Geller Promises to ‘Save’ Non-Muslims in Muslim Countries
Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, co-heads of the anti-Muslim hate group Stop Islamization of America (SIOA), have truly outdone themselves.
In the wake of European authorities’ cancellation of a planned rally in Strasbourg, France, the pair has announced its most grandiose plan yet: On Sept. 11, 2011, the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, SIOA plans to launch a “Freedom from Jihad aid flotilla” called The Audacity of the Infidel. The plan is, in part, meant to mock past and planned flotillas organized by leftists to bring aid to the Gaza Strip, which has been isolated by Israel.
Strasbourg officials put the kibosh on the planned summit, which was to have taken place this Saturday, due to security concerns over protests planned by antifascist groups and what SOIA characterized as “Islamic supremacist organizations.”
(Violent left-wing protests are more common in Europe than they are in the U.S. As Geller and Spencer point out, Strasbourg was also the site of a 2009 demonstration against NATO that turned violent when about 1,000 “Black Bloc” anarchists attacked police and set a hotel on fire. Also in 2009, an anti-Muslim rally in London organized by SIOA’s sister organization, Stop Islamisation of Europe, and the anti-Muslim English Defence League (EDL) ended badly, with riot police shielding the anti-Muslim demonstrators from a vastly larger crowd of counter-protesters.)
“The SIOA/SIOE Freedom From Jihad aid flotilla is intended to be a direct response to the capitulation of French, European, and American authorities to Leftist and Islamic supremacist forces of oppression and injustice,” the SIOA announcement says. “The mission is the first attempt by free citizens anywhere in the world to come to the aid of non-Muslims persecuted for their faith in Muslim countries.”
This is not strictly true. Though history shows that the Crusades were ultimately far more about conquest than virtue, in a 1095 speech at the Council of Clermont, Pope Urban II urged Christians to take up arms and rescue their “brethren” in the East: “As the most of you have heard, the Turks and Arabs have attacked them,” he said. “I, or rather the Lord, beseech you … to carry aid promptly to those Christians and to destroy that vile race from the lands of our friends.”
Check out SPLC’s Hatewatch for more.
