Free speech isn't free

SEPTA DID what it felt it had to do, pointlessly, and wound up in federal court after banning posters deemed to be anti-Islamic.

I say pointlessly because the same ban had been tried and defeated in Washington, D.C., New York and San Francisco.

The U.S. District Court here ruled Wednesday that since SEPTA has accepted other advocacy advertising, it can't refuse ads that call for ending U.S. aid to Islamic countries and that portray an Islamic leader as an ally of Adolf Hitler.

SEPTA general counsel Gino Benedetti said SEPTA rejected the Hitler ad because it "disparaged Muslims because it portrayed them in a way that I believe was untrue and incorrect and false," adding the ad "put every single Muslim in the same category as being a Jew hater."

I'll get to the specific ad in a moment, but that's a huge stretch by Benedetti, like saying attacking Boko Haram is an attack on all Muslims.

The posters (and other ads) are commissioned by the American Freedom Defense Initiative, co-founded by Pamela Geller. Both are accused of being "Islamophobic," which is a convenient way of trying to shut down those who disagree with you.

Those attacking Geller and AFDI include the Council on American-Islamic Relations, other Islamic groups and the leftist Southern Poverty Law Center, which I have supported over the years, even while not agreeing with all it says and does.

I also don't agree with everything Geller says. She's too often a bomb thrower whose careless words allow her critics to paint her with the anti-Muslim brush.

"This is part of the Islamic supremacist narrative," she told me. "I oppose an ideology that calls for the annihilation of the nonbeliever."

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Free speech isn't free