Judge slams brakes on Geller's Islam bus ads

A federal court in New York City in effect ruled Tuesday the city bus system could indeed ban political advertising deemed offensive, putting a kink in the plans of Pamela Geller's American Freedom Defense Initiative to post ads of a menacing man with a masked face alongside a quote from "Hamas MTV" that read: "That's his Jihad. What's yours?"

The ads also contained the message, "Killing Jews is worship that draws us close to Allah."

Geller said her group's messages were aimed at educating the public on the truths of radical Islamism. And in mid-April, U.S. District Judge John Koeltl ruled the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority could not prevent the ads from being placed in subway cars and on buses.

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The MTA had argued then the ads incited violence and stoked tensions against Jews. But when the agency lost its court case, board members reacted by voting 9-to-2 to ban all forms of political advertising from its subways and buses.

Charles Moerdler, one board member who supported the ban, said then: "Hateful speech with its odious appeal to intolerance is the incendiary that ignites violence. It does not take much to move the passions of hatred. ... Our riders and the public need not have their safety or serenity violated," the New York Daily News reported.

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Now Tuesday, the same federal judge who previously ruled Geller's ads could go forth turned around and said the MTA's ban of all political advertising basically moots the previous ruling that the ads were protected by the First Amendment.

Koeltl said, the New York Daily News reported: "No law requires public transit agencies to accept political advertisements as a matter of course, and it is not for this court to impose its own views on what type of forum the MTA should create."

Pamela Geller

Geller's lawyer, Robert Muise, has objected. "The government should not be permitted to violate the First Amendment and then on the heels of an adverse court decision simply modify its rules to avoid the consequences of its unlawful behavior," he said, adding the case could very well head to the U.S. Supreme Court, the newspaper reported.

Geller responded in an email to WND: "It's an end-run around the First Amendment. The court has misread the law of limited public fora and applied the wrong standard. The MTA’s 'new policy' prohibiting 'political ads' (aka Gellerphobia) ) has closed down the forum because it is targeted at us and our viewpoints. The MTA’s definition of 'political' as 'disputed opinion' is viewpoint-based and not lawful." She went on: "Even if they did properly close the forum to 'political' ads and if indeed our  ad is 'political,' we had a vested or grandfathered right to have these ads go up."

Geller said her attorneys are filing an appeal, but in the meantime, warned: "This is a defining moment in the great tradition of freedom of speech in this country. We will not stand by while the elites relinquish our inalienable rights so as not to offend savages."