Have things gotten so bad in the United States that criticism of the Administration makes one a "security threat?"
On Friday, Traditional Values Coalition President Andrea Lafferty sent a letter to the State Department asking for transcripts and written records of the individual who identified her as a “security threat” to Secretary Hillary Clinton during a closed door meeting earlier in the week.
“I want to know precisely who identified me as a so-called security threat,” said Lafferty. “When concerns over the tactics of “peer pressure and shaming” were precisely why Christian groups and others were so alarmed about this closed door three day conference, why would the State Department use those precise tactics to forcibly detain me?”
While monitoring a conference on the implementation of United Nations resolution 16/18 - a resolution many say is an attempt to criminalize criticism of Islam - Lafferty was targeted and detained by Clinton’s security personnel.
The incident took place on Wednesday, Dec 14, according to the TVC.
“For weeks we have been asking whether the true aims of the Organization for Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and U.N. Resolution 16/18 would be used to apply “old fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming” to chill and coerce those critical of the Islamist agenda,” said Lafferty.
“Hillary Clinton was as good as her word,” said Lafferty.
Lafferty was circled by several members of Secretary Clinton’s staff before being approached by a member of the security detail, demanding Lafferty follow him. When asked why she was being removed from the reception hall, the security detail announced that a phone call had identified Lafferty as a “security threat” to Secretary Clinton.
Lafferty adds she was "shocked and angry at the pressure and shameful intimidation tactics our State Department put on, even to the point of identifying me as a threat to Hillary Clinton.”
According to the TVC, while at a June 2011 conference in Istanbul, Turkey, Clinton remarked "how certain comments from those concerned about Islamic fanaticism have been deemed as “incendiary” and looked to sympathize with efforts that would criminalize certain speech that is 'an incitement to imminent violence.'"
A post at Assistnews.net explains:
Presumably this resolution would permit a critic to assert that "fundamentalist Islam is inherently violent", while making it unacceptable for an employer or security officer to suggest than an Islamic fundamentalist should not be employed at this school or that airport, or that they should be watched or investigated or searched -- for that would be negative profiling based on religion.
Meanwhile, though the language of "defamation" has been eradicated, a critical / offensive comment such as "fundamentalist Islam is inherently violent", would doubtless be viewed as incitement. In fact anything that could have been deemed "defamation" under Resolution 2005/3 will doubtless be deemed incitement under Resolution 16/18.
This shift in focus from "defamation" to "incitement" -- something the OIC has been pursuing since April 2009 -- is hugely significant as the ICCPR specifically mandates that incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence be prohibited by law (ICCPR Article 20.2).
“This language -- “incitement to imminent violence” -- has been used time and time again to close events here in the United States concerning the impact of Islamic shariah law, detain law-abiding Christians elsewhere, and now even target and detain as security threats people from State Department events,” Lafferty said.
“The very restriction on free speech the UN Resolution was pushing is exactly what they used against me,” Lafferty added.
“I had warned previously how members of the U.S. State Department and Hillary Clinton have pointedly remarked that part of the implementation of U.N. Resolution 16/18 will be an effort to utilize “techniques of peer pressure and shaming” to silence critics of Islamic shariah,” she explained.
“Little did I realize how quickly Clinton and her Islamist friends were set to make examples out of law-abiding Americans.”
“Dissent and free speech critical of Islam only pose a threat to those who fear the free exchange of ideas critical to representative government -- and “threatening” to those who see dissent as something that needs to be punished or crushed,” she wrote in her letter.
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