On April 27, 2011, Barack Obama released his long form birth certificate and that same day blogger Pam Geller declared on Fox Business that it “is actually not a birth certificate.”
She appears to know nothing about birth certificates, but she would have to have been off planet not to know that depictions of the prophet Muhammad have provoked violent responses from Muslim extremists. So in recognition of that fact, she held a contest and an exhibit for drawings of the, wait for it……, prophet Muhammad, and what happened? There was a violent response from Muslim extremists leaving two dead and one injured.
Geller is president of the American Freedom Defense Initiative, labeled by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-Muslim hate group. Rather than a very large “oops” from Geller, the AP reported that “she said that the shooting showed how ‘needed our event really was,’”
There is an ongoing debate debate in America over freedom of speech and respect for religion. I personally don’t think a public “stick it to the Muslims” event is a good idea.
Read more:
- ISIS claim responsibility for shooting at Texas Muhammad cartoon contest – Fox News
- Garland, Texas, shooting suspect linked himself to ISIS in tweets – CNN
- Images of Muhammad and a Texas cartoon show’s sketchy purpose – LA Times
- Two shot dead after they open fire at Mohammed cartoon event in Texas – CNN
“DEFENDING THE WEST: Pamela Geller calls for American blacklist of pro-jihad TV network”
apparently “defending the west” and “defending free speech” are not to be mistaken for one another.
I think Geller would consider a contest for Jesus drawings “another proof how Christianity is being attacked”. The bigotry is simply staggering.
But given that she knows nothing about Islam and probably would happily dump a ton of pork in every mosque (and believe that would scare ISIS away since we all know Muslims immediately turn to dust if they so much as look at pork), I don’t think she’s even close to maximum crazy.
Her stunt achieved its purpose…
Here is the ink to all 200 “cartoons” .. many look to be done by children.
http://s1167.photobucket.com/user/AFDIMotoons/library/?sort=6&page=1
PhtoBucket better add some extra security.
Was she among the chorus crying “Persecution!” when Obama joked about Bachmann’s claim that he was bringing on the End Times?
i have a feeling pam’s next event will be a non-event. even if she’s able to find a venue willing to stage it or unable to prevent her from doing so, anybody concerned about their own bodily safety will stay far away.
Clearly, Geller’s motives are driven by racist hate-mongering. And, she got what she wanted, international publicity for an event that, absent the shooting, no one would know about.
Still, as reprehensible as many of those cartoons are, in this country, people have a Constitutional right to be reprehensible.
The two fanatics who unwittingly died serving Geller’s purposes will be quickly forgotten. All they did was to afford a racist hate-monger more stuff with which to blog about. For Geller this is a big win.
For the rest of us, we are stuck having to tolerate the reprehensible, as the production of those cartoons is far less reprehensible than what those two idiot fanatics intended to do.
As Jon Stewart clearly and rightly said the other night, responding with guns to ideas, no matter how offensive, is never right.
In the wake of the CHARLIE shooting, most folks outside of France don’t seem to get that our laws restricting freedom of expression are aimed at hate speech against, to simplify it, human beings (e.g.,: jews, muslims, roms, etc), not ideas (e,g.: christ, allah, muhammad)
A NYT editorial on this subject that is truly worth reading:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/07/opinion/free-speech-vs-hate-speech.html?hpw&rref=opinion&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region®ion=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&_r=0
So what’s the remedy? A plethora of “stick it to the Christians” events until one of *them* snaps?
Maybe at her next event, the one to take a fatal bullet will be her, and not a cop that she needlessly endangered.
Calgary Sun notes that Geller is a birther:
http://www.calgarysun.com/2015/05/04/5-things-you-should-know-about-pamela-geller
It’s unclear if Geller currently practices any religion, but ethnically she is Jewish.
Muslims probably wouldn’t like mocking portrayals of their Prophet Isa, either, although I doubt that would be considered as outrageous as mocking Muhammed.
It’s funny how so many people (including people who should know better, like lawyers) think the First Amendment means speech and expression should be free from any consequences at all.
While violence or threats of violence are clearly wrong, it has nothing to do with the First Amendment.
Right wingers like Geller want desperately to generalize America’s wars to one big one against all of Islam.
She’s yapping too much about Christian persecution to be a practicing Jew.
And even if she claimed to be Jewish, she’d be like the bigoted Bible thumpers who claim to be “Christians” while crapping on just about everything Jesus said.
And with quotes like “Europe loves to memorialize dead Jews, even to the point of fetishizing them” (http://pamelageller.com/2015/01/pamela-geller-breitbart-the-death-of-the-jews-of-france.html/) I sincerely doubt she sees herself as a Jew (unless she’s one of the self-haters like Erik Rush or Mychal Massie).
she CLAIMS to be for free speech yet she campaigned against the mosque in NYC and Al Jazeera coming to the US
Stop Al Jazeera’s expansion in the United States by Pamela Geller
she has been banned from entering the UK – “After careful consideration, she [the Home Secretary] personally directed that you should be excluded from the United Kingdom on the grounds that your presence here is not conducive to the public good.
“The Home Secretary has reached this decision because you have brought yourself within the scope of the list of unacceptable behaviours by making statements that may foster hatred which might lead to inter-community violence in the UK.”
she is pro-choice and pro-marriage equality – i wonder how many in that group shares her views
She is disgusting. She is Jewish, but she seems utterly ignorant of Jewish history, and religious/ethnic beliefs, practices, and customs. To me, and I figure to most Jews, her campaign against building mosques, against halal, and in favor of a anti-Muslim caricatures is nauseatingly reminiscent of anti-Jewish Nazi campaigns.
“Some Jewish Reasons Why Inviting Pamela Geller To Speak Is Not Kosher”
http://www.loonwatch.com/2014/01/some-jewish-reasons-why-inviting-pamela-geller-to-speak-is-not-kosher/
J.D. Sue
I thought you would appreciate this from Geraldo:
[A]nd it is bad for the Jews. It makes us look like we are all as hateful as Pamela Geller. She plays right into their propaganda. It is absolutely appalling. And every time I see her on television, I want to take a shower.”
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/geraldo-trashes-pamela-geller-every-time-i-see-her-on-tv-i-want-to-take-a-shower/
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Yes. As much as I don’t like Geraldo, this time he is expressing a sentiment I wholly can relate to.
Except that it only makes you look that way to people who already think in stereotypical terms.
When I see comments like Geraldo’s, it feels to me like they’re countenancing stereotyping, instead of opposing it by pointing out that the stereotyped group actually consists of a wide variety of individuals.
I actually want to thank her. She drew me into the discussion about the “Ground Zero Mosque” and I discovered a few things that I never knew about before in that area. The most important one to me is the tiny Irish Hunger Memorial that I made a point to visit on my last stop in New York. It’s something that I would never have known about — it’s just a very tiny little elevated park in Battery Park, but I love it. It’s the least touristy thing I know of in New York.
Because of the efforts of Geller and others to try to get my attention on the “Ground Zero” mosque, I also know about the Amish market on the same street as the Mosque location, a really cool surf shop, and one or two locations of an adult-oriented nature that the opponents of the mosque seem to have missed entirely, despite them being much closer to the actual Ground Zero site. And, having been to Tribeca many many many times, I always understood that while Park Place and Broadway is “close to Ground Zero” in terms of physical distance, by Manhattan standards it really is a world away. I think this is a difficult concept for someone in, say, rural Ohio to grasp, but Pam Geller is a New Yorker and I know full well that she gets it.
I wonder if a visitor to Ground Zero would even get up that far without making a deliberate effort. I’m pretty sure the taxi will drop you at the South end by the 9/11 museum if they are clueful or some touristy “Wall Street-ish Broad-Steet-is” spot if they aren’t.
It was always fun to get into discussions with people about “the mosque” when they clearly had no clue about the nature of the area, or how mundane “the mosque” was going to be, or just how much is going on in that part of the city to begin with. To hear them tell it, “the ground zero mosque” was going to be like the Dome of the Rock right in the middle of the site.