Shut up or, inshallah, we'll sue

Earlier this month, a small Florida group carried out a public protest against Six Flags over Texas, here in the Dallas area, over the park's holding a special day for Muslim visitors. The event was sponsored in part by the Islamic Circle of North America, which the protesters denounced as supporters of terrorism. A local Muslim leader denounced them:

"They have an agenda and they have a focus, and that is to absolutely tear down any Muslim organization that has any level of promise in America," said Khalil Meek of Plano, president of the Muslim Legal Fund of America. "I'm not surprised they're doing it, and I don't even want to talk about them because the more hype they get, the more voice they get. I'd rather just ignore them and pray they grow up and learn how to become responsible people."

And now, it appears that one or more Muslim groups have filed a defamation lawsuit against the Florida protesters, Americans Against Hate.

Well. I don't know that protesting Muslim Family Day at an amusement park because it was sponsored by ICNA is the best use of one's resources, but it is by no means an outrageous, baseless claim to say that ICNA supports terrorism. ICNA has close ties to Jamaat-i-Islami, a radical Pakistani movement, and its other ties quite rightly call it into suspicion. I have written about how ICNA and the Muslim American Society, an American arm of the radical Muslim Brotherhood (which has quite a few of them), sponsored a quiz competition at a Dallas-area mosque in 2004 in which the teenagers were drilled on their knowledge of "Milestones," one of the foundational texts of modern jihadi Islam. The "general strategic memo" of the Muslim Brotherhood entered into evidence at the HLF trial listed ICNA as one of the friendly organizations to the Brotherhood's goals. None of this is conclusive, undeniable evidence that ICNA supports terrorism, but it does show that the conclusion is not remotely far-fetched. At the very least, it should not be undebatable.

So why is this little Florida organization being sued for defamation, instead of simply being denounced? My guess is to shut them up and intimidate into silence anyone who questions Muslim organizations. Mainstream Muslim organizations are very well financed; who will pay the legal bills of the Americans Against Hate? Even if they prevail in the lawsuit, fighting it will cost them a lot of time and money -- a lesson that will not be lost on any individuals or groups who want to exercise their free speech rights against Muslim groups.

This is not an isolated case. This past summer, Jeff Jacoby noted how the Islamic Society of Boston, which had sued journalists, activists and others -- including a progressive Muslim critic -- for allegedly defaming them by pointing out, among other things, ties its members have to jihadist elements, ended up dropping the suit. Why? Because it was groundless. Commented Jacoby:

What the lawsuit was really about, it seems to me, was intimidation -- intimidation of anyone inclined to raise questions or express concerns about the Islamic Society's leaders and their connections to radical Islam. Libel suits have become a favorite tactic of Islamists, who deploy them to silence their critics. In yet another document produced during discovery, the head of the Islamic Center of New England advises Abou-allaban to "thwart" Fox 25 with a lawsuit. "If Fox is being sued for this story," he writes, "it stands to reason that they will be prevented from reporting on the story further while the case is in court."

Sad to say, such legal intimidation works. Once the lawsuit was filed, Fox 25 and the Herald essentially ended their investigative reporting into the Islamic Society's radical connections.

So while the Islamic Society's lawsuit was without merit, that doesn't mean it was without effect. Serious questions remain about the Saudi-funded mosque going up in Boston. Will journalists, public officials, and concerned citizens insist on getting answers? Or will they choose instead to look the other way, unwilling to run the risk of predatory litigation and bad-faith accusation?

Seeking to intimidate critics by making them fear a lawsuit was, in my view, the point of the whole asinine Flying Imams debacle. Six imams whose behavior freaked passengers out and got them booted off a flight sued, among others, passengers who complained about them. Eventually the plaintiffs dropped passengers from their claim, but it took a subsequent act of Congress to protect airline passengers from lawsuits like this. As the Arizona Republic opined at the time:

As the imams have made clear from the moment they finally arrived in Phoenix, the only explanation for what happened at the Minneapolis airport is that a wide variety of people acted against their innocent behavior strictly out of ethnic bias or hatred. They have not deviated an iota from that script since.

No witness is sincere; no behavior on their part could be construed as provocative, even if inadvertently so.

The one and only explanation they brook is that the broad cross-section of non-Muslim humanity at the Minneapolis airport reported their behavior because they fear and hate Muslims.

It was a ludicrous argument on the day they and their lawyers first made it, and it is more so now as they seek to draw truly innocent passengers into their legal web.

To be sure, the First Amendment does not guarantee anyone the right to defame others. And no one who truly feels that he has been defamed should be denied access to the courts seeking remedy. But there has to be a way to protect the speech rights of ordinary people who would be intimidated into silence by fear of being sued simply for speaking out on an issue of legitimate public concern. Turns out there is: anti-SLAPP laws.