savage.
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The relentless 60-year campaign of terror against the Jewish people is savage. The torture of hostage Gilad Shalit was savage. The Munich Olympic massacre was savage. The unspeakable torture of Ehud Goldwasser was savage. The tens of thousands of rockets fired from Gaza into southern Israel (into schools, homes, etc.) are savage. The vicious Jew hatred behind this genocide is savage. The endless demonization of the Jewish people in the Palestinian and Arab media is savage. The refusal to recognize the state of Israel as a Jewish state is savage.
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The list is endless. The murder of Ambassador Chris Stevens was savage. Jihad is savage.
The city of Boston sanctions that savage jihad by denying our ad while allowing a Jew-hating ad full of lies to run. It is Israel that is denied her land, as set forth in the San Remo Resolution and in the Balfour declaration. It is Israel that keeps giving her land away in her relentless and self-destructive pursuit for peace.
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The Arabs left their homes at the behest of Muslim leaders, assuring them that they could return after they annihilated the Jews who had been living there for thousands of years. The Jews implored the Muslims to stay and live side by side with them in peace. Refugees? No, propaganda. 60 years of hatred. The anti-Israel ad that the MBTA is running is lies, lies and more lies.
We have filed suit against the MBTA. David Yerushalmi and Robert Muise of the American Freedom Law Center are our legal counsel. Our suit says: "This case seeks to protect and vindicate fundamental constitutional rights." This is viewpoint discrimination and a violation our First Amendment rights. We are arguing that the rejection of our ad "offends the 14th Amendment's guarantee of due process by granting a public official unbridled discretion such that the official's decision to limit speech is not constrained by objective criteria, but may rest on ambiguous and subjective reasons." The MBTA may harbor the age-old hate of anti-Semitism and allow it on their transit platforms, but they cannot and will not silence us. They cannot pick and choose what position they prefer. We won in New York, in a lawsuit about the very same ad, and we will win in Boston.
The freedom of speech is increasingly threatened in the U.S. in recent years – the left and Islamic supremacists are doing all they can to rule honest discussion of Islamic jihad violence and Jew hatred out of the realm of acceptable public discourse.
Watching the media spin always amuses me. In the Boston Globe's story on the restoration of the anti-Israel ads, notoriously pro-jihadi Globe reporter Lisa Wangsness has no problem with the anti-Israel posters, the blood libel and anti-Semitism. She actually quotes the vicious anti-Semite Phillip Weiss of Mondoweiss.
In the Globe's story on the rejection of our ads, my organization, the American Freedom Defense Initiative , or AFDI, is described as an "anti-Islamist advocacy group." That's better than things we're usually called, but in reality, AFDI is a human-rights organization dedicated to freedom of speech, freedom of conscience and individual rights. Freedom.
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The Boston Globe, of course, did not call us for comment. And Joe Pesaturo, a spokesman for the MBTA, lied when he told the Globe that "T officials had reached out to the organization, asking them modify the advertisement to bring it into compliance with the T's advertising." No one from the MBTA made any attempt to contact us or our attorneys. But it wouldn't have mattered if they had. I am not changing our ad. A is A, said Aristotle. Truth is truth, said Pamela Geller.
Jihad is savage, whether it's against the Jews in their homeland or Christians in Egypt, Nigeria, Indonesia, Ethiopia, Iran, etc., or Hindus in Pakistan, Bangladesh and India, or the Bahais in Iran. Truth is not demeaning. Support our work. Contribute here.
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