Atlas Shrugs
blogger Pamela Geller, lightning rod for the hateful fury of the unholy
alliance of Islamists and the radical left, is under attack again for
daring to run a pro-Israel advertising campaign in New York and San Francisco.
Ms. Geller is executive director of the American Freedom
Defense Initiative (AFDI) and of Stop Islamization of America (SIOA), in
addition to being the author of Stop
the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance
and The
Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration's War on America
(with Robert Spencer). For Islamists and the multiculturalist progressives who
have bought into the Muslim
Brotherhood’s strategy of demonizing its opposition as “Muslim-hating,” Geller
is the most public face of the mythical “Islamophobia”
in America.
Geller’s AFDI advertisements in San Francisco read, “In any
war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man.
Support Israel. Defeat jihad.” In New York, the ads read, “19,250 deadly Islamic
attacks since 9/11/01. And counting. It’s not Islamophobia, it’s
Islamorealism.”
While the Board respects everyone’s
right to free speech, we categorically condemn the bigotry and innuendo
expressed by this billboard message. To tar a faith and its followers because
of the actions of a few is deplorable, hateful and morally repugnant.
Except that the ad doesn’t refer to all Muslims. It doesn’t
even “tar” Islam, which jihadists themselves already do a spectacularly good
job of tarring. The ad merely notes the 19,250 deadly attacks (a number that
has since risen dramatically) since
9/11/01 carried out in the name of Islam. It underscores the “Islamorealism” that
people like Feiner and Swiderski, in their politically correct bubble, prefer
to deny and ascribe instead to “Islamophobia.” It refers to jihadists, who have
no compunction about killing less fanatical Muslims. Apparently Feiner and Swiderski
are more outraged that the ad “could be upsetting” to jihadists than they are
about the Muslim victims of their co-religionists. How tolerant of them.
Geller countered by responding to Swiderski and asking why
no such mailing went out concerning recent anti-Israel ads run by the MTA. “This
speaks to a systemic, institutionalized anti-Semitism prevalent in your
administration and among the Board. Care to comment?” Geller posed a rhetorical
question to FrontPage Mag interviewer Jamie Glazov, “Why didn’t he react as
viscerally when the same kiosks had vicious blood libels posted about Israel?"
San Francisco, the city that proudly champions every
America- and Israel-hating radical nutball or movement you can name, was of
course horrified by what it deemed to be racist hate speech from “notorious
anti-Muslim hate blogger” Geller and AFDI (the AFDI has been stamped as a “hate
group” by the Southern
Poverty Law Center, whose mission is to designate as such everyone who
disagrees with the well-funded progressive agenda).
The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, reluctant
to open itself up to an AFDI lawsuit for suppressing its free speech, did not
refuse Geller’s ad but added a disclaimer: “SFMTA Policy Prohibits
Discrimination Based On National Origin, Religion and Other Characteristics and
Condemns Statements That Describe Any Group As Savages.”
Not content with posting the disclaimer alongside the ad
itself, SFMTA Board of Directors chairman Tom Nolan felt compelled to announce publicly
that “the recent ad has no value in facilitating constructive dialogue or
advancing the cause of peace and justice.”
Actually, the ad concisely offers
the only possible support for “the cause of peace and justice” – siding with
civilization over barbarism. There can be no “constructive dialogue” with, for
example, a fundamentalist regime whose most fanatical desire is to wipe you
from the face of the earth. Nothing has been less constructive in terms of
derailing the Iranian Ayatollahs and their lust for nuclear weapons than the
West’s decades-long effort to engage them in “constructive dialogue.”
Ahmadinejad and the Ayatollahs have merely used that as a delaying tactic to
string us along while they steamroll ahead with their genocidal plans.
The only people who would find the AFDI ads offensive are those
who don’t think twice about disparaging Israel as a genocidal apartheid state
propped up by the racist, imperialist United States of AmeriKKKa. These willfully
blind hypocrites believe Israel and America are the greatest threat to world
peace and that jihad is nothing more than “inner struggle.” Funny how Western multiculturalists
leap to the defense of a culture they don’t understand and whose supremacist
atrocities they whitewash, while readily denouncing their own culture as the
fount of all evil.
Let me be perfectly clear, as our President is fond of
saying: Islamic fundamentalists are savages. Israel celebrates life; Islamists
love death. Israel gives medical care even to Palestinian failed suicide
bombers, sends
emergency relief teams worldwide, and makes life-giving
scientific advancements. Jihadists behead captive
soldiers, partygoers,
and children;
frame
mentally challenged Christian children for blasphemy, the punishment for which is
death; hang homosexuals from cranes; crucify suspected
spies in Yemen and dissidents in Egypt; wage
genocide against Christianity minority communities in the wake of the “Arab
Spring”; and celebrate
the murderers of children. If that doesn’t validate Ms. Geller’s framing of
this conflict as a Clash of Civilization and Savagery, I don’t know what does.
(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 9/6/12)
