A federal appeals court ruled this week that an anti-Muslim extremism group does not have the right to place advertisements on buses in Washington state showing pictures of wanted terrorists and claiming the FBI offers a $25 million reward for their capture.
The American Freedom Defense Initiative claimed that King County violated its First Amendment right to free speech by refusing to show the ads on its buses, but a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the claim on Wednesday, reported the Associated Press.
The group wanted to display an ad with 16 photographs of suspected terrorists and a "Faces of Global Terrorism" tagline, along with a statement that said "AFDI Wants You to Stop a Terrorist." But King County Metro Transit rejected it, saying it failed to meet its advertising policy guidelines which prohibit ads that are "false or misleading, demeaning or disparaging or harmful or disruptive to the transit system," according to The Huffington Post. The ad had been modeled after a similar FBI ad that the bureau ran in 2013 as a part of a terrorism awareness campaign.
"The FBI is not offering a reward up to $25 million for the capture of one of the pictured terrorists," Judge Susan Graber wrote in her ruling. "The FBI is not offering rewards at all, and the State Department offers a reward of at most $5 million, not $25 million, for the capture of one of the pictured terrorists."
The group's leader, Pamela Geller, disagreed with the judge's decision, and clarified that her group is not anti-Muslim, but rather, anti-Jihad.
"The truth, however, is that we simply ran the FBI ad, with no substantive changes. Seattle Metro accepted the FBI ad and then rejected ours after the FBI caved to Muslim demands to take the ad down," Geller wrote on Breitbart. "The AFDI ad is exactly the same as the FBI ad that was taken down, except for the attribution and the background color. We didn't change the amount of the reward for capture of the terrorists, or the source of that reward: our information came straight from the FBI ad, and any assertion to the contrary is a product of Graber's febrile imagination."
Geller was responsible for organizing the Prophet Mohammad cartoon-drawing contest in Texas that was fired on by two Muslim gunmen in May.
The group has similar ads on buses in other cities, including one in San Francisco equating Islam with Nazism, and has had mixed results in other court cases, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
The group recently won a lawsuit against the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority after it refused to display an ad that said "Islamic Jew-Hatred: It's in the Quran." The group has also won two rulings in New York City, and a case in Detroit is pending, according to the group's lawyer, David Yerushalmi.
Yerushalmi said it will appeal Wednesday's ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, HuffPo reported.
