For a monster, Pamela Geller is surprisingly likeable. For a rabid Far Right hatemonger she’s surprisingly liberal: although she is politically on the Right she’s a supporter of gay marriage, pro-choice, etc. For a Nazi/fascist/white supremacist, she’s a bit too proudly Jewish. For an anti-Muslim bigot she seems to have spent rather a lot of time helping Muslims, especially young Muslim females escaping from violence.
And for an ignorant Islamophobe, she seems to know quite a bit about Islam.
READ! IN THE NAME OF YOUR LORD
All right-thinking souls know that the Twin Towers were brought down by George W. Bush to effect a tyrannical takeover of the United States for a couple of years, before putting himself up for re-election. Back in 2001 however, Pamela Geller somehow got the idea that Islamists had something to do with it. She responded to 9/11 with an attack of her own, an intellectual assault on the ideology of jihad, learning everything she could and doing her best to educate others too.
Perhaps she should have just listened to affable celebrity Reza Aslan. After a particularly big terror attack – I forget whether it was the one where we all responded by holding up inflatable pencils, or the one where we sang “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” or the one where… – Reza appeared on CNN to patiently yet indignantly deny any connection between these violent acts and the teachings of his faith, which, he stated, “is just a religion, and like every religion it depends on what you bring to it.” Whatever questions I may have had about Islam, that certainly answers all of them. But Reza and his nice smile weren’t around in the immediate aftermath of the 2001 attacks, so, while all proper-minded Americans were wondering how long before the TV and the football got back to normal, Pamela Geller started slogging through ibn Ishaq’s “Life Of Muhammad” and Ali Dashti’s “Twenty-Three Years,” she began penetrating the Quran.
The Quran is a book and, like every book, it’s trying to tell you something.
SEE NO *****! HEAR NO *****! SPEAK NO *****!
“Fatwa: Hunted In America” documents Geller’s subsequent transformation from a newspaper publisher and socialite into a woman who needs 24/7 armed guards; a survivor of several assassination attempts; a pariah who’s been smeared and defamed by everyone from the Southern Poverty Law Centre to Donald Trump, from ISIS to the UK Government. They know her name in the desert: the sort of men who stone homosexuals and adulterers have issued death-sentences for Pamela Geller.
This book recounts her non-stop campaigns and controversies, the numerous lawsuits she’s filed and the steps her enemies have taken to try to silence her. She’s an ardent Republican who thinks Obama was the devil: few people reading this are going to agree with everything she’s done or said, but even fewer could deny that at every step she has fought bravely and righteously.
THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS
Seriously though, Donald Trump condemned Pamela Geller for being “unnecessarily inflammatory towards Muslims.” That was after she organised a display of some cartoons. Again with the cartoons…
Following the massacre at the “Charlie Hebdo” offices in early 2015, devout Muslims across the world demanded that more be done to ensure their religious sensibilities would not be offended so sacrilegiously ever again. In Garland, Texas, this manifested as a “Stand With The Prophet In Honour And Respect” conference at the Curtis Culwell Centre. Geller, responding, organised a “Draw Muhammad” contest at the same venue.
Two men drove a thousand miles from Arizona to be at the “Draw Muhammad” event. They parked up, got out of their car with their guns and started shooting. But Pamela had learnt from others’ mistakes: she’d taken her security seriously and had brought a SWAT team along. Result: two dead jihadis, no other fatalities. It became apparent in the ensuing investigation that the would-be killers were in the early stages of planning an attack on some other target, possibly the Super Bowl. We’ll never know how many deaths and injuries they would have caused had Pamela Geller not flushed them out early.
Result: Geller was pilloried across the media for causing violence, for provoking terror, for getting people killed, for putting lives at risk. She was slammed as offensive, uncivilised, insulting, “unnecessarily inflammatory.” Anjem Choudary, Fox News, Garland’s mayor, all united in criticism of Pamela Geller. The FBI knew what was going to happen and did nothing. Even the surviving members of “Charlie Hebdo” sneered at her!
Geller compares this to a rape-victim being blamed because of the mini-skirt she was wearing, but anyone engaged in such squalid victim-blaming would generally concede that rape is wrong too. So the analogy doesn’t quite work: for the Pamela Gellers of this world, 100% of the attention, 100% of the blame and the condemnation, is on you. It’s just easier that way. This is why the “Charlie Hebdo” crew had to be posthumously transformed from lifelong anti-racist activists into racists; from soixante-huitard Leftists to sexist-homophobic-xenophobic haters. By keeping the focus entirely on the dead cartoonists, by twisting them into Right-wing Islamophobes, no-one had to be inconvenienced with questions like: and the ones with the guns and the Blasphemy Laws, anything sexist/homophobic/xenophobic about them? Where do their political convictions sit on the Left-Right spectrum? And where do those convictions come from and who shares them?
Pamela Geller really is Right-wing, she’s sometimes shrill and obnoxiously American and of course she gets things wrong, you can go through her writings and beliefs and find much to criticise. And the texts that are held up as justification for her slaughter: anything to criticise in them?
“I condemn all forms of violence! No-one should be targeted for drawing pictures, but…”
“Sure: and the ideology calling for the violence, do you condemn that?”
“…I oppose all forms of extremism.”
“FATWA” shows just how dangerous a little knowledge plus a big mouth can be, but the sense you get reading it is that Geller doesn’t regret anything. She could have safely settled on the 9/11 attacks being part of a somewhat over-elaborate cunning plan by New World Order lizards to build an oil-pipeline in Afghanistan which they subsequently decided not to build, or it could have been Third World insurgents punishing us for the wicked things we’ve done, or another dastardly plot by hook-nosed Christ-killing Zionists to subvert a fair nation; or else she could have maintained her beliefs but fled, there was always the Witness Relocation option, forgotten away like Molly Norris. Nah: Geller is a tough New York knight who suspects she’s going to win and that Fourth Wave feminists – once the present miserable generation is done cannibalising itself – will regard her as an icon, or at worst as some ballsy mad aunt who might make you cringe a bit but who you wouldn’t exactly want to see lynched by backwards ultra-reactionary theocrats.
#JeSuisYourNameHere
For Theresa May, abject historical incompetence isn’t a new thing: as Home Secretary in 2013, she banned Pamela Geller from entering the UK on the grounds that Geller’s planned appearance was “not conducive to the public good.” It was claimed that her statements and actions could “foster hatred” and might cause “inter-community violence.” We let in men like Syed Muzaffar Shah Qadri who was banned from preaching in Pakistan, too extreme an Islamist for Pakistan, he had no problem getting into England; but we banned the mouthy Jewess who told a bit too much truth to power.
The UK owes Pamela Geller an apology. And the whole world owes her a fair hearing: “FATWA” is an inspiring, depressing, terrifying, instructive book, worth anyone’s time.
“You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality.”
SCRAP 