The 9/11 Spectacle
A good piece at The Propagandist on the convergence of goals among Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, and the radical Islamists and leftists they typically cast as their enemies:
No-one has better exposed the dovetailing between Geller and her anti-Muslim bigots, who are staging a rally against the proposed Islamic center near Ground Zero, and the assorted troofers and terrorism groupies organizing the “Our Lives After 9/11” conference nearby, than the diligent, brilliant blogger Adam Holland. In a recent piece on the John Birch Society provenance of an ostensibly leftist troofer protest, Holland nails it when he says, “these are all divergent streams of the paranoid style of American politics.”
Paranoia breeds panic, and that is exactly what the bigots and conspiracy theorists want - to spread far and wide the belief that the western relationship with Islam carries within it the seeds of apocalypse. Geller, a woman with an equally tenuous grasp of glamor and grammar, casts the Islamic center as a “victory mosque,” concrete proof, assuming it gets built, that New York City has been incorporated into the Dar al Islam (an assertion, incidentally, that left even Bill O’Reilly looking skeptical.)
And where Geller has “Islam” waging a war on “us,” Galloway will flip it and roar that “we” are waging war on “Islam.” Some of his co-speakers at the 9/11 conference - like Cynthia McKinney and Wayne Madsen - will go one step further by claiming that the opening salvo in this war was actually an inside job, and that we should look to Mossad, rather than Al Qaeda, for answers.
Lost in all this is the salutary observation made by Jonathon Narvey in these pages yesterday that when western bombast touches off violence in the Islamic world, the majority of those left dead are more than likely to be Muslims. Lost, too, is the understanding that the potential clash of pathologies at Ground Zero could just as easily result in an embrace.
Take, for example, the record of both camps on the orgy of Serb nationalist violence in the Balkans during the 1990s. Geller has been outspoken in her defense of the late Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, the architect of ethnic cleansing, and Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb war criminal who directed the rapes and massacres in Banja Luka, Srebrenica, Gorazde and other Bosnian towns and cities. For Galloway, speaking on his show on the Iranian Holocaust denial outfit Press TV, Milosevic, Karadzic and his old buddy Saddam Hussein were set up as war criminals in order to hide the real war criminals (no prizes for guessing whom he is referring to.)