Have U.S. Christians already lost the right to publicly speak against Islam?

“If the world hates you, you know that it hated Me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own. Yet because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. ” – Jesus Christ, [John: 15:18-19]

By LEO HOHMANN

It’s no secret that the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center, aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations, scour the country looking for Christians who dare to speak or write about their beliefs that Islam poses a threat to our constitutional freedoms — especially the freedom of speech.

When these intellectual gangsters find a Christian who dares to speak the forbidden thoughts in public, they pounce like ravenous wolves. They inform Antifa, #Ungovernable, #Resist and other Marxists and Anarchists who flood social media with disparaging comments about the speaker and show up at the advertised venue to cause chaos.

But before employing any of these disruptive tactics, they first try to get the speaker’s event canceled.

That’s what happened this past weekend in Minnesota, Iowa and Wisconsin.

Christian radio host Brannon Howse had scheduled a five-city Worldview Weekend speaking tour. Howse had enlisted speakers including former Muslim-turned Christian Pastor Shahram Hadian and Bible-prophecy teacher Jimmy DeYoung, and booked venues months in advance, only to see those reservations canceled at the last minute.

Managers of the city-owned Omni Center in Onalaska, Wisconsin, told Howse they received 57 phone calls when they opened their office on Friday, April 6, from activists threatening to protest his event. They told Howse he needed to up his liability insurance policy, which already provided $1 million in coverage. They canceled his event four hours before the doors were due to open.

Howse said he was on the phone with three different city officials that day, including the mayor, police chief and city administrator, all telling him they could not host his event at the Omni because his insurance was not sufficient.

“They violated the terms of our contract, which requires them to inform me of any cancellation in writing, either hand-delivered or via U.S. Postal Service,” Howse said.

Hotels in Milwaukee and Green Bay also canceled Howse’s events.

“We have a legal team in Wisconsin and they are looking at suing all three venues but they are particularly distressed that the city government of Onalaska stifled our free speech,” Howse told me. “When the government shuts you up, that is real censorship. Our attorneys are telling us the punitive damages for that could be astronomical for them.”

The last time I checked, talking about political or religious matters, however controversial or unpopular, was exactly the type of speech that our First Amendment was meant to protect.

The speaking events sought to expose how leftists supported by billionaire George Soros and elitist private foundations are intimidating America into silence by labeling anyone who exposes them as “racists,” “Islamophobes” and “white supremacists.”

“It re-affirmed what we’ve been talking about for over a year now in terms of where things are headed in this country and what we are facing as Christians,” Hadian told me.

What’s most disturbing is CAIR’s ability to enlist liberal-minded Christians to turn in their more conservative brothers and sisters for violating CAIR’s rules against speaking negatively about Islam.

“It’s the same coalition, the combination of the far-left SPLC labeling us a hate group and then joining forces with CAIR,” said Hadian, whose Truth in Love ministry is based near Spokane, Washington. “My presentation was on the Trojan Horse of the interfaith movement. CAIR-Washington recently hosted a ‘Faith Over Fear’ event as part of an interfaith movement here in Washington State. It’s mostly Lutheran but also Methodist, Catholic and some other denominations.”

On Jan. 31, CAIR and the SPLC joined forces in support of Islam, Hadian said.

“The whole point was they had 100 faith leaders sign a pledge to fight ‘Islamophobia’ and bigotry,” he said. “We know that Antifa is also an element of their strategy to shut us down.

“Those who are in denial, who don’t think there is Christian persecution, or who even think there is more Muslim persecution, those pastors better wake up, better be aware, that you now have Christian conferences being closed down by these Islamofascists, Antifa, the SPLC, they’re all working together.”

For more on how the army of leftists and Islamists pressured hotels to renege on their agreements to provide space for the Worldview Weekend events, see Jim Simpson’s excellent article in the Daily Caller.

Organizers voluntarily canceled one event in Bloomington, Minnesota, following numerous warnings that it would not be safe. A fifth conference in Des Moines, Iowa, carried on despite leftists showing up to disrupt the proceedings.

Watch Pastor Hadian’s video in which he spells out how Marxists will use any tactic, including threats of violence, in their quest to shut down the free speech of those who refuse to bow at the altar of political correctness.

All it takes to incur their wrath is to disagree with their utopian vision of a nation loosed from what they see as the shackles of Christianity. Islam is the tool of choice that cultural Marxists will use in their final assault on what remains of Western biblical Christianity.

The militants affiliated with the SPLC, CAIR and their allies in the liberal churches are more concerned about offending Muslims than protecting free speech.

They claim, with self-righteous indignation, to be against hatred and bigotry, but their outrage is clearly a one-way street. When have they ever showed the least bit of concern about voices in the public realm that offend Christian sensibilities?

They will stand up for anyone’s rights to free speech as long as they are slamming Israel [the other favorite target of Islam] or blaming Christianity for all the world’s evils, including Muslim terror. It is we Christians, with our “Islamophobia,” who drive the Muslims to kill, according to Islamic scholars who cite the Quranic principle of “fitnah.” Such bizarre Islamic thoughts have now been taken up by socialists the world over, including  United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres.

I can’t help but remember the “Piss Christ” exhibit presented some years ago by photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. I don’t recall any Marxists or socialists raising a stink about his right to mock Christianity in the most profane and blasphemous terms. In fact, the leftists celebrated Mapplethorp’s “art” [a photo of a crucifix emerged in a bottle of his own urine] and defended his “right” to have it publicly funded by your tax dollars!

But let the first negative word about Islam flow from a Christian’s mouth and the communists at SPLC and the Islamists at CAIR are swarming like vampire bats smelling blood.

The fact that so many of their cohorts happen to be members of left-leaning churches must make the ringleaders of intolerance at the SPLC and CAIR all the more ecstatic.

Most of the claims of anti-Muslim bigotry, taken by the media at face value as reported by SPLC and CAIR, do not hold up under close scrutiny. While I am not here to propose that anti-Muslim bigotry doesn’t exist, it seems the vast majority of cases involve critical speech or writings about the violent nature of Islam around the world, with very few cases of actual violence against Muslims.

Compare this with the very real and daily brutality against Christians across the globe, almost always in Muslim-majority nations. In Pakistan, for instance, Christians are relegated to third-class status, forced to toil in the brick kilns and other back-breaking hard-labor positions as indentured servants. They must carefully watch every word that comes out of their mouths when talking to their Muslim compatriots, for if they say something that causes a Muslim to take offense, they face the ever-present reality of violating Pakistan’s wretched Islamic blasphemy laws.

In Nigeria, little Christian girls are abducted and raped by Muslim thugs.

In Egypt, the Coptic Christians routinely face abduction, assassination, and firebombing of their churches by Muslim mobs.

And everyone has by now heard about the genocidal attempts of ISIS to eliminate Christian villages from their generational homelands in Iraq and Syria. Crucifixion, beheading, raping and burning were the favored methods of death and torture.

So we should not be surprised that the global persecution of Christians has come to America. The left in this country, in alliance with Muslim groups, has seen to it.  They will call evil good and good evil, they will employ every dirty trick available, because in their eyes the ends justify the means. They sense the hour has arrived, or is very close to arriving, when they can get away with not only smearing the reputations of Christians and brand them falsely as haters, but actually get them arrested for speaking ill of Islam [if you doubt this tragic outcome is on the near horizon, just look at Canada and Western Europe, where hate speech laws are used to arrest Christians].

The hotels in Minnesota and Wisconsin capitulated to special-interest pressure groups on the left because they feared those groups more than they feared any possibility of a boycott backlash from law-abiding Christian customers. That’s a business decision that is understandable, given that the left in America is far more unified and organized than the right.

Much of the corporate paranoia is a product of the Charlottesville, Virginia, debacle of last year, when police stood down and let a group of white nationalists clash with counter-protesters from Antifa.

The ease with which the corporate world capitulates to leftist demands has had a chilling effect on society. Instead of a free and open debate about a very real topic of concern – Islam and its claims to be a religion of peace versus its track record of violence and intolerance wherever its adherents happen to be in the majority – the issue gets buried deep within the unapproachable shadows of our national psyche.

Instead of freely debating, we sit in silence and pretend.

Have any major media outlets – CNN, Fox, the New York Times, or Washington Post — reported on last weekend’s canceled Christian conferences?

No, not one.

Imagine if we switched up the roles: What if it had been conservative Christians threatening violent protests against a Muslim conference highlighting the threat of intolerant Christianity?  Would the media let that story slip under their radar?

What if a Muslim-American had scheduled a conference on Sharia law being superior to U.S. law, and numerous Christians called the hotel venue and threatened to protest? Would the hotel cancel an event like that and tell the Muslim presenter his reservation was suddenly invalid? I suspect not. Which begs the question: What is it about offending Islam that makes everyone in our society, our business owners, politicians, and churches, so nervous?

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Leo Hohmann is a veteran journalist and author of the 2017 book “Stealth Invasion: Muslim Conquest through Immigration and Resettlement Jihad.” If you appreciate this type of original, fact-based and independent reporting, please consider a donation of any size to this website. We accept no advertising and are beholden to no one.