District 5 Diary: The Examiner on the "spreading hate" lie

His Jihad: killing Jews and Americans

Good to see that the SF Examiner allowed Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer to respond to Nathan Lean's op-ed accusation that they're "spreading hate" with their Muni bus ads mocking the sappy, soft-focus "My Jihad" ad campaign that tries to sanitize what Jihad really means to a significant number of Muslims around the world:

Central to Nathan Lean’s claim that our American Freedom Defense Initiative ads spread “hate” is his charge that the ads “suggest collective guilt on the part of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims for acts of terrorism.” Yet nowhere do our ads suggest any such thing. Instead, they highlight real hatred and incitement to violence from influential Muslim leaders and spokesmen. Muslims and non-Muslims who abhor and oppose that hatred and incitement should be standing with us, not condemning us.
There seems to be a blanket of political/intellectual fog over the city that makes some people dumber than they should be. How else to explain the widespread reading disorder and cognitive breakdown that's greeted these ads? [Later: I meant to give credit to the exception in local newspapers, the Chronicle's Debra Saunders, who's good on this issue. See Sanctimony City from March 14]

The PC Bay Guardian naturally is outraged, but then recall that it rolled over when the Islamic bullyboys rioted over the Danish cartoons. Last week's Guardian ("Hate Speech on Muni")---in a short piece without a byline---wrote about the "horrible bus ads attacking Islam---and Muni says it has to run them because of the First Amendment." Well, is Muni correct or not? The phrasing suggests that the Guardian has some doubts about the First Amendment, though as a political publication it should have none.

Apparently the Guardian is nursing an old grudge with Muni:

That may be legally true---although a decade ago, when the Guardian paid for bus ads making fun of Willie Brown, who happened to be the mayor at the time, the ads mysteriously disappeared from the bus sides. Because the First Amendment didn't apply to attacks on Hizzoner.

Exercising free speech "may be legally true"? Sounds like the Guardian thinks Geller is simply exploiting a legal technicality when she's only exercising the free speech rights of every American, even though her message offends the lame, evidently authoritarian, multicultural ideology of city progressives.

If the Guardian had litigated over the Willie Brown ads, they would have prevailed in court, but Bruce Brugmann was probably too cheap to hire a lawyer: "Hate speech has direct impacts, and this kind of vicious stuff only leads to more violence."

The Guardian's Tim Redmond used that bogus leads-to-violence argument---the point of the ads highlights the violence by Jihadists---last year during the first series of anti-Jihad ads:

It's not just idle rhetoric---this stuff frightens people. "We're hearing from people that they're uncomfortable riding Muni," Zahra Biloo, executive director of the Bay Area office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told me. Obviously, you can't run ads that enourage someone to engage in violence. Is dehumanizing people and calling them "savages" the same thing? Biloo thinks it's pretty close: "It's important for progressive cities to say, 'not in our city,'" she said.

Biloo was surely lying about people too frightened to ride Muni because of the anti-Jihad ads, but Redmond bought it because it fit the Guardian's version of progressivism, which would apparently like to limit this free speech deal only to opinions approved by San Francisco liberals.

And what about the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)? As Geller and Spencer point out, that organization is more problematic on this issue than Redmond and others understand:

He[Lean] says that our jihad truth campaign “taunts a positive campaign to reclaim the term ‘jihad’ from extremists on both sides whose narrow interpretations of the concept fuel misunderstanding and hatred,” but he doesn’t mention that that campaign was sponsored by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a group that the Justice Department has found to have numerous ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, and of which several former officials have been convicted of jihad terror activity. Our jihad ads were an attempt to counter with the grim truth about jihad this group’s cynical attempt to render Americans complacent about jihad violence.

An Examiner news story last week read like a parody of objective reporting, with Muni "unable to refuse the ads because of First Amendment conflicts"! That darn First Amendment allows people to say things that upset PC San Francisco. Surely the Founding Fathers didn't intend that. Maybe, like CEQA, we should get Supervisor Wiener to "reform" that extreme law to make it conform to Good Government as practiced in San Francisco.