Extremist Pamela Geller held one of her inciteful, anti-Islamic stunts in Garland, Texas yesterday. Gunmen opened fire and were shot and killed by the police. On Fox News, Geller blamed President Obama.
Pamela Geller is one of the most vile hate mongers to be seen on Fox News – and that’s saying something. From the Southern Poverty Law Center:
Through her website, Geller has promulgated some of the most bizarre conspiracy theories found on the extreme right, including claims that President Obama is the love child of Malcolm X, that Obama was once involved with a “crack whore,” that his birth certificate is a forgery, that his late mother posed nude for pornographic photos, and that he was a Muslim in his youth who never renounced Islam. She has described Obama as beholden to his “Islamic overlords” and said that he wants jihad to be victorious in America. In April 2011, Geller accused Obama of withholding evidence in the then-upcoming trial of accused Fort Hood mass murderer Major Nidal Malik Hasan.
Geller uses her website to publish her most revolting insults of Muslims: She posted (and later removed) a video implying that Muslims practiced bestiality with goats and a cartoon depicting the Muslim prophet Mohammad with a pig’s face (observant Muslims do not eat pork). Geller also has denied the genocide of Bosnian Muslims by Serbian forces in Srebrenica – calling it the “Srebrenica Genocide Myth,” even though the Serbian government itself issued a state apology for the massacre. She wrote, “Westerners are admitting to their role in something that didn’t happen, and digging their own graves.”
Naturally, Fox News likes her.
Last fall, Geller came up with an extremely inflammatory anti-Islamic advertising campaign on New York City subways and buses. Her latest gambit was to hold a “Draw Muhammad” contest in the same site that Muslims held a conference in January, shortly after the Charlie Hebdo attack. The Muslim conference’s stated mission was to combat Islamophobia. Geller’s mission was to inflame it.
Geller dubiously claimed that the Muslim conference was “just to oppress free speech” and that was why she was there: “to stand in defense of free speech.” For herself, that is. She complained, “The idea that American Muslim leaders would support the ideology behind the jihad slaughter… was deeply disturbing.” Yet Geller admits she was part of the protests trying to shut down free speech at the Muslim conference.
Fox News host Kelly Wright did not challenge Geller’s claims, nor her hypocrisy. He did not ask for anything like proof to back up her accusations about the Muslim conference.
Nor did Wright object as Geller blamed Islamic violence on President Obama.
GELLER: Tonight, we see here in America that the war is here. It’s quite terrible. But look, it was coming. …And the fact that the west, our political leaders - you know, you have President Obama at the U.N. declaring that the future does not belong to those that slander the prophet of Islam. This capitulation by western leaders on a basic, fundamental, unalienable right of freedom of speech has emboldened these savages.
However, Wright did challenge Geller about hosting an event designed to stick it to Muslims.
WRIGHT: You had to be thinking it might even incite that kind of unrest here. … Would our founding fathers have put up a caricature of someone’s faith and knowing that it might incite unrest?
Predictably, Geller played the victim. “What am I to do, abridge my freedom of speech in order to placate savages?” she asked.
You can bet that Geller will be championed ad nauseam by Fox News as some kind of free speech crusader.
Listen to her below, from one of the May 3 Fox News reports on the shooting.
Yes — just as one must be simple minded to become upset when someone practices the same freedom of speech and burns a US flag.
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Buy a pack of popcorn. The coming attractions of the GOP presidential race will be entertaining.
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Does this mean that Ms Geller DOES acknowledge that guns are NOT just for “protection” and “self-defense?” That innocent people can be the targets of guns and that maybe guns should NOT be allowed in certain places where tensions and feelings might run a bit hot and high?
I guess Wayne LaPierre’s going to have to have a long talk with Geller over her crossing the line with her radical ideas.
Geller fails to recognize that freedom of speech comes with a VERY high price. Yes, you’re free to speak whatever comes into your mind (even one such as Geller’s) but you are NEVER free from the consequences of your speech. If you want to say that “Blacks are thugs” or “Black people are animals,” then by all means, that’s your right. Don’t be surprised, however, when people call you a bigot or racist for your own thoughts and words and actions. After all, that’s merely OTHER people expressing THEIR “free speech.”
That latter point seems to be something Geller (and FoxNoise, as well) forgets: Free speech can only exist when MULTIPLE opinions are allowed to be expressed. If you only want your own opinion to be expressed, even to the point of shutting down opposing opinions, then that’s expressing the exact opposite of free speech.
That’s why animal (including human) sacrifice is prohibited under US law, regardless of a religion’s “deeply held” belief to practice it. IF such a religion wishes to engage in the practice, the church (for lack of a better word) MUST work under specific guidelines that ensure the animal is killed with as little cruelty as possible (the same applies to kosher and halal food preparation facilities). The problem is that the regulations are so difficult to follow that many such groups simply don’t engage in the practice or make do with substitutes; it’s a hell of a lot easier to ensure that chicken’s throat is completely slit with a small blade or its neck is snapped in one move than it is to kill a full-grown bull or even pig (even sportsmen know how incredibly difficult a “clean” kill is when dealing with moderately large living animals, even with a rifle).
Personally, I’ll admit, I think animal sacrifice is abominable and I would never be part of a faith that practices such BUT, as long as an animal sacrifice practitioner doesn’t try to use one of my pets (not that I actually have any—this is a hypothetical) for his sacrifice, I’m really not going to treat it as much worse than someone who chooses to own a snake and needs to buy feeder mice for his pet (what’s the real difference in buying a live mouse for your Burmese python and buying a live mouse to sacrifice to Yahweh or Ba’al or Cthulhu or Anansi or whatever mythical being you choose to worship?).
Here is the Muslim Brotherhood in America’s plan to destroy us from within but neither the House or Senate will hold hearings on the Muslim Brotherhood in America and their plan and the media will not report on it, including Fox News!
From the Explanatory Memorandum– the Muslim Brotherhood in America in its own words:
“The process of settlement is a ‘Civilization-Jihadist Process’ with all the word means. The Ikhwan [Muslim Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”
http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/2013/05/25/an-explanatory-memorandum-from-the-archives-of-the-muslim-brotherhood-in-america
Well now, Pammy — if that’s the case, that would mean BOTH of President Obama’s parents were natural-born US citizens (Malcolm X was born Malcolm Little in Omaha, NE) . . . and, therefore, there would be no more need for the afterBirthers to question his citizenship. Amirite?
I’d ask if you thought that through before making that claim — but since when have rightwingnuts ever thought anything through . . .
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Texas sounds like a good place for the venue
