SEPTA will not appeal a federal court ruling that the transit authority must accept virulently anti-Muslim advertising on its buses, SEPTA officials said Thursday.
In accepting the ruling, SEPTA officials said they would tighten the agency’s advertising standards to legally prohibit such ads in the future.
The black-and-white ads proclaim “Jew Hatred: It’s in the Quran” and feature a photograph of a 1941 meeting between Hitler and Hajj Amin al-Husseini, a Palestinian Arab nationalist who made radio broadcasts supporting the Nazis.
The ad was produced by the American Freedom Defense Initiative, a New Hampshire-based nonprofit organization, which argued in legal filings that the ad was germane and timely “in light of the fact that many Jews (and Christians) are being persecuted in Islamic countries in the Middle East.”
U.S. District Judge Mitchell S. Goldberg ruled March 11 that because SEPTA had accepted other political and controversial ads on public issues, it could not refuse to accept the Hitler ad.
SEPTA officials said Thursday that will change.
New advertising standards will be created to prohibit all political, public-issue, and noncommercial ads. By consistently refusing all such ads, SEPTA officials say, they will satisfy Goldberg’s concerns that selective prohibitions violated constitutional free-speech protections.
That kind of broad prohibition against all political and ideological advertising on buses was upheld earlier this month by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco in a case involving anti-Israel ads on buses in Seattle.