An Islam-Bashing Bridge Too Far? Not for Pamela Geller
But Geller is made of tougher stuff. “I love these Marines,” she writes. “Perhaps this is the infidel interpretation of the Islamic ritual of washing and preparing the body for burial.”
Geller’s star has dimmed considerably since Sept. 11, 2010, when she and Dutch Muslim-bashing politician Geerts Wilders headlined at a rally against the so-called Ground Zero Mosque in lower Manhattan. Just as Timothy McVeigh and his co-conspirators set back the antigovernment “Patriot” movement by effectively putting some of its words into practice, Geller, her close ally Robert Spencer and many of their Islamophobic colleagues were deeply embarrassed last summer when the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik quoted them approvingly in his anti-Islamic manifesto. (Last July, Breivik killed 77 people, most of them teenagers, who he thought were helping promote Muslim immigration.) The sales of her latest book Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance have been lackluster. In October, two hotels, one in Sugarland, Texas and one in Nashville, Tenn., cancelled events at which she was a featured speaker.
Geller, of course, blames jihad, the forces of “political correctness,” and the liberal media for conspiring to silence her. “Truth,” she says, “is the New Hate Speech.”
Or maybe the problem is that her hate speech (and if chortling about the desecration of dead bodies doesn’t qualify, it’s hard to think of what does) so clearly reveals the ugly truth about what she really believes.