The Islamophobia Thread

Re: Handle: look up the Skokie case, Smith v. Collin. That's the relevant precedent. Then tell me how this is any different.

Let's see...

... The USA have a legal nazi party.

A legal. nazi. party.

More than one.

Being a Nazi was legal while being Communist wasn't?! What the fuck?!

A). You're confusing the Red Scare era for normality.

B). It wasn't illegal to be a Communist. You might be subjected to harassment and persecution, and lots of people might not hire you, but all legal protections still, in theory, extended to you. The McCarthyist era was a black mark on history, and by the 1970s it was recognized as such.

C). First Amendment rights extend, rightly, to protect even the most reviled members of the community. That's the precedent, and it's a vital one.

edited 19th Mar '15 9:15:20 AM by SabresEdge

And the Skokie case had the party being represented in court... by a Jewish lawyer.

The First Amendment provides "protection" to a lot of nasty folks. Including, among others, these guys. It shouldn't be a surprise that islamophobes, nazis & general nutjobs use it as a shield.

[mind draws a blank]

They... they can run ads on busses?

Provided there's money and an absence of boycotts or protests... yeah.

The law cannot bar them from doing so, if the ad provider is willing to run them. The government's role is not to act as the moral guardian.

That said, I'm personally wondering how the Transit Authority worded its advertising policy. The government cannot, as a rule, force a private entity to say something it does not want to say (is the Transit Authority a private or public entity?).

The municipal transit authority would almost certainly be both a public and a government entity. There are private transit companies, but they are usually inter-city or inter-state, and I don't know of any municipality which has only a private transit company serving it.

edited 19th Mar '15 11:22:34 AM by Madrugada

Yes, that'd make sense.

If the adverts are treated as public space that must be made available for advertising use by whoever pays for it, well, there you have it, I'd think. So long as the adverts don't transgress certain regulations regarding obscenity, there are no grounds for the Transportation Authority to yank them.

Which I have to say sounds rather odd for the U.S. — you'd expect it all to be privatised, which is something a lot of other more left-wing countries have done or are doing. And anyway, aren't some private (and foreign) firms contractors to local school districts?

edited 19th Mar '15 3:27:07 PM by Greenmantle

For providing school bus service? Yes, that coming from a private company is not at all uncommon.

I don't suppose that the add runs afoul of any false advertising laws? I know that those have been tried against other crazy right-wing-nutter adds in other parts of the world.

Tricky. It'd be extremely borderline at the very best, and courts will err on the side of free speech when there's doubt.

Really, it'd be down to a concerted and probably sustained campaign to marginalize such voices, rather than trying to rely on the law to silence them, which tends to backfire anyway if it means they can paint themselves as the repressed underdog standing up for truth.

Make that "backfire in a truly ginormous way." If some Moslem really wanted to give Islam a worse name in America than it's currently got, all he'd have to do is focus on muzzling stuff like the bus ads, or making it harder to do. To the general public, the current "has a problem with free speech and free exercise" image is something that a Moslem of genuine, non-feigned good will would be doing his best to belie, not live up to. Moaning and fretting that such ads can be allowed, whether legally or de facto ... doesn't help, to put it mildly.

So, the remaining moves:

• Ignore them
• Run counter ads
  • Taking a defensive stance: "No, those people aren't right"
  • Taking a positive stance: "Muslims are real cool 'n shit" [insert pictures of amazing architecture or technical innovations from the Golden Age]

Just run one that says "Christian Jew-hatred - it's in the bible" and slap a picture of Hitler on there pointing out he was Catholic.

Fighting Hitler associations with Hitler associations is not the way to go.

Actually I think it's solid: "The Qur'an says to hate Jews and Muslim leaders had associations with HITLER! They were evil after all! Oh, wait, the Bible also says to hate Jews, and Christian leaders had associations with HITLER! HITLER was a christian himself! But we're Christians, and we aren't evil! So Muslims probably aren't evil either! Whew!"

Yes, Handle, but you are intelligent and you have proper logical thinking.

Some folks in America (regardless of being Reps or Dems) or even Europe, however...

Surely there must be a counter to these Poisoning The Well tactics!

Simple satire is pretty effective. Doing what Jon Stewart does and pointing out how absurd the comparison is (and sure, mention that the same thing could be said of Christians while doing so) prevents people from taking it (or anything else like it) seriously.

Running a counter-ad sounds more like a local discussion on a bulletin board. Fighting fire with fire is rarely effective.

The problem with all this "it's free speech" stuff is that federal and local governments are perfectly happy to violate free speech laws when the people being insulted matter to them. Witness attempts at forcing people to take down "there's probably no god" signs, while a picture of a gun-toting child with "If God doesn't matter to him, do you?" was ruled perfectly legit. An anti-Christian ad either wouldn't go up in the first place, or would get taken down under a misuse of hate speech laws.

One time one place disallowed an ad that just said "Atheists" because it would apparently offend people.

edited 20th Mar '15 3:05:27 PM by Elfive

Philadelphia should appeal. I think they can make a case that ads on municipal buses create the impression of government approval of the message (since the buses are public property). The Supreme Court is currently hearing a somewhat similar case in which the State of Texas rejected an order for a custom license plate that featured the Confederate Flag.