Here’s a review of Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer’s crude anti-Muslim movie “The Ground Zero Mosque: Second Wave of the 9/11 Attacks,” at the SPLC blog: Pamela Geller’s New Film: The Next Wave of Anti-Muslim Propaganda.

The “seminal, ground-breaking” film (as described on SIOA’s website) is intended to cast the Park51 controversy as a critical turning point in America’s war on terror – but despite incessant yanks on the viewer’s heartstrings, the 87-minute film makes a remarkably thin case for its provocative claim that it represented “the second wave of the 9/11 attacks.” The first 35 minutes and the last 20 minutes are almost entirely devoted to an emotional recounting the horror of the 9/11 attacks – often from the viewpoint of surviving family members – and a belabored critique of the mainstream media for allegedly ignoring or slanting the mosque controversy. The half-hour in between takes a cursory, one-sided look at questions about Rauf and El-Gamal, their financing, and about their alleged connections to radical Islamic figures.

The 9/11-related emotionalism thickly embedded throughout the movie serves a clear purpose. Like Geller and Spencer themselves, the presentation blurs any distinction between radicalized Muslim fundamentalists bent on violence, and Islam itself, thereby implying that the former accurately represent more than 1.5 billion nonviolent Muslims worldwide. It further interweaves concerns about Rauf’s “insensitivity” for choosing that particular location (Geller, at one point, says she has “no problem with mosques” in general) and insinuations about the developers’ motives (which imply Geller would object to the project even if it were moved). So is the film about a single offending mosque, a dangerous radical cleric allegedly masquerading as a moderate, or generalized anti-Muslim hostility? Yes.