Mona Eltahawy: If Anti-Muslim Ads Are Protected, So Must Be My Free Speech Right to Protest
If Anti-Muslim Ads Are Protected, So Must Be My Free Speech Right to Protest
Five days after I spraypainted over a racist and bigoted advertisement in the New York subway, a man set fire to my brother’s local mosque. He struck just a few hours after the mosque’s kindergarten had been filled with children at Sunday school, including my four nieces and nephews.
It was a coincidental correlation but there was nothing casual about either the hate speech on the walls of the subway - which a judge declared “protected political statement” - or the arson in Ohio, which was described as an “act of terrorism” by officials who announced federal hate crime charges against the suspect.
American rightwingers - in between calling me a “bitch” and “cunt” countless times - would have you know I’m an “Islamo-Nazi anti-speech ungrateful immigrant” incapable of appreciating the wonders of the first amendment. The right is incredibly deft at getting earnest about all the wrong things. It was precisely my love of the first amendment that made me join sidewalk activists in 2010 to support an Islamic community center’s right to open in Lower Manhattan. As a member of a minority whose very presence has been considered an offense - “Why can’t you just move a few blocks away? Can’t you see you’re hurting our feelings?” - of course, I believe in the right to offend: it’s a two-way street.
A bag of dogshit was left at the doorstep of Park51, a car circled the building and our protest with a decommissioned missile mounted on its roof, and Tea Partiers often visited the protest to pick arguments.
When I first heard about those subway ads, Park51 immediately came to mind. Pamela Geller connects the dots of hate, determined to mine the depths of American ignorance to once again bully Muslims and Arabs. Her group, Stop Islamization of America, was behind attempts to shut down Park51, calling it the “Ground Zero Mosque”. Her recent subway ad, paid for by her anti-Muslim American Freedom Defense Initiative, conflates “savage” (a heinous word loaded with a dehumanizing and bloody history in this country; ask blacks and Native Americans) with Palestinian/Muslim/Arab and with “Jihad”.
