I apologize for paragraphs running together in this article without proper spacing. I tried for over an hour to get the article to format correctly, but sometimes WordPress has a mind of its own and there is nothing I can do about it.
Qasim Rashid is an attorney, author of EXTREMIST, and national spokesperson for the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community USA.
“There’s an important history behind America’s free speech laws to which the anti-Islam hate group behind the ‘Draw Muhammad Contest,’ is wholly ignorant. While the Islamophobe leading this hate group believes she’s a free speech champion, remarkably comparing herself to Rosa Parks, in reality America’s current free speech model developed as an attempt to protect — not demonize — religious and racial minorities. “U.S. law only began to protect hateful speech during the 1960s,” writes Garrett Epps. “Southern state governments were trying to criminalize the civil-rights movement for its advocacy of change. White Southerners claimed that the teachings of figures like Martin Luther King or Malcolm X were ‘hate speech’ and would produce ‘race war.'”
A little more history, this from The ‘Lectric Law Library. Please note the date of this case is 1735, a wee bit before the “1960s.”….
The colonies’ most celebrated seditious libel prosecution was that of John Peter Zenger in 1735. Zenger, publisher of the ‘New York Weekly Journal’, had printed a series of scathing criticisms of New York’s colonial governor. Although the law was against Zenger, a jury found him not guilty — in effect, nullifying the law and expressing both the jurors’ contempt for British rule and their support for a free and unfettered press. After Zenger’s acquittal, the British authorities abandoned seditious libel prosecutions in the colonies, having concluded that such prosecutions were no longer an effective tool of repression.
The stage was set for the birth of the First Amendment, which formally recognized the natural and inalienable right of Americans to think and speak freely: “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
“Repeated demonization can inspire violence.” claimed Rashid. “This is a fact.”Then, quoting Rabbi Rick Jacobs: “During the Holocaust, the Nazis went beyond making us social outcasts; they systematically slaughtered our people with unspeakable cruelty. Because we know so well what it is like to be outcasts, we must never, through our deeds or words, make others into modern-day lepers. [W]hat [Geller] does, what she represents, has no place in a Jewish community that is built on tolerance and understanding.” Really, Rabbi? Even if your people are having their heads cut off by intolerant savages for the crime of being Jewish? Do you really believe that bowing to these cockroaches, allowing them to cause the shutdown of our constitutional liberties will convince them what a swell guy Rabbi Rick is, thus sparing your head? Please tell me you don’t believe that! Perhaps you and Qasim can attend a remedial class on the United States Constitution together. You have to admit, a Jew and a Muslim attending a course on US Constitutional law together would be historical, if not hysterical.
Ex-Army officer and stone-cold patriot, Thomas Madison is on a mission to contribute in any and every way to the restoration of and strict obedience to the United States Constitution, that divinely-inspired, concise, intentionally and specifically broad (wrap your head around that oxymoron) blueprint which has gifted the world with the concept and realization of individual liberty and unlimited prosperity.
We, as a nation, have lost our way. We have spent the past one-hundred years attempting to fix what was never broken. As with building anything, when you can't figure it out, consult the blueprint. So too with rebuilding America, the blueprint for which is the United States Constitution.
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