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Another Attack on Free Speech
Apparently, things have been too quiet for Rep. Ilhan Omar. And we’ve been free of Islamist attacks for a long time. So, it’s time to stir things up on behalf of Muslims. Omar has decided to stand up for Muslims by creating a position in the Department of State (without consulting the department) to protect beleaguered Muslims everywhere. She submitted a bill that passed in the House to establish the Office to Monitor and Combat Islamophobia. According to CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, there have been 500 documented complaints of “anti-Muslim hate and bias” this past year in the U.S. Given that CAIR is an outgrowth of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, I tend to be skeptical of this data. The bill passed in the House on a party-line vote on Dec. 14.
So why do I care? This bill isn’t intended to protect Muslims worldwide from acts of violence. Instead, I believe Omar plans to further destroy our already debilitated commitment to freedom of speech.
The incentive for this bill was probably a response to the “rude and ill-advised” reference to the “jihad squad” made by Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado. But the implications of this bill are much more far-reaching. Essentially, the bill targets those people who use “hate speech”; these statements are elevated into the category of “hate crimes”:
I read Bari Weiss’s new book, 
[Updated upon considering some comments. Deletions noted by strike-through; italics annotate additions.]
“Now, it isn’t inherently anti-Semitic to be critical of Israeli political leadership or policies. The Democratic Party antagonism toward the Jewish state has been well-established over the past decade. But [Ilhan] Omar used a well-worn anti-Semitic trope about the preternatural ability of a nefarious Jewish cabal to deceive the world.
