Seattle Transit Refuses AFDI FBI 'Faces of Global Terrorism' Ad

Seattle Transit Refuses AFDI FBI 'Faces of Global Terrorism' Ad

Last month, the FBI was running a terrorism awareness campaign featuring bus ads depicting photos of sixteen of the world’s Most Wanted Terrorists. This was a publicity campaign sponsored by the Joint Terrorism Task Force for the State Department’s Rewards for Justice (RFJ) program. But then the Leftists and Islamic supremacists complained that the ads were “Islamophobic,” and they came down – and unbelievably, Seattle is refusing to allow my group, the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), to put them back up.

The RFJ program offers huge rewards, up to $25 million, for information that helps stop jihad terror plots. It has been very successful, helping bag the notorious jihadist Ramzi Yousef, who is now in prison for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center jihad bombing. This program saves lives.

However, Muslim groups and the politicians in their pockets actually succeeded in pressuring the FBI into removing the ad. As such, we decided that we had to do the FBI’s job for them, in the interest of national security.  We took it upon ourselves to alert the public to the nature and magnitude of the terror threat, and submitted the same ad, with minor variations in the color scheme and design to avoid copyright issues, to Seattle Transit.

Thursday we received their response. They refused it. They refused our ad that the FBI ran last month.

It’s a spectacular submission to terror. Seattle King County is refusing our ad because they consider it disparaging to Muslims. The ad is a poster for the worst terrorists on the FBI’s most wanted list. Their refusal is devastating, and provides further proof of all that I have been warning about all these many years.

Sharron Shinbo of Seattle Transit wrote that our ad could not be accepted “based on our current advertising policy,” because it didn’t comply with three separate sections of that policy.

Shinbo’s letter explains those three sections. The first was that they claimed that they rejected the ad because it was “False or Misleading”: “Any material that is or that the sponsor reasonably should have known is false, fraudulent, misleading, deceptive or would constitute a tort of defamation or invasion of privacy.”

How could the ad have been true and good when the FBI submitted it but false or misleading when we submitted it? Remember, Seattle Transit took the FBI ad down because Jeff Siddiqui of American Muslims of Puget Sound claimed that the ad made Seattle-area Muslims “concerned for their safety and because Congressman Jim McDermott (D-WA) claimed the campaign was “offensive to Muslims and ethnic minorities” and encouraged “racial and religious profiling.”

All that was nonsense, but even if it were true, it didn’t establish that the ad was false or misleading. But Seattle Transit also rejected our ad because it was “demeaning or disparaging”: 

Advertising that contains material that demeans or disparages an individual, group of individuals or entity.  For purposes of determining whether an advertisement contains such material, the County will determine whether a reasonably prudent person, knowledgeable of the County’s ridership and using prevailing community standards, would believe that the advertisement contains material that ridicules or mocks, is abusive or hostile to, or debases the dignity or stature of any individual, group of individuals or entity.

That comes closer to what Siddiqui and McDermott claimed, but it, too, is nonsense. The ad doesn’t mock or ridicule Muslims. Nor is it hostile to them. It asks people to be vigilant and watch for wanted terrorists. Those terrorists are Muslims through no fault of the FBI or AFDI. Moderate Muslims who claim to reject the terrorists’ understanding of Islam should be leading the opposition against those terrorists.

Seattle Transit also rejected the ad as “Harmful or Disruptive to Transit System”:  

Advertising that contains material that is so objectionable as to be reasonably foreseeable that it will result in harm to, disruption of or interference with the transportation system.  For purposes of determining whether an advertisement contains such material, the County will determine whether a reasonably prudent person, knowledgeable of the County’s ridership and using prevailing community standards, would believe that the material is so objectionable that it is reasonably foreseeable that it will result in harm to, disruption of or interference with the transportation system.

So, in other words, they won’t run this ad depicting the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists because those Most Wanted Terrorists might blow them up. And so Seattle bows down before the terrorists. It isn’t the first time, and won’t be the last.

We are filing suit. Our ace lawyer, David Yerushalmi of the American Freedom Law Center (AFLC), has already filed a Freedom of Information Act request asking for all communications between the FBI and Seattle Transit related to the creation and termination of the ad. We aren’t going to take this capitulation to Islamic supremacism lying down. The ads will run. Count on it.

Pamela Geller is the President of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), publisher of AtlasShrugs.com and author of The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America and Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance. Follow her on Twitter here.

Pamela Geller is the President of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), publisher of AtlasShrugs.com and author of The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America and Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance. Follow her on Twitter here.

Photo credit: KOMO News

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