CAIR complained to wordpress.com about an Islam bashing website hosted on their service and WordPress removed the site:

he Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) announced today that an anti-Muslim Internet hate site that contained a number of threats of violence targeting mosques, including the comment “I want [Muslim] blood on my hands,” has been taken down by its hosting company.

CAIR said visitors to “Bare Naked Islam,” hosted by WordPress.com, now see the message: “barenakedislam.wordpress.com is no longer available. This blog has been archived or suspended for a violation of our Terms of Service.”
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[NOTE: “Bare Naked Islam” was one of the major promoters of the campaign to pressure Lowe’s to drops its ads from TLC’s “All-American Muslim.”]

Last month, CAIR called on the FBI to investigate the threats of violence targeting mosques posted on the blog and urged WordPress.com to remove it for violating the hosting company’s terms of service (TOS), which prohibit blogs that “contain threats or incite violence towards individuals or entities.” Articles and comments posted on “Bare Naked Islam” urged attacks on and desecration of American and European mosques.

And the outrage from right wing bloggers has spread like wildfire, as you can see on this Memeorandum thread.

We see this a lot from the right. A couple of years ago Michelle Malkin got her account suspended on YouTube and countless right wing blogs went into the “boycott Google products” rampage. What I found most interesting is that a lot of those blogs were Blogger blogs, which is a free blogging service offered by…..you guessed it GOOGLE!

What these people don’t seem to understand is that this is the free market in action. Sites like YouTube and WordPress.com are businesses exercising their rights as businesses. If they feel something on their site goes against their terms of service they have every right in the world to pull it.

And why we are talking about rights, let’s talk about blogger rights. Don’t like what a blogging service is doing? Fine – get your own hosting and do it yourself. You can get a lot of decent hosting for less than $100 a years. Throw some Google ads on there and you instantly pay for that. Hell you might even make a little extra money in the process.

Of course there is a downside to this too. Hosting companies also have their own terms of services and can pull a site if they feel like they violate those terms. Again – free market and all. I’ve been involved in the hosting business in the past and that’s a very responsible approach for a business to take. If a site you are hosting is making violent threats then you sure as hell don’t want that liability. It’s much easier to just yank that site. That appears to be the case of what happened here and one that hate promoting sites will find about anywhere.

Yes I know we have the first amendment and all, but again, you can’t yell fire in a crowded theater either! With freedom of speech comes increased responsibility and if you aren’t willing to accept that responsibility then your speech might become a little less free. Simple as that.