Children’s rights champion and free speech attorney disinvited to speak by fellow Jews in UK

Just received word from attorney and activist Brooke Goldstein (pictured above) that she was banned from speaking by a Jewish society at Leeds University in England.

Goldstein is director of the Lawfare Project, a New York-based non-profit that supports and defends journalists and others who cover radical Islam and terrorism. She also runs the Children’s Rights Institute, a non-profit that raises awareness about the abuse of Muslim children, including their use as human shields and their indoctrination to become suicide bombers. A champion of free speech, Goldstein advised Dutch politician Geert Wilders following his prosecution for “inciting hatred against Muslims” due to his criticism of Islam and stance on Muslim immigration to the Netherlands (he has since been acquitted of wrongdoing).

She expressed surprise at having been blocked from speaking at Leeds University, after speaking at nine venues in the UK, including Parliament. She is dismayed in particular at having been, she says, unfairly characterized as a “hate speaker” by the “Jewish society” at Leeds.

“This is a symptom of a much larger problem,” Goldstein told me, “the silencing of free speech about issues of national security because of accusations of ‘Islamophobia.'”

The Jewish group, known as Jsoc, contends in a statement published on its web site that it canceled Ms. Goldstein’s appearance due to a link on her blog to a web site called ‘The Gates of Vienna’ as well as due to advertisements for the film “The Third Jihad” on her website.

The authors of the statement wrote, “We feel that neither of these are in line with the values we wish to associate with in Jsoc and find their content despicable and abhorrent … We are not happy to hold Ms. Goldstein on our campus. This is not because we are ‘spineless’ or ‘cowardly’ but because we have principals and morals and are proud to stand up for our beliefs and what is right for our community.”

They did not sign their names to their “statement.”

More to come.

This entry was written by Heather Robinson and posted on March 18, 2012 at 12:53 am and filed under Blog. permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Keywords: childrens-rights, free-speech, human-rights. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL. */?>