Bizarre, Constitutional Law, Criminal law, Free Speech, Media, Society

Columnist Arrested In New York While Trying To Spray Paint Over Anti-Muslim Poster

The video below has attracted considerable interest in the latest confrontation over an anti-Muslim ad campaign in the New York subway system. Many people have objected to the campaign by the American Freedom Defense Initiative which has put up signs reading “In any war between civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad.” However, columnist Mona Eltahawy who appears regularly on CNN and MSNBC took that opposition to a new level in this confrontation with a woman who tried to stop her from spray painting over one of the signs — an act that led to Eltahawy’s arrest. The incident involved a sharp difference of opinion on what constitutes protected freedom of speech.

The signs themselves led a court to reject a challenge to the campaign and order that the signs be posted as an exercise of free speech. I agree with that decision. Like most free speech advocates, I prefer to have such controversial views posted than to have the government engage in content-based regulation of speech.

That leads us to the recent confrontation. In the video below, Eltahawy insists that she is doing nothing but exercising her free speech rights in a non-violent protest. Pamela Hall challenges her with a camera and asks “Mona, do you think you have the right to do this?” Eltahawy responds by saying “I do actually. I think this is freedom of expression, just as this is freedom of expression.”

I am afraid that I have to disagree. Destroying a sign is an effort to keep others from speaking. It is the very antithesis of free speech. Throughout the ages, governments and majoritarian groups have torn down the signs and prevented the expression of unpopular groups or individuals. Eltahawy’s position is akin to saying censorship is the triumph of free speech in that it expresses an opposing view. If this were the case, any act of harassment and intimidation would be an act of free speech. It would make forced silence the ultimate triumph of free speech.

Notably, before the incident, Eltahawy reportedly tweeted to her fans: “Meetings done; pink spray paint time. #ProudSavage.”

None of this has anything to do with the merits of the campaign. The content of the speech does not matter. This is not a means used for free expression; it is the denial of free expression. For a prior column, click here. Ironically, her conduct has distracted the public debate over the content of the campaign, which was receiving considerable criticism. She has now given the sponsors the status of victim and compelled many to rally around the free speech rights of those sponsors.

Her lawyer is pushing the free speech angle but that will have little traction in an actual court of law. As a journalist, Eltahawy’s actions are doubly wrong and frankly reprehensible. The cure to statement view as “bad speech” is more speech — not trying to silence your opponent. Eltahawy was trying to keep others from reading the message as her form of free speech expression. That rather twisted view of free speech would leave only speech that is allowed by the majority. Indeed, it would deny speech opposed by any minority with each group tearing down or covering up message deemed wrong or offensive. It is the type of inverse logic denounced by Adlai Stevenson: “A hypocrite is the kind of politician who would cut down a redwood tree, then mount the stump and make a speech for conservation.” Free speech cannot be the basis for preventing the speech of others.

79 thoughts on “Columnist Arrested In New York While Trying To Spray Paint Over Anti-Muslim Poster”

  1. Woosty, I put my reading glasses on. lol Is she a mad woman or someone who is fighting for her cause or both? She was sexually assaulted by the Egyptian police. Hope she fare better with the NYPD.

  4. The biggest problem I find in the Muslim world is the absence of their push for similar means to combat, the case in point the poster that they found offensive. They should paste another poster next to the one they feel offended about to show their own view point even if it depicts against the Jewish attitude towards the Palestinians and their apartheid way to treat non-Jews living in Israel. Lots of points can be made which would make them legitimately exercising their free speech.

    But sadly, rather than speaking out against what they disagree with, their psyche is to get enraged about things and find means to destroy. The are the prisoners of their self cultivated repression and suppression, thanks to the Wahhabi

    Mullahs and glittering Mosques banked by Saudi Arabia all around the world, especially in the US and in our prison system. This is the reason that the highest rate of conversion to Islam comes from there.

    One more question should be asked to them is, why have they not been protesting outside the Syrian Embassies around the world for the butchery taking place against their own people in Syria rather than becoming Pavlovian dogs and protesting against a silly trailer all around the world?

    What is the point and what is their goal in doing that.

    Why are they silent about the atrocities being committed to their fellow Muslims in Syria, Bahrain and other countries?

    The only answer I can find is that their hatred is solely directed towards anything and anyone who is a non-Muslim and dares to express his/her views against them. This is not the way to cultivate any freedom within, but to the contrary. It makes them live in their spiked cocoons which only hurt themselves. No one else. They are the prisoners of their self fabricated destiny.

    We can only hope that their struggles are directed among themselves for their own freedom in the respective countries who are going through the Arab Spring, not to the outsiders.

    If not, then this spring will wither and merge into the landscape of the Sahara desert.

  6. “Arresting the columnist, one could argue on the other hand, is a blatant chilling of political speech rights, considering how millions upon millions of graffiti artists run almost no risk of arrest.”

    One could argue that, but one would be wrong. She seems to me to be a publicity whore and got just what she wanted.

    I would take her more seriously and respect her more if she styled her action as civil disobedience and accepted the consequences of her illegal actions. But saying that she has a free speech right to spray paint a sign shows total and willful ignorance of or disrespect for the First Amendment. Either way, that makes her justification for her actions reprehensible.

  10. Her illegal action may actually pay off for her cause. I think her beliefs would have been better served by calling out the war mongers that put up the sign.

  11. Blouise, She is a liberal female muslim columnist who has mad a name for herself. I will bet she added more twitter followers with this. She is very smart and she is filling a void.

  12. Ms. Eltahawy gained her citizenship in 2011. She has free speech slightly confused with the rights of the American advertising industry and profits.

    Advertising space belongs to the guy who placed the highest bid, not to everybody who has an opinion to express.

    If you want to play, you gotta pay. Free speech went under the rails a long time ago. If you want to exercise your right to free speech; pony up the cash … or, of course, you can get a lot of free advertising for free speech by getting arrested.

    Hmmm ….

  15. I woke up one morning in DC in 1991 and hurried out to a doctor’s appointment down on the GWU campus. I saw a swastika spray painted on the side of a US Mail box. I thought, “wow, some idiot.” Then I saw another, on the side of a newspaper dispenser box — and another — and another and another and before I got to the doctor’s office I had counted up 31 swastikas. Then there was a fuss in the newspaper about someone who painted up the whole campus and a 7-block radius with swastikas.

    Strangely, some fool attending GWU Law School (I have now forgotten the fool’s name but I’m sure he graduated and became a lawyer and is practicing somewhere for the big bucks) wrote an article defending the swastika-painter’s right to do that based on — you guessed it — the First Amendment.

    My response was:

    1. Exercise your damn first amendment rights on your OWN property; and
    2. IS THIS DAMN FOOL GONNA BE A LAWYER?

    The billboard was not the journalist’s property — she was wrong.

  16. Hmmmmm….

    The hate group who put up this sign has thousands of copies of it everywhere.

    This reporter defaced one. And the argument is that she is “Destroying a sign is an effort to keep others from speaking”. Seems to me that the American Freedom Defense Initiative already got their speech well heard.

    Arresting the columnist, one could argue on the other hand, is a blatant chilling of political speech rights, considering how millions upon millions of graffiti artists run almost no risk of arrest.

    Should there be no calculus of the relative speech rights being abrogated here? Surely the American Freedom Defense Initiative would need to have a high percentage of its signs destroyed before one could argue that their free speech rights had been significantly harmed?

  17. The journalist is clueless as to what free speech means and her reaction is, in a trivial way, exactly that of the mob that attacked the embassy. I agree with Justice Holmes.

  19. I can’t stand that so many people are calling it an “anti-muslim” poster when it is only anti-jihadist. Are all muslims jihadists? I would tend not to think so.
    Has common sense flown out the window, or are we just being overrun by the religious nuts and/or the sensationalists?

  20. The “journalist” decided to attempt to silence the speech with which she disagreed. That was and is wrong. She had a number of choices that did not include vandalism. For example she could have stood by the offending ad with a sign that countered its sentiments. She could have purchased another ad to be out up in the subway. She decided however to vandalize the ad. If an anti Semite vandalizes a synagogue it is agreed that the vandalism is a criminal act regardless of the fact that the vandal might argue that his vandalism was only an expression of his political beliefs, an act of free speech. If a mosque is vandalized by an anti Muslim gang we would all agree that a free speech defense should not fly. The antidote to offensive speech or speech with which we disagree is more speech not vandalism.

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