Mona Eltahawy, as police infringe on her exercise of the rarely invoked Eleventeenth Amendment, which protects a citizen’s right to spray any message she doesn’t want others to see with pink. paint.

The controversial ads went up in DC Metro stations today, after efforts by the city to have them blocked were declared, properly, to be unconstitutional by a sane and objective judge. The ads read,

“In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad.”

The controversy over the subway ads started heating up in the wake of the “Innocence of Muslims” debacle, when a crude internet trailer for a crude anti-Islam movie was used by extremists and fanatics around the world as an excuse to demonstrate against or attack U.S. embassies. The Obama Administration’s less-than-ringing defense of free speech in its efforts to minimize the violence had the undesired effect of emboldening domestic censors, among them  Mona Eltahawy, a free-lance Egypt-born journalist, who spray-painted one of the anti-jihad ads, the creation of the American Freedom Defense Initiative, in a New York subway station where it had been hung on September 24. She argued, as she sprayed, that censoring someone else’s protected speech was her First Amendment right. No, it’s not. A 2011 naturalized citizen, she needs to bone up on her American Constitution before she speaks at any more college campuses. She was arrested. Good. Continue reading →