Pamela Geller has posted a warning to the Washington Post, in response to a critical article by Michelle Boorstein entitled “How Influential will Anti-Muslim Groups Become?“:
I am not anti-Muslim.
I love Muslims. I am pro-freedom and anti-islamic supremacism.
Stop the slander and defamation. It’s an incitement to violence.
Do it again and I am going to sue you.
Yours in liberty,
Pamela Geller
Atlas Shrugs
SIOA
FDI
I’d like to see how that would play out in court. It’s true that her associate Robert Spencer talks of “Muslims of conscience” (albeit while simultaneously sneering at the idea of moderate Muslims by sarcastically calling extremists “misunderstanders of Islam”), and that she has promoted an organisation called “Muslims Against Shariah”. It’s also the case that the groups with which she is involved tend to support reformists in Iran, which disgusts those further to the right; Debbie Schlussel, for instance, recently attacked Geller on this point as part of a denunciation of HBO for a documentary about Neda Agha-Soltan (“I don’t mourn her one bit”, sniffed Schlussel, refering to the murdered Iranian).
However, while Geller’s complaints against the “Ground Zero mosque” referenced the supposed secret extremism of those behind the project, her rhetoric has made it quite clear that any sort of mosque close to the site would be unacceptable, on account of the character of Islam per se – not because of “Islamic supremicism”:
“The only Muslim center that should be built in the shadow of the World Trade Center is one that is devoted to expunging the Quran and all Islamic teachings of the violent jihad that they prescribe, as well as all hateful texts and incitement to violence”.
As I noted a few days ago, this isn’t a statement made in good faith: a Muslim center with an “expunged” Quran makes about as much sense as a church with the anti-Jewish parts of the New Testament expunged or a synagogue with the more sanguinary passages of the Torah expunged – ancient religious texts may be re-interpreted or contextualised in ways that make them more amenable to the modern world, but they are seldom repudiated by adherents. And Geller didn’t write “Islamic center” – she wrote “Muslim center”.
And as for the whine about “incitement to violence”, this shows Geller to be someone who can dish out the most inflammatory abusive but not take any of the same treatment. In Geller’s world, critics of Israel are (inevitably) Nazis, and anyone who raises concerns about the Rifqa Bary media circus must be in favour of honour-killings.
(Correction: I originally wrote that Boorstein was with Newsweek rather than the Washington Post)
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“Muslims Against Sharia”, of which Geller is a member, is NOT a Muslim organization. It has been researched and exposed by several sites as a group of extremist Jews trying to play agents provocateur.
Guess she’s still pumped up that PayPal decided not to cancel her account.
Don’t forget Pamela’s famous claim that “innocent civilians” don’t exist.
She’s a Free Speech Hypocrite (free speech for me but not for thee: look at her blog’s recent triumphant crowing about a Muslim student groupe getting banned from campus for hate speech) and she also an Incitement to Violence Hypocrite.
I have posted comments on her site a few times. Funny how they always disappear…
[…] June 16, 2010: Richard Bartholomew has posted Pamela Geller Threatens to Sue Washington Post Journo over “Anti-Muslim” Label. Geller claims she’s not anti-Muslim, just against Muslim supremacism. But, as Bartholomew […]
I have some admiration for Ms Geller because she recognises that there is an incompatibilty between Islam and western democracy and enlightenment values.
One of the mosque’s promoters, an islamist named Daisy Khan, has spouted on about the virtues of polygamy. To claim, thus, the promoters of this mosque aren’t radicals is just a case of willfull blindness.
The mega-mosque mania is far too cordinated to be just hap-hazard and “innocent”. In London asupremacist mega-mosque planned for a site just next to the olympics venue, and which was meant to dominate the landscape, was nixed at the last minute fortunately. The mega-mosque in New York has similar supremacist intentions and should be stopped at all cost. Here in Montréal a mega-mosque is being proposed that would dominate the downtown. It, too, is now starting to be opposed.
There is a pattern to this in that Islam has a penchant for appropriating historically sginificant sites. The expensive mega-mosque in Montréal, if built, will ocupy some of the grounds of a very historic and important Catholic convent. It is being promoted by Muslim student groups from both Concordia and McGill universities, both of which have close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. Where students could come up with the 10s of millions required for its construction is an utter mystery…
Pamela Geller is boilerplate for sure, but that doesn’t mean she’s wrong. The public in both America and Europe are SO anesthetised and SO unaware of radical Islam’s agenda that “boilerplate” is the only way to wake them up.
And they are most certainly waking up.
Some ‘collaborative’ leftists find the prospect of an aware and engaged public utterly terrifying, and so I can understand their fear of Geller.
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