Last week, the little birdies in Twitter’s legal department notified me that one of my tweets from 2015 is “in violation of Pakistan law.” It seems like ancient history, but Islamic supremacists never forget — or forgive.
My innocuous tweet featured a compilation image of the 12 Muhammad cartoons published by Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in 2005. It also linked to my Jan. 8, 2015, syndicated column on the Charlie Hebdo jihad massacre in Paris. There’s no hate, violence, profanity or pornography, just harmless drawings and peacefully expressed opinions about the Western media’s futile attempts to appease the unappeasable enforcers of sharia law, which bans all insults of Islam.
The Twitter notice assured me that the company “has not taken any action on the reported content at this time,” yet advised me that I should “consult legal counsel about this matter” in response to complaints from unnamed “authorized entities.”
Don’t worry, lawyer up? Gulp.
I’m used to getting threats directly from bloodthirsty cartoon jihadists. In 2006, I spearheaded a “Mohammed cartoons blogburst” in support of the Danish cartoonists at Jyllands-Posten. After posting all 12 of the drawings to educate the public about the publication’s brave stand against sharia-enforced self-censorship in the West, death and rape threats from radical Muslims around the world poured into my email inbox. Vengeful thugs based in Turkey and Germany called me a “whore” and “prostitute,” vowing “We will kill you” unless I deleted the pictures from my server. My website was targeted by jihadist hackers who launched a week of denial-of-service attacks.
Thirteen years later, however, who knew that using an American company’s microblogging service from my secluded mountaintop in Colorado could get me in hot water with foreign Muslim stone-age goons 8,000 miles away still hung up on the cartoons.
Who knew Twitter would act as dutiful messenger pigeons for the oppressive anti-blasphemy police squad that sentences people to death for disparaging Islam.
Welcome to Silicon Valley sharia.
Over the past few months, several other prominent critics of Islamic extremism have received similar warning letters from Twitter’s legal department, including Saudi-Canadian activist Ensaf Haidar, the wife of imprisoned Saudi blogger Raif Badawi; Imam Mohammad Tawhidi, an Iranian-born Muslim scholar and reform advocate from Australia; Jamie Glazov, a Russian-born Canadian columnist who just released a new book called “Jihadist Psychopath”; and Pamela Geller, an anti-jihad blogger and activist.
Jacob Engels, another conservative activist and blogger, was suspended from Twitter this weekend without explanation. His last tweet linked to video of a black Christian street preacher being arrested for “breaching the peace.” Engels opined that the scene depicted “America’s future thanks to (Rep. Ilhan Omar). Roaming rape gangs … cops do nothing. Massive terrorist attacks.”
There’s no violence, hate, profanity or pornography, just an informed opinion about the consequences of open borders and capitulation to Islamic extremism. So why was Engels censored for condemning violent Muslims? Jack Morrissey, the Disney film producer who publicly called for the falsely accused Covington Catholic high school students to be fed into a woodchipper “screaming, hats first,” was allowed to retain his verified Twitter status without any punishment for his bloody death wishes.
This is all of a piece. As I reported in December, citizen journalist Laura Loomer was banned from Twitter for stating true facts about radical Muslim Rep. Ilhan Omar’s embrace of sharia laws that threaten gays, Jews and women. Loomer has since been deplatformed from PayPal and just learned she can no longer sell T-shirts protesting Twitter’s ban with the hashtag #StopTheBias on Teespring.
Paypal’s CEO admitted this week that he relied on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s powerful smear machine for input on which conservatives to blacklist in order to uphold the company’s alleged values of “diversity and inclusion.” SPLC’s de-Paypal’d victims include Tommy Robinson, an English anti-jihad activist; VDARE, a nationalist immigration news and commentary site that publishes my syndicated column; and Gavin McInnes, a humorist, social critic and media entrepreneur whose fans have raised nearly $140,000 at DefendGavin.com for his powerful defamation lawsuit against the SPLC. McInnes was also de-Twittered and temporarily de-YouTube’d.
Among others targeted by SPLC, which collaborates with credit card companies and banks to silence influential thinkers and activists on the right: David Horowitz, a venerable scholar and investigative author who successfully beat back Mastercard’s attempt to drop him over his organization’s opposition to Islamic radicalism and illegal immigration, and the Center for Immigration Studies, which is suing the SPLC for labeling its mainstream think tank a “hate group.”
Deplatforming dissenting voices is a ruthless, bizarre and unprogressive way to achieve “diversity and inclusion.” So is conspiring with repressive regimes that are hell-bent on destroying the West. Twitter has become America’s version of Islam’s morality police — the dreaded “mutaween.”
I will not. As an American citizen who is subject to America’s laws — not Pakistan’s or Mohammed’s — I’ll retweet my harmless little Mo cartoons to my 2.1 million followers every day from now on and stand with other targets on the side of free speech and free thought. How about you, Twitter?
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