Robert Spencer
Jihad Watch
9/21/2011
More on this story. From MarketWatch:
NEW YORK, Sept. 21, 2011 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ — AFDI/SIOA co-founder and Executive Director Pamela Geller has won an important victory for free speech. Omar Tarazi, a lawyer linked to the Hamas front group the Council on American-Islamic Relations, has dismissed his ten-million-dollar libel lawsuit against Geller with prejudice: it cannot be re-filed.Geller explained: “This is a huge victory for the First Amendment, truth, and the anti-Sharia movement in this country, which is exposing an insidious cancer that brings progressives and Islamic supremacists together in common cause to attack anyone who criticizes Islamic supremacism with the threat of lawsuits, actual lawsuits, or even worse, violence.”
“The message,” she added, “is that we will not be silent. We will continue to fight the implementation of Sharia blasphemy laws restricting free speech under the guise of the fictional construct of a ‘phobia.'”
Tarazi, an Ohio-based lawyer, represented the parents of Rifqa Bary, the teenage girl who fled from her home in fear for her life in 2009, after converting from Islam to Christianity. He sued Geller for $10,000,000 after she criticized him in a series of blog posts at her award-winning website, AtlasShrugs.com, pointing out his ties to Hamas-linked CAIR and his efforts to harass and demoralize Rifqa Bary by, among other initiatives, denying her the Christmas cards that Geller had encouraged her readers to send to the girl.
Geller pointed out the larger implications of Tarazi’s lawsuit: “This lawsuit was filed as part of the Islamic supremacist lawfare campaign against critics of Sharia, jihad, Islam’s death penalty for apostates, and honor killings, and I refused to capitulate. At the end of the day, Tarazi blinked and folded. The years-long battle is over, and Islamic supremacism has suffered a stunning and well-deserved defeat.”…
The article continues at Jihad Watch.
