FREE SPEECH: League Sanctions Team Owner Over A Tweet That Offends Terrorists

He’s a minority owner for the defending championship team and he just got suspended over an ‘offensive tweet’… directed at an actual terrorist group.

I love the game and all and don’t much care for the defending champs. But the league is WAY out of line on this one.

Doug Cifu is minority owner of the Florida Panthers. As most of you will know, they are the defending NHL Stanley Cup champions.

This time yesterday, I had never heard of the man. Now, he’s the center of a news story, for all the wrong reasons.

Most of the time, the NHL has managed to navigate the partisan ridiculousness that has infiltrated sport over the last few years. They seem to have ducked the kneeling for the anthem issue, and the BLM hype made (by comparison) barely a ripple in hockey.

Most of the controversy that will incense fans in the sport has to do with arguments over rule changes, missed calls by refs, or decisions around suspensions.

A Twitter spat by someone in a minority management role? That’s hardly something the fans would care about. Unless someone makes a federal issue out of it.

Which is exactly what happened here. And then all hell broke loose.

A Leafs fan with a burner account started baiting him on social media. He’s nothing but a troll, and he says so on his account. First it got political, then it got personal.

Context: the guy he was baiting is Jewish, and the Panthers/Leafs series has been a gritty one with some dubious hits and fans on both sides upset by some non-calls by the refs that (might? should?) could have resulted in suspensions.

Predictably, each side claims the reffing favors the *other* team.

The troll baited the Jewish owner by invoking Gaza. You can imagine why he might have taken that a little personally. For all we know, he could have individual friends or relatives that were directly impacted by the horrors of 10/7.

The troll rolls up to a stranger, invokes the Gaza conflict, throws a sexual slur his way, and comes out as the victim when he gets called out on his antisemitism?

Is it because he wants to see every Hamas member embrace the violent end they claim to crave?

Just as a reminder, here’s a partial list of countries that list Hamas as a terrorist group:

Both USA and Canada recognize Hamas as a terrorist group. Would the league react to wishing harm on ISIS, too? How about Al Qaeda?

The troll was crowing over his victory:

Let’s see what the league did in response:

The NHL was made aware of the messages and suspended Cifu.

“The NHL has concluded that Mr. Cifu’s X posts were unacceptable and inappropriate,” the league said in a statement. “As a result, Mr. Cifu has been suspended indefinitely from any involvement with the Club and the NHL. An in-person meeting will be scheduled with Mr. Cifu and the Commissioner at a date to be determined.”

Either the team, or the league forced an apology every bit as scripted as the John Cena one, where he apologized for his regrettable language… blah blah blah.

There’s going to be an ‘in-person’ meeting.

Capitulation is a mistake. This is the same league that threw someone out of a stadium for throwing a banana on the ice while a black player was skating.

And they’re coming down on a Jewish owner who was baited by a self-described troll invoking Gaza and calling him a phallis-licker?

Punitive action for saying the planet should be rid of terrorists?

These Hamas sympathizers are not only openly cheering for the downfall of America, they are calling for volunteers to put their lives to that task.

A Hamas supporter in Dearborn Heights, Michigan gloats on camera that America must be destroyed to atone for the Gaza war, a war Hamas started.

“The American empire … they must fall. And inshallah, inshallah, they will fall. And my message to people of Gaza and oppressed people… pic.twitter.com/JpjonTKxy8

— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) April 29, 2025

When we speak of Hamas, we are not dealing with people who merely have a difference of political opinion. These are xenophobic zealots who believe they will fulfill some kind of a divine eschatological purpose by ridding the world of Jewish. people… as well as anyone else who will not submit to their vision of Islamic supremacy.