NY Attorney General Criminalizes Opposing Islamic Terrorism
Attorney General Letita James shuts down Jewish group for fighting back.
Attorney General Letita James shuts down Jewish group for fighting back.
www.frontpagemag.com
After two years of Hamas supporters assaulting NYPD officers and Jewish community members, besieging synagogues, blocking streets, vandalizing buildings and making death threats, New York Attorney General Letitia James finally took action. Against Jews.
In a press release, AG James, who had previously worked to shut down the NRA because she disagreed with its politics, announced that she had closed down Betar, a pro-Israel group , for appearing at synagogues to defend them from Muslim mobs, for claiming that “that all devout Muslims ‘hate America’, and for making derogatory remarks about Islam and Gaza.
Shortly after nearly all New York politicians condemned Hamas supporters showing up outside a Jewish school to chant, “we support Hamas”, a fairly straightforward case of bias intimidation, Attorney General James instead decided to announce action against a Jewish protest group rather than against the Islamic and Antifa groups whom it had been defending against.
Many of the ‘charges’ laid out by AG James are forms of speech that may be derogatory or abrasive towards Islam, Muslims or Islamic terrorists, but are not in any way illegal.
For example, the filing by AG James complains that “Betar members repeatedly referred to keffiyehs” (the pro-terrorist scarves worn by some Muslims and radical leftist supporters of terrorism) “as ‘rape rags’ in public and private”, that some member of the group stated “that all devout Muslims ‘hate America'” and that the group tweeted that it “hate(s) Gazans”.
Under the First Amendment, Betar members are entitled to say these things whether or not anyone finds them deplorable. AG James does not allege that Betar members stood outside a mosque and shouted these things. Indeed her filing reveals that some of these comments came from private ‘members only’ chats on Whatsapp that were spied on by Islamists and Antifa.
Attorney General Letita James is criminalizing private speech in a private forum. That reflects the weakness of her case against Betar which is long on rhetoric and short on actual crimes.
The preponderance of the filing by the attorney general’s office and its ‘hate crimes’ division is dedicated to the rhetoric of Betar or members of the group. It’s only able to document three types of illegal activities, these are stealing and burning ‘Palestinian’ flags, pushing beepers at terrorist supporters, and fighting back against pro-Hamas mobs attacking synagogues and Jewish neighborhoods. James does not cite any Betar members arrested for these alleged acts.....
