//essays//
Spring 2013
New York at the Crossroads of Islamophobia and Free Speech:
The First Amendment at Risk
Bryan Schonfeld
Since the events of September 11, 2001, the United States of America has had a rather un-American relationship with Islam. In the past few months alone, several high profile stories have come into view that threaten this relationship’s fragility, and bring greater awareness to the tension between American values and religious stereotypes. Protests with sometimes fatal consequences broke out earlier this fall across the Middle East in anger over an anti-Islam film made in California. At the same time, caustically anti-Jihad ads were sponsored in trains riding the New York subway system. Together, these events—in addition to the much-debated Ground Zero mosque and the recent NYPD surveillance of Muslim college students—have helped ignite a timely debate over the limits of free speech and the place of Islamophobic hate speech in Western society. Though a global issue, Islamophobia is of particular concern here in New York, one of the sites of 9/11 and the city with the largest Muslim population in the United States.
America must take a two-pronged approach to Islamophobia. Islamophobic speech must be allowed by law in keeping with Constitutional precedent. But non-government groups must substantially improve efforts to wage counter-campaigns against Islamophobia, in order to blot out hate while keeping our rights-based institutions intact. It is not the government’s responsibility to regulate these matters, just as much as it cannot use security fears as a rationale for suspending the Constitutional freedoms of Muslims. For freedom of religious expression to be firmly protected—not just in law, but in practice—private groups must play their own role in ensuring that Islamophobia does not hinder Muslims’ ability to create places of worship and centers of community.
In September, protests erupted throughout the Middle East against The Innocence of Muslims, a film mocking the religion of Islam. The low-budget, poorly-acted movie poke crude fun at Islam, referring to the Prophet Muhammed as “Muhammed the bastard,” and suggesting that he was a homosexual. During the week of September 11th, there were mass protests in Sudan, Lebanon, and Egypt against the movie. Hezbollah even issued a fatwa calling for violence against the filmmakers.
A debate about the limits of free expression when criticizing Islam came to the fore at the United Nations. The statements of Islamic leaders from Turkey, Indonesia, Egypt, Iran, and others called for the criminalization of anti-Muslim hate speech in the Western world, which they saw as a necessary step to protect Muslims from harassment. The United States was singled out as an agent of Islamophobic speech, impugned by a diverse chorus of leaders from the Muslim world for the sacred right of free speech that is an essential feature of the American self-conception. Muslim leaders insisted, contrary to that value, that the United States government has an even stronger obligation to protect Muslims from Islamophobia by punishing those who promote it.
President Obama soundly rejected the idea of criminalizing hate speech in his speech before the United Nations in September 2012. He acknowledged that hate speech is vile and prejudicial, but he explicitly affirmed the right to freely express one’s ideas: “True democracy demands that citizens cannot be thrown in jail because of what they believe.” This is the American ideal: the First Amendment to the Constitution famously states that, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech.” Obama advanced America’s claim to an unwavering dedication to free speech, especially to offensive speech, by tying freedom of expression to the potency of democracy. America’s perception of free speech, though, is unique. Holocaust denial is illegal in Canada, France and Germany. In some countries, there are similar legal restrictions against Islamophobia: in France, animal rights activist Brigitte Bardot was fined the equivalent of $23,000 for criticizing Islamic ritual slaughter of sheep. The American system is distinctively different; modern first amendment jurisprudence firmly upholds the right to desecrate the sacred.
Much of modern First Amendment interpretation can be traced to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ dissent in Abrams v. United States in 1919: “I think that we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loath.” In 1919 this was a dissenting opinion; today, it is the status quo. In National Socialist Party v. Skokie (1977), a unanimous Supreme Court decision upheld the right of neo-Nazis to hold a parade in Skokie, Illinois, one of Chicago’s most densely Jewish suburbs and home to a sizeable population of Holocaust survivors. In Texas vs. Johnson (1989), the Supreme Court overturned laws against flag burning, protecting freedoms for the anti-patriots. More recently, in March 2011, the Supreme Court upheld 8-1 the right of the Westboro Baptist Church to protest military funerals with homophobic chants and slogans that included “God Hates Fags” and “Thank God for Dead Soldiers.” The American judiciary has shown a formidable tolerance for hateful and offensive language, and is historically opposed to proposals like that to outlaw Islamophobia.
Based on America’s strong tradition of allowing offensive speech, any solution to the issue of Islamophobia must be based on the dual concepts of freedom of speech and freedom of religious expression, both of which are enshrined in the First Amendment. Unfortunately, New York has not been immune to a rising trend of intolerance across the United States that has limited the freedom of Islamic religious expression.
Recent reports of the NYPD spying on Muslims, including college students and religious leaders, provide another example of interference with the expression of Islamic religion. For six years, the secret “Demographics Unit” of the NYPD monitored mosques, Muslim neighborhoods, and student groups all over the Northeast. This questionably illegal spying generated no known leads or investigations; the surveillance does not appear to have had any result other than violating the constitutional rights of American citizens. This instance of Islamophobia was motivated by the gross suspicion of a vast Islamic conspiracy among students and religious leaders to kill Americans and promote terrorism. Unfortunately, such incidences of profiling and rights violations are not unique to New York. Last year an FBI informant pretending to be a convert infiltrated the Islamic Center of Irvine in California by using a hidden camera and a tape recorder, as part of a surveillance mission called “Operation Flex”. The FBI officer pretended to be a jihadist, and attempted to find “fellow jihadists” to report into the FBI. He failed to find any. These are but a few counts within a larger trend of interference with Muslims’ First Amendment rights.
An ongoing case study in this troubling pattern is the recent subway ad controversy. In September, ads targeting Muslims begin to appear in New York subway stations. After a protracted legal battle in which the MTA tried to prevent the ads from going up, the inaptly named “American Freedom Defense Initiative” led by Pamela Geller succeeded in getting this offensive message broadcast all throughout New York: “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man.” This is followed by “Support Israel. Defeat Jihad.” Unfortunately, this hateful message is nestled between two Stars of David. While it can be argued that the ad opposes jihadists, and not all Muslims, the ad still characterizes opponents of Israel as sub-human. There is a distinction between calling certain acts such as suicide bombings barbaric, and calling people “savages”; the latter, unlike the former, connotes racism and colonialism. The ads went up in ten subway stations; Geller says that all ten were quickly defaced. Some ads were covered in post-it notes; Egyptian American-activist Mona Eltahawy sprayed pink graffiti on another, leading to her arrest. Geller was undeterred by resistance to the ads, saying, “I refuse to abridge my speech as to appease savages.” Instead of backing down, the American Freedom Defense Initiative came out with a new ad campaign in January. The ad features a tasteless photo of the World Trade Center aflame next to a Quran quote, “Soon we shall cast terror into the hearts of nonbelievers.” Coming under criticism, Geller has defended her approach to Islam not as Islamophobia, but as “Islamorealism.”
Private groups have played a pivotal role in limiting the influence of these ads. Ads criticizing Islamophobia and bigotry have been placed in subways in opposition to the anti-jihad ads. These ads have been paid for by Jewish and Christian groups who hope to promote interfaith acceptance. One notable counter-ad paid for by Rabbis for Human Rights-North America says, “In the choice between love and hate, choose love. Help stop bigotry against our Muslim neighbors.” In contrast to Geller, who used a quote from the Quran to make her point, the Rabbis use a quote from the Hebrew bible, “Love your neighbor as yourself”(Leviticus 19:18). Likewise, a Christian ad reads, “Love your Muslim neighbors.” The Jewish Council for Public Affairs and the President of the Union for Reform Judaism also condemned the ads, as did United Methodist Women, which created its own counter-ad. The Anti-Defamation League also responded: Ron Meier, the director of the New York Regional chapter, said, “We believe these ads are highly offensive and inflammatory.” Especially noteworthy in Meier’s response is that he refused to allow Geller to associate Israel advocacy and Judaism with her intolerant messages: “Pro-Israel doesn’t mean anti-Muslim. It is possible to support Israel without engaging in bigoted anti-Muslim and anti-Arab stereotypes.”
Unfortunately, the Anti-Defamation League has elsewhere acted irresolutely in what ought to be an unwavering liberal counterattack against Islamophobia, by speaking in opposition to the so-called “ground zero mosque”. The project, referred to as a “monster mosque” by a New York Post writer in 2010, was in fact a more modest proposal to build an Islamic cultural center called the “Cordoba House” two blocks from Ground Zero. Despite saying, “we regard freedom of religion as a cornerstone of the American democracy, and that freedom must include the right of all Americans—Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and other faiths—to build community centers and houses of worship,” the League determined that building the Islamic Center a few blocks from Ground Zero would “cause some victims more pain—unnecessarily—and that is not right.” That an organization whose purpose is to “stop defamation against the Jewish people and to secure justice and fair treatment to all” would oppose this building shows a profound lack of concern for the larger implications Islamophobia has for protection of the First Amendment. Of greater importance is the League’s tacit alignment with more obvious purveyors of hate, such as Pamela Geller, the creator of the anti-Islam subway ads, and a visible opponent of the mosque. Much of the bigotry among Geller and her contingent was predicated on the idea that a connection existed between the perpetrators of 9/11 and the group planning the Islamic Center, creating a totally absurd equation of Al Qaeda and the average American Muslim community. The symbolic significance of this debate, however, was not lost on Mayor Bloomberg, who said, “This is an important test of the separation of Church and State—as important a test as we may see in our lifetimes—and it is critically important that we get it right.” Ultimately, the plan to build the mosque is still under development, having been slowed but not stopped by the controversy.
For Muslims to enjoy the full rights of American citizens which they deserve, private groups and individuals must be vigilant in criticizing the intolerance that is often directed at the American Muslim community, even in a progressive city like New York. These groups must not interfere with freedom of speech in doing so; activists should not deface offensive ads, but instead take the path of counter-ads and tolerance campaigns. The subway incident shows that Jews and Christians must both express their outrage at the way their symbols and values have been pirated by organizations expressing intolerant ideologies. These groups must be explicit in showing that the conflict between the United States and extremists is not one between Christianity and Islam or between “civilized” and “savage,” but rather between the United States and groups like Al Qaeda who hijack Islam for their own radical and violent purposes. In this way the First Amendment can be firmly upheld, for Muslims—as Americans—just as for their brothers and sisters of all faiths
America must take a two-pronged approach to Islamophobia. Islamophobic speech must be allowed by law in keeping with Constitutional precedent. But non-government groups must substantially improve efforts to wage counter-campaigns against Islamophobia, in order to blot out hate while keeping our rights-based institutions intact. It is not the government’s responsibility to regulate these matters, just as much as it cannot use security fears as a rationale for suspending the Constitutional freedoms of Muslims. For freedom of religious expression to be firmly protected—not just in law, but in practice—private groups must play their own role in ensuring that Islamophobia does not hinder Muslims’ ability to create places of worship and centers of community.
In September, protests erupted throughout the Middle East against The Innocence of Muslims, a film mocking the religion of Islam. The low-budget, poorly-acted movie poke crude fun at Islam, referring to the Prophet Muhammed as “Muhammed the bastard,” and suggesting that he was a homosexual. During the week of September 11th, there were mass protests in Sudan, Lebanon, and Egypt against the movie. Hezbollah even issued a fatwa calling for violence against the filmmakers.
A debate about the limits of free expression when criticizing Islam came to the fore at the United Nations. The statements of Islamic leaders from Turkey, Indonesia, Egypt, Iran, and others called for the criminalization of anti-Muslim hate speech in the Western world, which they saw as a necessary step to protect Muslims from harassment. The United States was singled out as an agent of Islamophobic speech, impugned by a diverse chorus of leaders from the Muslim world for the sacred right of free speech that is an essential feature of the American self-conception. Muslim leaders insisted, contrary to that value, that the United States government has an even stronger obligation to protect Muslims from Islamophobia by punishing those who promote it.
President Obama soundly rejected the idea of criminalizing hate speech in his speech before the United Nations in September 2012. He acknowledged that hate speech is vile and prejudicial, but he explicitly affirmed the right to freely express one’s ideas: “True democracy demands that citizens cannot be thrown in jail because of what they believe.” This is the American ideal: the First Amendment to the Constitution famously states that, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech.” Obama advanced America’s claim to an unwavering dedication to free speech, especially to offensive speech, by tying freedom of expression to the potency of democracy. America’s perception of free speech, though, is unique. Holocaust denial is illegal in Canada, France and Germany. In some countries, there are similar legal restrictions against Islamophobia: in France, animal rights activist Brigitte Bardot was fined the equivalent of $23,000 for criticizing Islamic ritual slaughter of sheep. The American system is distinctively different; modern first amendment jurisprudence firmly upholds the right to desecrate the sacred.
Much of modern First Amendment interpretation can be traced to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ dissent in Abrams v. United States in 1919: “I think that we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loath.” In 1919 this was a dissenting opinion; today, it is the status quo. In National Socialist Party v. Skokie (1977), a unanimous Supreme Court decision upheld the right of neo-Nazis to hold a parade in Skokie, Illinois, one of Chicago’s most densely Jewish suburbs and home to a sizeable population of Holocaust survivors. In Texas vs. Johnson (1989), the Supreme Court overturned laws against flag burning, protecting freedoms for the anti-patriots. More recently, in March 2011, the Supreme Court upheld 8-1 the right of the Westboro Baptist Church to protest military funerals with homophobic chants and slogans that included “God Hates Fags” and “Thank God for Dead Soldiers.” The American judiciary has shown a formidable tolerance for hateful and offensive language, and is historically opposed to proposals like that to outlaw Islamophobia.
Based on America’s strong tradition of allowing offensive speech, any solution to the issue of Islamophobia must be based on the dual concepts of freedom of speech and freedom of religious expression, both of which are enshrined in the First Amendment. Unfortunately, New York has not been immune to a rising trend of intolerance across the United States that has limited the freedom of Islamic religious expression.
Recent reports of the NYPD spying on Muslims, including college students and religious leaders, provide another example of interference with the expression of Islamic religion. For six years, the secret “Demographics Unit” of the NYPD monitored mosques, Muslim neighborhoods, and student groups all over the Northeast. This questionably illegal spying generated no known leads or investigations; the surveillance does not appear to have had any result other than violating the constitutional rights of American citizens. This instance of Islamophobia was motivated by the gross suspicion of a vast Islamic conspiracy among students and religious leaders to kill Americans and promote terrorism. Unfortunately, such incidences of profiling and rights violations are not unique to New York. Last year an FBI informant pretending to be a convert infiltrated the Islamic Center of Irvine in California by using a hidden camera and a tape recorder, as part of a surveillance mission called “Operation Flex”. The FBI officer pretended to be a jihadist, and attempted to find “fellow jihadists” to report into the FBI. He failed to find any. These are but a few counts within a larger trend of interference with Muslims’ First Amendment rights.
An ongoing case study in this troubling pattern is the recent subway ad controversy. In September, ads targeting Muslims begin to appear in New York subway stations. After a protracted legal battle in which the MTA tried to prevent the ads from going up, the inaptly named “American Freedom Defense Initiative” led by Pamela Geller succeeded in getting this offensive message broadcast all throughout New York: “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man.” This is followed by “Support Israel. Defeat Jihad.” Unfortunately, this hateful message is nestled between two Stars of David. While it can be argued that the ad opposes jihadists, and not all Muslims, the ad still characterizes opponents of Israel as sub-human. There is a distinction between calling certain acts such as suicide bombings barbaric, and calling people “savages”; the latter, unlike the former, connotes racism and colonialism. The ads went up in ten subway stations; Geller says that all ten were quickly defaced. Some ads were covered in post-it notes; Egyptian American-activist Mona Eltahawy sprayed pink graffiti on another, leading to her arrest. Geller was undeterred by resistance to the ads, saying, “I refuse to abridge my speech as to appease savages.” Instead of backing down, the American Freedom Defense Initiative came out with a new ad campaign in January. The ad features a tasteless photo of the World Trade Center aflame next to a Quran quote, “Soon we shall cast terror into the hearts of nonbelievers.” Coming under criticism, Geller has defended her approach to Islam not as Islamophobia, but as “Islamorealism.”
Private groups have played a pivotal role in limiting the influence of these ads. Ads criticizing Islamophobia and bigotry have been placed in subways in opposition to the anti-jihad ads. These ads have been paid for by Jewish and Christian groups who hope to promote interfaith acceptance. One notable counter-ad paid for by Rabbis for Human Rights-North America says, “In the choice between love and hate, choose love. Help stop bigotry against our Muslim neighbors.” In contrast to Geller, who used a quote from the Quran to make her point, the Rabbis use a quote from the Hebrew bible, “Love your neighbor as yourself”(Leviticus 19:18). Likewise, a Christian ad reads, “Love your Muslim neighbors.” The Jewish Council for Public Affairs and the President of the Union for Reform Judaism also condemned the ads, as did United Methodist Women, which created its own counter-ad. The Anti-Defamation League also responded: Ron Meier, the director of the New York Regional chapter, said, “We believe these ads are highly offensive and inflammatory.” Especially noteworthy in Meier’s response is that he refused to allow Geller to associate Israel advocacy and Judaism with her intolerant messages: “Pro-Israel doesn’t mean anti-Muslim. It is possible to support Israel without engaging in bigoted anti-Muslim and anti-Arab stereotypes.”
Unfortunately, the Anti-Defamation League has elsewhere acted irresolutely in what ought to be an unwavering liberal counterattack against Islamophobia, by speaking in opposition to the so-called “ground zero mosque”. The project, referred to as a “monster mosque” by a New York Post writer in 2010, was in fact a more modest proposal to build an Islamic cultural center called the “Cordoba House” two blocks from Ground Zero. Despite saying, “we regard freedom of religion as a cornerstone of the American democracy, and that freedom must include the right of all Americans—Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and other faiths—to build community centers and houses of worship,” the League determined that building the Islamic Center a few blocks from Ground Zero would “cause some victims more pain—unnecessarily—and that is not right.” That an organization whose purpose is to “stop defamation against the Jewish people and to secure justice and fair treatment to all” would oppose this building shows a profound lack of concern for the larger implications Islamophobia has for protection of the First Amendment. Of greater importance is the League’s tacit alignment with more obvious purveyors of hate, such as Pamela Geller, the creator of the anti-Islam subway ads, and a visible opponent of the mosque. Much of the bigotry among Geller and her contingent was predicated on the idea that a connection existed between the perpetrators of 9/11 and the group planning the Islamic Center, creating a totally absurd equation of Al Qaeda and the average American Muslim community. The symbolic significance of this debate, however, was not lost on Mayor Bloomberg, who said, “This is an important test of the separation of Church and State—as important a test as we may see in our lifetimes—and it is critically important that we get it right.” Ultimately, the plan to build the mosque is still under development, having been slowed but not stopped by the controversy.
For Muslims to enjoy the full rights of American citizens which they deserve, private groups and individuals must be vigilant in criticizing the intolerance that is often directed at the American Muslim community, even in a progressive city like New York. These groups must not interfere with freedom of speech in doing so; activists should not deface offensive ads, but instead take the path of counter-ads and tolerance campaigns. The subway incident shows that Jews and Christians must both express their outrage at the way their symbols and values have been pirated by organizations expressing intolerant ideologies. These groups must be explicit in showing that the conflict between the United States and extremists is not one between Christianity and Islam or between “civilized” and “savage,” but rather between the United States and groups like Al Qaeda who hijack Islam for their own radical and violent purposes. In this way the First Amendment can be firmly upheld, for Muslims—as Americans—just as for their brothers and sisters of all faiths