'Killing Jews' Parody Ads Will Grace NYC Subways MANHATTAN (CN) - There is no public-safety threat in an advertising campaign on New York City subways and buses that tells commuters: "Killing Jews is worship that draws us closer to Allah," a federal judge ruled Tuesday. 
 
 Paid for by the American Defense Freedom Initiative (AFDI), the ad shows a picture of a man draped in a Palestinian keffiyeh next to a quotation attributed to "Hamas MTV." 
 
 Viacom does not have a channel in the Gaza Strip devoted to Hamas propaganda. 
 
 In the advertisement, the "Hamas MTV" citation refers to Palestinian Media Watch's translation of a hateful music video that militants broadcast on the public airwaves of the Gaza Strip. 
 
 AFDI quoted this inflammatory language to parody the "My Jihad" ad campaign by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), an initiative aimed to reclaim a tenet of the Muslim faith from violent extremists and bigotry against their creed. 
 
 Sending up that campaign, the "Killing Jews" ad ends: "That's his jihad. What's yours?" 
 
 Both AFDI and CAIR have courted controversy for years over advocacy that their critics say crosses the line to hatred. 
 
 The Department of Justice under former President George W. Bush branded CAIR "unindicted co-conspirators" in a case against the Holy Land Foundation accusing the groups of support for Hamas. 
 
 Calling this designation a product of the post-Sept. 11 climate of fear, CAIR has long complained that the "unindicted co-conspirator" accusation offered no chance to clear its name at a trial. The group also has struggled to live down the taint of an expression of sympathy for Hamas that an executive has since repudiated. 
 
 For its part, AFDI's vitriolic ad campaigns across the United States have led to its labeling as a hate group. The Southern Poverty Law Center called its leader Pamela Geller "the anti-Muslim movement's most flamboyant figurehead," and the Anti-Defamation League denounced her lawyer David Yerushalmi for his "record of anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant and anti-black bigotry." 
 
 Geller is quick to tell her detractors that the oldest Queens Village Republican Club has honored her as "American Patriot of the Year." 
 
 New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority had more of a problem with the message than the messenger. 
 
 Since CAIR's "My Jihad" ad never ran in New York, the MTA worried that commuters would interpret the ad as an endorsement of anti-Semitic murder. 
 
 U.S. District Judge John Koeltl saw little risk of that Tuesday. 
 
 "While the court is sensitive to the MTA's security concerns, the [administration has] not presented any objective evidence that the Killing Jews advertisement would be likely to incite imminent violence," the 28-page opinion states. "Indeed, as the [MTA] knew when considering whether to run the ad, substantially the same advertisement ran in San Francisco and Chicago in 2013 without incident." 
 
 Finding that the ads qualified as protected speech, Koeltl said the MTA "restricted it based on its content without a compelling interest or a response narrowly tailored to achieving any such interest." 
 
 Though two MTA officials testified that the threat was real in daylong hearings on March 25, Koeltl believed then and now that New Yorkers were savvy enough to distinguish genuine Hamas propaganda from a send-up of it. 
 
 To prevent any confusion, Koeltl suggested that the MTA put up an "adjacent advertisement countering the quote from Hamas or stating that the entire AFDI ad is [a] parody." 
 
 An MTA spokesman said: "We are disappointed the judge's decision and are reviewing our options." 
 
 Yerushalmi reacted to the decision with a statement that lashes out against "terrorists" and "government bureaucrats" he alleged to be mutually bound by Islamic speech codes. 
 
 "Judge Koeltl's well-written and considered opinion sends a loud and clear message to Islamic terrorists around the globe as well as to those government bureaucrats who believe that Sharia's blasphemy laws are an exception to the First Amendment," he said. "And that message is this: America's liberties will not give way to Islamic terror threats nor to government bureaucrats who are quick to cast aside our liberties for fear of offending Muslims." ||||| Conservative activist Pamela Geller won the latest court decision against a local transportation authority trying to censor her anti-jihad and anti-sharia campaign. 
 
 New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority had sought to keep off city buses one of four ads purchased by her American Freedom Defense Initiative. The ad had quoted a Palestinian TV station run by the Hamas government of the Gaza Strip as saying that “Killing Jews is Worship that draws us close to Allah.” 
 
 In a ruling dated Monday but released Tuesday, Federal District Court Judge John Koeltl said the ad was protected political speech under the First Amendment and that a government agency cannot refuse it based on unspecific fears that the ads would incite violence. He granted AFDI’s request for a preliminary injunction against the MTA’s rejection. 
 
 “Under the First Amendment, the fear of such spontaneous attacks, without more, cannot override individuals’ rights to freedom of expression,” Judge Koeltl said, noting both that the ads had essentially already ran without incident in Chicago and San Francisco. 
 
 He also said the MTA claim that the ad would incite violence “thoroughly unpersuasive.” 
 
 “The defendants contend that the advertisement could be read as urging a subset of Islamic extremists to follow Hamas’s command, but if that group is as violent and radicalized as the defendants contend, presumably they would not need a bus advertisement to remind them of Hamas’s interpretation of the Quran,” Judge Koeltl wrote. 
 
 At her site, Ms. Geller called the decision “another huge AFDI victory for freedom and individual rights … The Judge came down on our side on every point, upholding the Constitution and beating back sharia restrictions on free speech.” 
 
 Ms. Geller’s ads parody a previous ad campaign by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, called “MyJihad,” which paints “jihad” as about personal struggle against sins or temptations and not a call to wage holy war against infidels. The CAIR ads had lines like “”My Jihad is to stay fit despite my busy schedule. What’s yours?” and “My Jihad is to not judge people by their cover. What’s yours?” 
 
 After quoting the “Killing Jews” or other lines, Ms. Geller’s ads end by riffing off CAIR’s campaign: “That’s his Jihad. What’s yours?” 
 
 None of Islam’s major jurisprudential schools say “jihad” cannot mean “holy war,” though there is a general consensus that it has a broad meaning and many applications. 
 
 The judge stayed his order for a month in order to let any appeals go forward, though MTA spokesman Adam Lisberg said the agency hadn’t decided what to do yet. 
 
 But the city’s political leaders were not happy with the judge’s decision. 
 
 “These anti-Islamic ads are outrageous, inflammatory and wrong, and have no place in New York City, or anywhere,” Monica Klein, a spokeswoman for Mayor Bill de Blasio, noted in a statement. 
 
 “These hateful messages serve only to divide and stigmatize when we should be coming together as one city,” she said. 
 
 
 
 
 
 Copyright © 2018 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission. ||||| Born and raised on the mean streets of New York City's Upper West Side, Katie Halper is a comedian, writer and filmmaker. She is the host of the Katie Halper Show on WBA1, writes for places like The Nation, Feministing, Jezebel and appears on places like MSNBC, RT, Sirius radio (which hung up on her once). Katie's had her photo taken with Rudy Giuliani and was called "cute and somewhat brainy" by the National Review. 
 
 image via pam geller 
 
 For some weird reason, New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) wasn’t keen on running ads which read “Killing Jews is worship that draws us closer to Allah.” But thanks to a judge’s decision on Tuesday, these catchy anti-Semitic-seeming-but-actually-Islamophobic posters will be coming soon to a bus near you (if you live in New York)! 
 
 The ad in question was paid for by the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), a so called “Pro-Israel” organization, which the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) labels a hate group, lead by Pamela Geller, whom the SPLC calls, “the anti-Muslim movement’s most flamboyant figurehead.” You may remember Geller from her previous tasteless and hateful campaigns like the San Francisco bus signs which compared Muslims to Nazis and said “Stop the hate… End all U.S. aid to Islamic countries.” Or the Washington DC-based billboards which read, “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat jihad.” 
 
 The poster designed for the New York state of mind features a man wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh who is quoted as saying, “Killing Jews is Worship that draws us close to Allah.” The ad attributes the quote to “Hamas MTV” and follows up with the killer (pun intended) tagline, “That’s His Jihad. What’s yours?” 
 
 The campaign attempts to parody the “MyJihad” campaign sponsored by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which sought to reclaim Islam from “Muslim and anti-Muslim extremists.” Ironically, the MyJihad campaign itself was a response to the “savage” AFDI campaign. 
 
 The MTA declined to run the MyJihad ads, which is part of the reason they didn’t want to run these ads and had asked for an injunction against AFDI. Not only are the ads Islamophobic but, ironically, they could easily function as anti-Semitic, since the otherwise powerful and stinging satire will be lost on all commuters who don’t follow the hot and heavy AFDI vs CAIR transit-based-ad-campaign rivalry. 
 
 But Judge John Koeltl disagreed, determining that the MTA could not prove the ads would lead to violence that would outweigh the AFDI’s freedom of speech. And, in one of my favorite sentences ever, Justice Koeltl wrote “the defendants have not presented any objective evidence that the Killing Jews advertisement would be likely to incite imminent violence.” 
 
 It was a major victory for not just bigotry but for bigotry which is poorly expressed through confusing, obscure, inner-baseball advertising campaigns. (They are pretty meta, though. I’ll give them that.) Not surprisingly, Geller praised the decision as a “triumph for liberty and truth.” Her lawyer, David Yerushalmi, who the Anti-Defamation League denounced for his “record of anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant and anti-black bigotry,” was equally thrilled: 
 
 Judge Koeltl’s well-written and considered opinion sends a loud and clear message to Islamic terrorists around the globe as well as to those government bureaucrats who believe that Sharia’s blasphemy laws are an exception to the First Amendment. And that message is this: America’s liberties will not give way to Islamic terror threats nor to government bureaucrats who are quick to cast aside our liberties for fear of offending Muslims. ||||| Advertisement Continue reading the main story Stories from Our Advertisers 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 A federal judge in Manhattan on Tuesday ordered the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to display an ad from a pro-Israel group on buses after the agency declined to run it last year. 
 
 The group, the American Freedom Defense Initiative, sued the authority in October, saying it had infringed on the group’s First Amendment rights by rejecting the ad. The authority had argued that the ad could be seen as a call to violence against Jews. 
 
 The ad shows a man with a scarf across his face next to the words, “Killing Jews is Worship that draws us close to Allah,” attributed to “Hamas MTV.” Below that, it reads: “That’s his Jihad. What’s yours?” 
 
 The judge, John G. Koeltl, of United States District Court, ruled that the ad qualified as protected speech and granted a preliminary injunction ordering the transportation authority to run the ad. He said the order would not take effect for 30 days so the agency could consider whether it would appeal the decision. 
 
 “While the court is sensitive to the M.T.A.’s security concerns, the defendants have not presented any objective evidence that the ‘Killing Jews advertisement’ would be likely to incite imminent violence,” Judge Koeltl wrote in the order. 
 
 The judge noted that a similar ad ran in Chicago and San Francisco in 2013 without incident. 
 
 Pamela Geller, president of the American Freedom Defense Initiative, called the ruling a “triumph for liberty and truth.” The group initially planned to run the ad with others as part of a campaign. Ms. Geller said she would now buy more ad space on more buses since it was running alone. 
 
 A spokesman for the authority, Adam Lisberg, said in a statement that the agency was disappointed by the ruling and would review its options. 
 
 The set of ads was intended to parody a “My Jihad” campaign by the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Those “My Jihad” ads portrayed jihad as a concept of nonviolent individual and personal struggle. 
 
 Ms. Geller’s group successfully sued the authority in 2012 over another ad that the agency eventually had to run. In that case, a federal judge ruled that the authority had violated the group’s First Amendment rights. 
 
 Judge Koeltl, in his order on Tuesday, said that there was no evidence that seeing one of the ads on the back of a bus would prompt a violent reaction. 
 
 “The defendants underestimate the tolerant quality of New Yorkers,” he wrote, “and overestimate the potential impact of these fleeting advertisements.”
– Soon, you could see MTA buses in New York with the words "Killing Jews is Worship that draws us close to Allah" on the side. That's because a controversial pro-Israel group wants to run the ads—they show a man with a Palestinian keffiyeh covering his face alongside the aforementioned quote, which is attributed to "Hamas MTV," plus the slogan, "That's his Jihad. What's yours?"—and this week a federal judge decreed that the MTA must comply in order to abide by the First Amendment, Courthouse News reports. (There is no "Hamas MTV"; the ad is actually referencing a music video militants broadcast in the Gaza Strip.) The decision won't take effect for a month, in case the agency wants to appeal, the New York Times reports. The pro-Israel organization in question is Pamela Geller's American Freedom Defense Initiative, which has previously brought us anti-Islam ads in New York and Chicago, ads comparing jihadists to "savages," and ads showing a plane about to hit the World Trade Center. (The Southern Poverty Law Center labels the AFDI a hate group, Raw Story notes.) The group sued the MTA after the "Killing Jews" ads were initially rejected. Though the MTA says it fears the ads could be seen as calling for harm to Jews, the judge noted that similar ads in Chicago and San Francisco in 2013 did not result in violence. The ad is a parody of the Council on American-Islamic Relations' "My Jihad" campaign, which seeks to frame jihad as a "personal struggle against sins or temptations" rather than holy war, the Washington Times notes.