At NYU, Pamela Geller Claims She Isn’t ‘Anti-Muslim’ (Again)
On Wednesday, Pamela “Shrieking Harpy” Geller took her Traveling Bigotry Roadshow to an NYU class on “Cultural Wars.” As usual when she’s trying to appear rational, Geller denied that she has a single prejudiced bone in her body; this is her schtick at personal appearances, while on her website she spews non-stop hatred at everything and everybody related to Islam.
If you want to see the real Pamela Geller, just read her blog — a reeking sewer of ugliness, derangement, conspiracy theories, and overt, blatant racism and bigotry. And she isn’t fooling anyone with her transparent attempt to lie about it, as NYU Local’s national editor Surekha Ratnatunga shows: Right-Wing Blogger Discusses Jihad, Park51, And Free Speech At NYU.
Responding to my question about whether there is an anti-Muslim movement in America, she said, “not anti-Muslim, but counter-Jihadist.” She later dismissed accusations that she was racist by saying, “I believe in individualism, so I look at a person and judge them as an entire unit — who are they, what are their actions.”
Yet for the past six years, her blog has been criticizing Muslims not as individuals, but labeled as Muslims (she uses the term Jihadist interchangeably). Most recently, a clip of a man beating a puppy to death is characterized as “another Muslim abuse video.” She refuses to accept that there are moderate Muslims, only secular ones. She assumes everyone who follows Islam follows the most extreme Taliban interpretations of Sharia law. She called Park51 a “Mecca on the Hudson, because it is a habit of Islam to build mosques on the cherished sites of conquered land,” and the refusal to move it somewhere else “inhumane.”
Geller’s rhetoric dehumanizes Muslims, and though she most definitely has the constitutional right to say all these things, she’s hardly the embodiment of the civic responsibility she criticizes Muslims for lacking. The “clash of civilizations” narrative that Geller promotes may just be a metaphor to her, but other people take it quite literally. Whether Geller believes she’s a racist or a part of an anti-Muslim movement is of less importance than the overtly racist and anti-Muslim readership to which she panders. To ignore the repercussion of your words is to not understand their true meaning, so for all of Geller’s purported views on personal liberty and civic responsibility, she ultimately harnesses them hypocritically.