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Anti-Islam Ads Remixed in San Francisco and New York

By ROBERT MACKEY

As my colleague Benjamin Weiser reported last month, a federal judge in Manhattan ruled that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority had violated the First Amendment rights of a pro-Israel group by refusing to run an ad that refers to Arabs as “savage” on 318 city buses.

The ad campaign was devised by Pamela Geller, the crusading anti-Islam blogger who fought to block the construction of an Islamic cultural center and mosque near the site of the World Trade Center two summers ago. The full text of the ad, which refers to a statement by Ms. Geller's intellectual hero Ayn Rand, reads: “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man.” Then, between two Stars of David, the tag line appears: “Support Israel. Defeat Jihad.”

While the judge gave the New York City transit system 30 days to consider its options for appeal, the ads have already appeared on the sides of buses in San F rancisco, provoking anger from Muslims and supporters of the Palestinian cause.

As the local ABC affiliate in San Francisco reported, the city's Municipal Transportation Agency took the unusual step of denouncing the ads and running huge disclaimers on the sides of the buses to disavow what a spokesman called the “repulsive” message from Ms. Geller's group it was forced to accept.

Earlier this week, some of the San Francisco ads were edited by Ms. Geller's opponents to invert their message. An image posted on Facebook on Sunday by an Oakland blogger showed that text was added to the side of one bus so that the ad now reads: “In any war between the colonizer and the colonized, support the oppressed. Support the Palestinian right of return. Defeat racism.”

As Nora Barrows-Friedman reported on the pro-Palestinian Electronic Intifada on Saturday, another ad was changed by superimposing a hand stamping the words “hate speech” over the original text on the side of another bus.

Ms. Geller's American Freedom Defense Initiative has also succeeded in placing similarly themed ads in Metro-North stations in the New York suburbs. As an image of one of those ads posted on Instagram by a Sarah Lawrence College graduate student who blogs as @supertrampnyc shows, it reads: “19,250* deadly Islamic attacks since 9/11/01. *And counting. It's not Islamophobia, it's Islamorealism.”

Writing on her group's blog last week, Ms. Geller posted a reader's photograph showing that one of those ads, at the Hastings-on-Hudson train station, was torn down leaving only a tiny sliver of paper - on which someone had scrawled: “Countless acts of terrorism and violence have been committed by Christian extremists. Does this make all Christians terrorists?”

Although Ms. Geller has launched a number of similar initiatives in the past, she noted that a pro-Palestinian ad had been placed in Metro-North stations earlier in the summer. Liliana Segura, an editor at The Nation, posted an image of that ad on Twitter last month.

Ms. Segura's photograph shows, the ad from the Committee for Peace in Israel and Palestine illustrated “Palestinian Loss of Land” from 1946 to 2010 through a series of maps. The text next to the illustration said: “4.7 Million Palestinians Are Classified by the U.N. as Refugees.”

After that ad appeared in stations, a local CBS news reporter spoke to the man who paid it and to the editor of a Jewish newspaper in New York, The Algemei ner. The newspaper editor, Dovid Efune told CBS that the ad was anti-Semitic because “it paints Jews as aggressors, as imperialists - people that are stealing or taking land from others.”

A CBS news video report on a pro-Palestinian ad in a suburban New York train station in July.

While the language in the pro-Palestinian ad refrained from attacking any group, the original Ayn Rand statement Ms. Geller adapted her ad copy from is even more inflammatory, as Adam Serwer explained this week in a post on the Mother Jones Web site. During a lecture in 1974, Ms. Rand said:

The Arabs are one of the least developed cultures. They are typically nomads. Their culture is primitive, and they resent Israel because it's the sole beachhead of modern science and civilization on their continent. When you have civilized men fighting savages, you support the civilized men, no matter who they are. Israel is a mixed economy inclined toward socialism. But when it comes to the power of the mind-the development of industry in that wasted desert continent-versus savages who don't want to use their minds, then if one cares about the future of civilization, don't wait for the government to do something. Give whatever you can. This is the first time I've contributed to a public cause: helping Israel in an emergency.