AFLC Advisor Board Member Andrew McCarthy wrote an important article in National Review that all freedom-loving Americans should read:Â Islam v. Free Speech: Twitter Surrenders.
As you may have heard, Twitter has announced new regulations on content under the guise of suppressing “hate” speech.  However, as McCarthy points out, “the regulations cast a much wider net that potentially calls for the suppression of political and educational speech.”
What is fueling this regulatory shift? The not-so-subtle imposition of sharia blasphemy standards on the West by Islamic supremacists.
In the article, McCarthy notes that it has been “the top agenda item of Islamic supremacists” to impose such standards on the West, further noting that “[t]his campaign is not waged exclusively or even primarily by violent jihadists.  Instead, its leading proponents are the Muslim Brotherhood’s network of Islamist activist groups in the West and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (a 57-government bloc of, mainly, majority-Muslim countries).”
As McCarthy observes,
“The West should be fighting these anti-Western Islamic supremacists in defense of our core principles.  Instead, the Obama administration — particularly the president and his former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton — has colluded with them.  So have other left-leaning governments and institutions that are naturally hostile to free speech and open debate.”
A dangerous result of this collusion, as McCarthy points out, is U.N. Human Rights Council Resolution 16/18, which he properly describes as a “blatantly unconstitutional provision, co-sponsored by Obama, Clinton, and OIC members” that “calls on all nations to ban speech that could promote mere hostility to Islam.  Essentially, this is a codification of sharia, which prohibits all expression that subjects Islam to critical examination.”
Indeed, the new regulations announced by Twitter “are prohibitions on speech similar in effect to Resolution 16/18.”
McCarthy concludes:
“We must hasten to add that Twitter is a private service.  It is not bound by the First Amendment.  Unlike the government, it is permitted to suppress speech disseminated through its own system.  But that system has millions of users . . .  The new Twitter policy is clearly an effort to shape the public’s understanding of what is and is not tolerable speech.  The question is: Is Twitter influential enough to have that effect . . . or will its obnoxious policy prompt protests by users that induce Twitter to rethink its course?”
Indeed, the question McCarthy poses is a call to action!