Human Rights attorney and the director of the Lawfare Project, Brooke Goldstein, asserts that anyone who is brave enough to speak openly about terrorism and its connection to Islam may find themselves on the “receiving end of a frivolous and malicious lawsuit designed to silence and punish them.”
Goldstein claims over the last 15 years, Islamic groups like the Arab league and the OIC attempt to punish any type of speech they consider offensive to Islam. Moreover, she told Breitbart News Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon and the host of Breitbart News Sunday that such groups pair lawsuits with acts of violence and are becoming more aggressive about invoking fatwas, as they did to the Danish cartoonist. Goldstein, also pointed out that violence and fatwas ensued across the Muslim world when the state department decided to blame a so called anti-Islam YouTube film for the attack on Benghazi.
The human rights and free speech advocate posits that the lawsuits and violence precipitates an inherent self censorship. Altogether these three free speech denying modalities comprise a phenomenon which Goldstein calls “Islamist Lawfare, which is the use of the law as a weapon of war to silence and punish free speech about these issues of public dissonance.”
Bannon asked Goldstein if she thought there was an over-hyping by the Conservative Right of Islamist overreach in America, or is there a real problem as in the UK, where Sharia Law is now becoming codified into English Common law. Goldstein replied that “I wish it was just hype. But what we can measure now, because this has been a strategy that has been pursued, is the effects of the lawfare.”
Goldstein cited one example where Islamist lawfare was carried out and resulted in a major act of terror on American soil. She referred to a community center and mosque called the Islamic Society of Boston, that in 2005 was being investigated for receiving Saudi funding and was breeding Wasabi Islamic radicalism. The mosque turned around and sued at least 17 media defendants tying up the courts in a two year process stymieing police and discouraging further investigations.
The mosque was able to continue its teachings and sponsorship of radical ideology. Unfortunately, several years later, the mosque produced the two Tsarnaev brothers, responsible for the bombing of the Boston Marathon in 2013, which killed three people including an eight year old boy and wounded many others.
Goldstein expressed her outrage that we have a policy in the government now where the words Islam and Jihad are being redacted from counter terrorism training manuals. She further points out that we have FBI officials and counter intelligence experts “that have been fired because they are Islamaphobic. We have Fort Hood which is reclassified as work place violence, not Islamist terrorism.”
Goldstein concludes that we have an uber PCness in America that brands people, even if it’s a Muslim criticizing his own religion, as being an Islamaphobe.
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