Newsmax: Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer Legally Challenge British Ban

from Atlas

Newsmax: Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer Legally Challenge British Ban

http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2013/07/newsmax-activist-pamela-geller-i-wont-be-kept-out-of-uk.html

I was on the Steve Malzberg show yesterday discussing the British ban on free speech. Newsmax wrote it up and they were good enough to upload the show to youtube.  Contribute to the fight for free speech.

Activist Pamela Geller : I Won ' t Be Kept Out of UK Bill Hoffman, Newsmax, July 1, 2013
Pamela Geller, co-founder of Stop Islamization of America, is hiring a high-powered legal team to fight for the right to enter the United Kingdom after being banned by the British government last week.

"I will be taking action against the UK government. Full steam ahead," Geller, an anti-Islamist activist, told "The Steve Malzberg Show" on Newsmax TV.

"It's about whether we still have freedom of speech or whether criticism of Islam and jihad is now against the law in the UK. It seems that you can speak about jihad, but only if you're in support of it."
Geller and Robert Spencer, both conservative bloggers, had been set to speak at a weekend rally of the right-wing English Defence League in London's Woolwich suburb, where a British soldier was hacked to death by two Muslim extremists.

But last Wednesday, they were notified by British Home Secretary Theresa May that they would not be admitted because their presence would “not be conducive to the public good.”

"Mind you, I have never been arrested, I've never committed a crime, I have never been to jail," said Geller, who is also editor and publisher of Atlas Shrugs.com and executive director of the American Freedom Defense Initiative.

"I submit that free speech is indeed conducive to the public good. And you know what's really crazy? The U.K. had just allowed in a vicious jihad preacher … who has advocated due hatred and wife-beating.

"So he's allowed in, but me, a free-speech activist, a human rights activist dedicated to freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and individual rights, is banned."

Geller said a petition drive to protest the ban has been launched at britishfan.com, as well as a legal fund at thebritishlegalfund.com.

"[It] was started by a freedom-loving group in the U.K. a couple of days ago … Sign the petition because this is outrageous," she said.

"I'm not taking this laying down. I'm going to the wall on this one."

Spencer, who runs the Jihad Watch web site, has said the British decision amounts to a ban on those who “oppose jihad violence and Islamic supremacism.”

But a government spokesman, quoted by the BBC, defended the ban, stating: “We condemn all those whose behaviors and views run counter to our shared values and will not stand for extremism in any form.”