Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller Are still Fighting Back against Their Ban: Help Them



The 25 June 2013 is a significant date not only in the history of the counterjihad movement but also in the history of freedom of speech in one of the countries that most contributed to its establishment: Britain.

That is the date on the letter to Robert Spencer announcing the UK Home Secretary Theresa May's decision that he should

be excluded from the United Kingdom on the grounds that your presence here is not conducive to the public good...

The Home Secretary notes that you are the founder of the blog Jihad Watch (a site widely criticized for being Islamophobic). You co-founded the Freedom Defense Initiative and Stop Islamization of America, both of which have been described as anti-Muslim hate groups.

So those were the reasons given for Spencer's and fellow founder of American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) and SIOA Pamela Geller's ban.

As Robert Spencer put it at the time:

Muhammad al-Arifi, who has advocated Jew-hatred, wife-beating, and jihad violence, entered the U.K. recently with no difficulty. In not allowing us into the country solely because of our true and accurate statements about Islam, the British government is behaving like a de facto Islamic state. The nation that gave the world the Magna Carta is dead.

Al-Arifi is just one of the many Islamists admitted to Britain, in this case just a few days before Spencer's ban. The interesting thing about him is that he's the author of these words:

Devotion to jihad for the sake of Allah, and the desire to shed blood, to smash skulls, and to sever limbs for the sake of Allah and in defense of His religion, is, undoubtedly, an honor for the believer. Allah said that if a man fights the infidels, the infidels will be unable to prepare to fight.

Robert Spencer, according to the Home Office, instead wrote this:

...it [Islam] is a religion and is a belief system that mandates warfare against unbelievers for the purpose for establishing a societal model that is absolutely incompatible with Western society because media and general government unwillingness to face the sources of Islamic terrorism these things remain largely unknown.

The grammatically and logically confused quotation is unlikely to be literal, as anyone who's read Robert's prose will easily realize. Nevertheless, what distinguishes the latter extract from the one immediately above? They both equate Islam with war against infidels, but one - Al-Arifi's - approvingly, and the other - Spencer's - disapprovingly:

[I]t is perfectly acceptable to speak about jihad violence in the UK, as long as you’re for it. If you oppose it, watch out...

This is even more true in view of the fact that the purpose of the two anti-jihad campaigners' visit to Britain was to lay a wreath at a memorial for British soldier Lee Rigby - murdered by two jihadists on a London street on 22 May - on Armed Forces Day, 29 June.

Immediately after the ban, The British Society For Freedom of Speech published the online petition Allow Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer to Speak in UK, which has so far collected almost 10,000 signatures, including mine.

On 2nd July, Spencer and Geller fought back with an appeal against their ban and instructed lawyers in the UK.

A couple of weeks ago, two judges decided to uphold the Government’s exclusion on Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller from the UK.

But that's not the end of it. A fund has been established to help the lawsuit against the entry ban.

They know that it’s not going to be easy:

The entire British government and media elite is determined to appease Islamic supremacists and discredit and silence the defenders of freedom. We will have to hire a top British legal team that can navigate through all the roadblocks and obstacles that the Home Office puts up.

It’s going to cost us upwards of $25,000.

So, please help them fight the ban: donate via Paypal to americanfreedomdefense@aol.com .