Recently, while Pamela Geller’s American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) held a Muhammad cartoon drawing contest in Garland, Texas, a couple of American-born Islamic zealots opened fire on the security officers who were hired in anticipation of precisely such an attack.
One officer was injured. Fortunately, no officers were killed, and both would-be mass murderers were shot dead.
Someone up there must really like Pamela Geller.
Down here, however, there are plenty of people who most decidedly dislike Geller.
Since she escaped the death wish of Islamic extremists, Geller has been in the cross hairs of leftist extremists.
Heidi Beirich, of the “hate-watch” organization, the Southern Poverty Law Center, said that while Geller is entitled to express herself, “I think decent people would say: ‘Why do you [Geller] need to do that [blaspheme against Muhammad]?’”
MSNBC host Chris Matthews castigated Geller for arranging a “trap” for those who were intent upon slaughtering her and every one of the 200 or so people in attendance at her event.
CNN’s Alisyn Camerota informed Geller that the latter’s critics seem to have a point in charging her with “Islamophobia.”
The Washington Post offers this gem of a headline: “Event organizer offers no apology after thwarted attack in Texas.”
That the usual suspects on the left reserve their moral outrage for Geller, rather than those who would’ve murdered her and the crowds of participants at the Garland exhibition, is telling. It’s also all too predictable.
When the French magazine Charlie Hebdo published cartoons depicting Muhammad, a couple of Islamic fundamentalists responded by massacring several people at its offices. In the wake of this bloodbath—an attack on “free speech” is how it was branded—nearly the entire Western media, and certainly all of the left, expressed its solidarity with the murdered.
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Beyond the fact that the aspiring killers in Texas failed where their French counterparts succeeded, the only other difference between the situations in the Lone Star state and Paris is that the illustrations of Muhammad featured at Geller’s event weren’t nearly as obnoxious, perverse, and disgusting as those printed in the pages of Charlie Hebdo.
So why, then, is it that legions of people from around the Western world were clamoring to “stand with Charlie,” while Geller and her organization have been condemned? For an answer, we must look beyond the details of these two events to the political circumstances of those involved with them:
Charlie Hebdo is a militantly irreligious, leftist rag.
Geller’s AFDI is nothing of the sort. In fact, Geller’s organization exists exactly in order to draw the public’s attention to the glaring incompatibility between Islamic fundamentalism and Western civilization.
Both her conviction that jihadism deserves as much attention as she devotes to it as well as the latest tactics that Geller’s employed in driving home this point can and should be debated. Yet one shouldn’t have to sympathize with Geller in order to be struck by the breathtaking hypocrisy of her critics.
To be clear, Geller’s detractors are motivated by nothing more or less than a deep and abiding ideological animosity toward her, for they regard Geller as just one more “right-winger” with whom they must contend, just one more obstacle in their path toward “the fundamental transformation” of the world.
And her background as an outspoken white, non-violent, non-leftist critic of a Politically Correct Zeitgeist that insulates certain groups—like Muslims—against any objections, to say nothing of the kinds of objections that Geller is known to raise, guarantees her standing as an object of the left’s contempt.
As for Muslims, they are among the teeming masses of the world’s “oppressed,” the targets of the Christian West’s centuries’ old campaign against humanity. From the Crusaders of yesteryear to the imperialists of today, Muslims are, ultimately, victims. From the left’s perspective, it is precisely this history of “oppression” and “exploitation” that explains terrorism and jihadism.
Yet these “root causes” don’t just explain Islamic violence.
They justify them.
When the violence is directed at unenlightened retrogrades like Geller, it is that much more justified.
Admittedly, no leftist will say as much—probably not even to him or herself. But this is the meta-narrative, the unspoken conceptual framework, to which the left assimilates Islamic-on-Everyone violence.
Of this, anyone who knows anything at all about the left can have no doubts.
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