Breaking news: CAIR, perennial agitator for language purges and “hate speech” regulation, is suddenly the champion of First Amendment free expression. It proves, once again, that Islamists and leftists are just like defense lawyers.

A defense lawyer who has a good case can be very persuasive. If the defendant really is innocent, or if the prosecution’s case really is flawed, defense counsel can take one main line of defense and pound away at it relentlessly. That is how doubt is sown, which is the defense lawyer’s objective. A credible story that the prosecutor cannot completely refute is the roadmap to acquittal.

This, however, is not the lot of most defense lawyers. In the vast majority of cases, the client really is guilty, and the state really does have ironclad proof. So defense counsel becomes the charlatan for whom every trial day is a new day. On Monday, he tries a false-identification theory, suggesting that the defendant was not even at the scene of the crime. When that doesn’t fly, on Tuesday he runs with, “Well, maybe he was there, but he didn’t know the three guys he was with.” Once that blows up, Wednesday’s gambit is: “Well, sure, he knew them, but he didn’t know they were going to rob the bank.” By Thursday, it’s: “Well, maybe he said he’d help them, but one was a government informant, so he must have been entrapped.”

Our defense lawyer is put in this untenable position because his true objective is fundamentally different from his lofty pretense. He purports to be on a quest for justice, but the only thing he really cares about is getting the defendant off, by any means that might work. Thus, he tries all means he can think of, even if they are contradictory — even if positing the first defense undermines the next, ultimately destroying his overall credibility as an advocate.

Although it does more than its share of litigating, the Council on American-Islamic Relations operates mainly in the court of public opinion. CAIR is the Muslim Brotherhood bullhorn created to cheerlead for sharia, for Hamas, and for sundry other jihadists — all under the guise of “civil rights.” In unison with its “social justice” collaborators on the left, CAIR is most often found campaigning against “Islamophobia.” This is a term strategically created by the Brotherhood to slur as “defamation” or “incitement” (collectively, “hate speech”) any criticism of Islamic supremacism. That includes the ideology’s undeniable roots in Muslim scripture; its vow to destroy the West from within; and its promotion of terrorism against legitimate sovereign authority, spun as “resistance” against “occupation.”

It is farce. CAIR has no real interest in hate speech per se. Indeed, it has no real interest in civil rights — no proponent of sharia could. Its sole actual imperative is Islamic supremacism: promoting any cause that increases Islamic influence and protesting any effort either to reduce Islamic influence or to subject Islamic-supremacist doctrine to scrutiny. Consequently, CAIR’s precious fretting over hate speech extends only so far as Islam is advanced or imperiled.

The same is true of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation — the supranational caliphate in the making — whose top goal at the moment is suppression of speech about Islam. Like its CAIR confederates, the OIC pretends to be a champion of universal “human rights.” Thus it feigns opposition to defamation or incitement against what it calls “religion.” But we know this is fraudulent — or at least we would know if examination of Islamist ideology were not so adamantly discouraged. It is a plain, irrefutable fact that Islamic countries repress the practice of other religions. Indeed, the practice of religions other than Islam is illegal in Saudi Arabia, the OIC’s de facto leader. Patently, it is not “religion” that the OIC cares about; it is Islam. “Religion” is invoked as a smokescreen, enabling these Islamist activists to pose as guardians of civil rights rather than the vanguard of Islamic supremacism.

All of this is worth sorting out because, unexpectedly, we have a teachable moment. The state of California has adopted a resolution decreeing that “no public resources will be allowed to be used for any anti-Semitic or any intolerant agitation.”