Religious Extremist’s of all Stripes (Our Neighbors)

The Rest of the Story. What KXYL’s Connie failed to mention ( expand your sources to more
than WND and get the rest of the story ! ) :

GLOBAL JIHAD
Islamists threaten U.S. Christian worker
Website lists address, photo, prayer for delivery of 'fatty neck'
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Posted: February 8, 2005
1:00 a.m. Eastern
© 2005 WorldNetDaily.com

A Christian aid worker who writes for an evangelical news service apparently has been targeted for death by contributors to an Islamist website.

Posting on the Houston-based site Al Ansar, the Islamists blamed Jeremy Reynalds, director of Joy Junction in New Mexico, for the demise of another website, mawsuat.com, and asked if anyone else had more information on him, according to Internet Haganah.

Internet Haganah describes itself as a "global open-source intelligence network dedicated to confronting Internet use by Islamist terrorist organizations, their supporters, enablers and apologists."

In the subsequent discussion thread on Al Ansar, the Islamists posted Reynalds' home address so he would be "visited" and then a photograph with the wish that his ribs would be broken.

Another offered prayers to Allah that Reynalds' "fatty neck" would be delivered to them, a reference to Islamists' common method of decapitation.

"The thread closes with a heartfelt 'amen,'" Internet Haganah said.

Reynalds' emergency homeless shelter is the largest in New Mexico. He also is a freelance writer who has covered topics related to Islam and terrorism.

He wrote about the demise of the website mawsuat.com in a January article.

When informed by Internet Haganah of the threat, Reynalds said said he has no intention of backing down.

"He is more determined than ever to help drive Internet terrorism right where it belongs – into the pit of hell!" Internet Haganah said.

Meanwhile, relatives of Hossam Armanious, an immigrant from Egypt slain Jan. 14 with his wife and two daughters, suspect Islamic radicals who issued death threats via an Internet chat service are responsible.

The New York Sun reported last week that Armanious was just one of a number of Christians systematically tracked by a radical Islamic website because they debate Muslims on the popular Internet chat service PalTalk.com.

Barsomyat.com features photographs and information about Christians who actively debate on PalTalk, including a group of photographs of a Syrian Christian, "Joseph," who now lives in Canada. One comment warns: "Know, oh Christian, that you are not far from us and you are under our watchful eyes!"

The Islamic website's banner displays lamb with its throat being slit and a crucifix crossed out by a violent red "X." The main heading, in Arabic, says "Christians: Revealing the Truth Behind Our Belief."

The FBI reportedly is investigating Barsomyat.com

Related story:
Christians stalked on Islamic website
source: http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=42757
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and now the Christian Terrorists (Insurgents ?) Note same tactics !

'Right to Life', but Not for the Living
Copyright © 1998, 2003 by David E. Ross

Once again, the "Right to Life" movement demonstrates its lack of interest in life for the living. Their agenda ends at birth. Dr. Barnett Slepian was murdered this weekend because he performs abortions. Since Dr. David Gunn was shot in 1993, a total of three doctors and four other individuals associated with abortion clinics have been murdered by gunshots or bombs. What happened to their rights to life?

*** Begin Right Sidebar ***No, I will not publish the link to the "Christian Gallery" Web site. I will not waste my time trying to locate it. And if I already had the URL, I would not extend further publicity to their terrorist agenda by posting it. *** End Right Sidebar ***Immediately after the news about Dr. Slepian broke, several "Right to Life" leaders fell over themselves denouncing the murders. Hypocrites! Their rantings about "baby killers" and "murderers" encourage violence against those doctors and other health-care workers who help women end their pregnancies. This is no different from how the homophobic hatred spewed by such "moral" leaders as Senator Lott, James Dobson, and the Southern Baptist Convention fomented the murder of Matthew Shepard. No, the "Right to Life" leadership might not have supplied the rifle or pulled the trigger in the death of Dr. Slepian; but when you preach hatred, you reap the rewards of hatred, which are generally violent. In any case, the denunciations of the actual murders sound false when you consider the lack of any denunciation of the "Christian Gallery" Web site and its list of doctors targeted for violence or death.

(Alert: Religious dogma ahead!)

Claiming to protect human lives by stopping abortion, the "Right to Life" movement has it backwards. Health-care workers who help women end their pregnancies are humans, but the fetuses about which the "Right to Life" movement cares so much are merely potentially human. Until it receives a soul with its first breath of air, a fetus is incomplete and cannot be human. The doctors who perform abortions — breathing and thinking — have souls and thus higher priority for their rights to life than any fetus. Yes, I know this is only the belief of my own religion; but the idea that a mass of undifferentiated cells shortly after conception has a soul and is a truly human life is also a narrow belief of certain religions that is not universally shared with all religions. How dare the "Right to Life" movement insist that I follow their religion and not my own!

25 October 1998
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Dr. Slepian believed in life. As an obstetrician, he delivered many healthy babies to women who wanted to be mothers. He claimed that he performed abortions because he wanted to protect the lives of women who would otherwise risk death at the hands of "back-alley butchers". By giving those women safe, competent abortions, he assured them that they would survive to have children later. He did indeed choose life.

In the meantime, Dr. Slepian's murderer is a coward, who shot his victim in the back.

26 October 1998
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James Kopp was sentenced in May of this year to 25 years to life in prison for murdering Dr. Slepian. He was tried after being extradited from France, which delayed extradition until receiving official assurance from the U.S. that Kopp would not face capital punishment.

Loretta Marra and Dennis Malvasi, who hid Kopp from arrest, were freed from jail after being held more than two years waiting for trial on federal charges of conspiracy to harbor a known fugitive. The two pleaded guilty and were sentenced to time served.

7 November 2003

source: http://www.rossde.com/editorials/edtl_abtn_dr_killed.html
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Issue#73:
The Limits of Free Speech

Spring 1999

February 11, 1999
Published in intellectualcapital.com

Radical protest groups that advocate or condone violence inevitably test the limits of free speech. The First Amendment rights of all Americans have been defined, in part, by Supreme Court cases protecting the rights of Klan members, Communists, and other malcontents. Anti-abortion activists who applaud or excuse violence against abortion providers appeal to our constitutional tradition of tolerance for dissident speech, no matter how ugly or outre. And, in general, when they rally outside abortion clinics screaming epithets at patients and clinicians, they are indeed exercising their First Amendment rights (so long as they do not prevent people from entering the buildings.) But the constitutional right to outrage, deeply offend, or verbally abuse your opponents does not include a right to threaten them. When does intimidating, angry speech constitute an unprotected threat of harm? That was the hard question recently answered by a jury in Portland, Oregon when it leveled a $100 million damage award against anti-abortion activists on the violent fringe of their movement.

Planned Parenthood v. American Coalition of Life Activists is a civil action brought by Planned Parenthood, the Portland Feminist Women's Health Center, and five individual doctors against fourteen individuals and two anti-abortion groups, including the American Coalition of Life Activists. The ACLA is a splinter group that condones violence against abortion providers. The suit was brought under the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Law ( RICO) and the federal Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (the FACE Act.)

Defendants were charged with unlawfully threatening abortion doctors, by featuring them on wanted posters and by contributing to a controversial web site, "The Nuremberg Files." It posted pictures of abortion doctors (labeled "baby butchers") and accused them of crimes against humanity, listing their names, addresses, license plate numbers, and their spouses and children's names, when available. Three doctors on the list have been killed: their names were crossed out. The names of those wounded were listed in gray.

The RICO charge against defendants is lamentable. RICO was aimed at organized crime's infiltration of legitimate businesses and should not be used against political groups. But the FACE charge deserved to be heard by a jury. The Face Act expressly prohibits using "threat of force" to "intimidate" or "interfere" with abortion providers or patients. Planned Parenthood v. ACLA thus raised two questions: how should this prohibition on threats or intimidation be construed consistent with the First Amendment? Did the wanted posters and Web site qualify as threats?

Federal courts have held that, in principle, threatening someone with death or serious injury is not protected speech. Like many simple legal principles, however, this one is difficult to apply, in fact. In 1969, in Watts v. United States, the Supreme Court upheld a federal law prohibiting the issuance of threats against the President. But the Court stressed that "true" threats do not include political hyperbole - without exactly explaining how to distinguish the two. (Hyperbole, perhaps, is like obscenity: judges supposedly know it when they see it.)

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, however, has defined "true threats." In 1996, in Lovell v. Poway Unified School District, it held that threatening speech is unprotected when a "reasonable person" would forsee the speech would be perceived as a "serious expression of intent to harm or assault." In making this judgment, the Court added, fact finders should consider the context of the speech, "including the surrounding events and the reaction of the listeners." (Lovell upheld the suspension of a high school student who, in a moment of pique, allegedly threatened to shoot her guidance counsellor.)

The rule enunciated in Lovell was applied by federal District Court Judge Robert E. Jones in the Nuremberg Files case. Judge Jones instructed jurors that the wanted posters and Web Site were actionable threats if anti-abortion activists should have known that they would be considered truly threatening, given the circumstances (a history of violence against abortion providers.) As the judge explained to the jury, this is an "objective standard" "that of a reasonable person." Jurors were not required to make any findings regarding the actual subjective intent of defendants. The question before them was under the circumstances, "would a reasonable person know that their statements would be threatening," not "did these particular defendants intend to issue threats?"

Whether or not this objective rule satisfies the First Amendment is likely to be an issue on appeal. A rule requiring jurors to consider a defendant's actual state of mind is more protective of speech, appropriately: people should not be held liable for threats they did not actually intend to make. It seems clear, however, that in this case, the defendants would have been found liable under a higher standard. Indeed, the jury found malice or ill intent on their part when it awarded punative damages.

First Amendment advocates are divided over the justice of this verdict. The wanted posters and the Nuremberg Files web site straddle the line between protected political rhetoric and threats to murder. No explicit threats were issued, but, considering the context and a recent history of violence, including the murders of three doctors who had been the subject of wanted posters, the implicit threats were clear. In fact, the FBI offered doctors targeted by the Nuremberg Files round the clock protection and advised them to wear bulletproof vests. One defendant testified that "If I was an abortionist, I would be afraid."

There was no proof of a direct, causal link between the speech and violence against abortion providers; but incitement to violence was not exactly at issue in this case. Whether or not defendants' speech incited violence, it greatly threatened targeted abortion providers. The verdict in this case suggests, in part, that people have a right not to be terrorized, (especially when engaged in constitutionally protected activity), and that the right not to be terrorized may sometimes trump the right to speak. That is a controversial idea but not exactly a novel one: it is reflected in efforts to prohibit stalking. The Nuremberg Files web site and wanted posters might, in fact, be analogized to stalking, because they explicitly targeted individual doctors.

The identification and targeting of individuals also put privacy rights at stake in this case. It is another reminder of the threats to privacy posed by the Internet. When, if ever, should your right to privacy trump my right to disseminate personal information about you on the Net?

Should the Nuremberg Files be shut down? The question is moot. Judge Jones has no power to order the site off the web, since, its operator, Neil Horsely, is not a defendant in this case. But two days after the verdict in Planned Parenthood v. ACLA, Horsely's ISP "inactivated" his account, claiming that he had violated the company's "Appropriate Use Policy." Horsely reported that he was seeking a "bolder and more principled ISP" to host his site. It's worth noting that the Nuremberg Files was only one part of a Christian web site (christiangallery.com), which (as far as I could tell), consisted largely of protected speech.

Should the defendants be shut up? Of course not, although they may be edited. Defendants must retain their right to condemn "baby butchers," in the strongest language they can muster. But that may only include a right to condemn them in general, without targeting individuals and demanding they be brought to justice. In this case, the difference between general and particular attacks on abortion providers may be the difference between protected speech and vigilantiism.

© Wendy Kaminer
Wendy Kaminer is a public policy fellow at Radcliffe College and president of the National Coalition Against Censorship.

source: http://www.ncac.org/cen_news/cn73kaminer.html
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Anti-Abortion Web Site Shut Down in Civil Suit
26-Feb-1999 | Jonathan Wallace, Editor of The Ethical Spectacle

The defendants in the 'Nuremberg Files' case were recently fined US$107 million by a US court and their website was later removed by the Internet Service Provider 'Mindspring'. The 'Nuremberg Files' was an anti-abortion site.

The controversy has re-opened with the mirroring of the site by a Dutch free speech advocate. Whilst opposed to any restrictions on abortion rights, Internet Freedom is completely opposed to the site's closure. To help clarify why, we are redistributing an article by Jonathan Wallace, free speech advocate and publisher of The Ethical Spectacle (http://www.spectacle.org). The article originally appeared as a SLAC bulletin.

In an Oregon case, a jury returned a verdict for substantial damages against the publisher of the Nuremberg Files website, which published lists of abortion doctors with their home addresses. When a physician on the list was murdered, a line was placed through the name; when a doctor was wounded, the name was listed in gray. Though the anti-abortion focus of the site was clear, nothing on the site specifically advocated violence against the doctors.

After the verdict, the ISP hosting the site closed it down, claiming a terms of service violation.

The verdict, which will likely be reversed on First Amendment grounds if appealed, acutely illustrates the way society blurs the distinction between morality and legality. Not everything which we find shockingly immoral is, or should be, illegal. In the case of a decision assigning liability for pure speech---for that is all a web page is---more consideration should have been given to the goals of the first amendment, and the precedents already established in free speech law.

Decades of Supreme Court decisions, long preceding the Internet, have established that even the explicit advocacy of violence is protected except in the small subset of cases in which the speech is capable of inspiring immediate action against a victim. A book, pamphlet or web page calling for the murder of a group of people, repulsive as it is, is not illegal under this rule. Standing on the proposed victim's doorstep, addressing an angry armed mob, would be.

One Supreme Court precedent involved a speech given at an isolated farm to a racist group. The advocacy of violence was not aimed at specific individuals, but at members of a race who were not present. In another case, a dissident said that if he were drafted, the first person he would point his rifle at would be President Johnson. The Court held that this statement was too conditional to constitute an immediate threat of action.

The lawsuit was brought under a 1994 law, the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act. The name of the law itself indicates that it was brought to address actions taken on the front steps of the targeted location, not on a web page.

The act creates a criminal penalty and a civil remedy against "whoever.....by threat of force.....intimidates or interferes with, or attempts to interfere with" any user or provider of reproductive health services. Congress did not have the authority, in passing this act, to expand the limits of the Supreme Court definition of a threat. It could only target a particular type of threat meeting the Supreme Court criteria. The Nuremberg Files web site did not meet the Supreme Court standard, and the judge should never have permitted the case to be submitted to a jury.

Thus, the Nuremberg Files web site could have legally called for the murder of abortion doctors. Unlike speech on a doctor's doorstep intended to inflame an armed mob, it is very unlikely that a court will find that speech on the web is sufficiently immediate to constitute an illegal advocacy of violence under the Supreme Court rule. The jury's verdict was based on shock and rage at the defendant's ideas. But it is very dangerous to jump from the reaction that an idea is shocking to the presumption that it is illegal or should give rise to civil liability.

An interesting question is whether the behavior of the Nuremberg Files webmaster would be illegal even if performed on a doctor's doorstep. Holding up a piece of paper with the proposed victim's name and drawing a line through it might not constitute the kind of immediate inflammatory speech which could be prosecuted even in that context---not in the same way as shouting "Kill him now!" to an angry mob.

Once you clear away the fog of rage, it is hard to find the illegal activity in the morally horrifying Nuremberg Files page. The site reprinted publicly available information. In order to turn this activity into a crime, we would need privacy laws which don't currently exist, providing civil liability for revealing the identity or address of a person who doesn't want this information known. Even then, there would be a strong free speech issue concerning the circumstances under which the newsworthiness of a person's identity overrides his desire for privacy.

Once we acknowledge that the first amendment protects the communication of a person's name and address, we are forced to look for nuances to make the behavior which shocks us illegal. Suppose I print the names and addresses of the congress people who voted to impeach the president on a website where other language leads you to infer that I want you to write and thank them. You print the same information on a website where certain prose leads the reader to infer you are very angry at them. How much nuance in your writing does it require for a jury to find that you are advocating violence against the congressfolk? Once juries or courts get involved looking for nuances in pure speech, we are all at risk.

When we make speech like the Nuremberg Files site illegal, the temptation is then to keep drawing the circle further out. At some point it becomes illegal to make statements like "the world would be better off if no doctors performed abortion" or to write a novel involving the killing of abortion doctors. Then we have to get involved in very fine distinctions: is the novel by someone well-known in the mainstream, like John Grisham, or by a fringe figure who belongs to an anti-abortion group? For the purposes of the first amendment, there is no distinction, and cannot be any, between A Time to Kill and The Turner Diaries. Of course, it is frequently debatable whether a depiction advocates the acts of violence it describes-- shades of the centuries old debate as to whether The Merchant of Venice is an anti-semitic work (I believe it is, by the way). The next step is to take similar or practically identical speech and decide whether it is acceptable based on the identity of the speaker. In the sixties, Roy Rogers appeared on television wearing an American flag shirt, but Abbie Hoffman was blacked out when he tried to do the same.

Abortion is legal and constitutionally protected in the US. The key to protecting the right to abortion is to guard the people who deliver the service and prosecute the people who physically attempt to harm them. This does not and should not extend to silencing those who oppose abortion, no matter how virulent their speech.

source: http://www.netfreedom.org/news.asp?item=58