Pamela Geller’s Anti-Muslim Crusade Gearing Up After Garland Shooting
After the shooting in Garland, Pamela Geller is promising to ramp up her anti-Muslim campaign.
Pamela Geller isn’t finished.
Pamela Geller isn’t finished.
Two days after hosting a deliberately provocative contest featuring cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed — an event in suburban Dallas that ended with a shooting — Geller told Foreign Policy she plans to do it again. The contest meant to poke Islam with depictions of the prophet, an act many Muslims consider blasphemous, and spurred gunmen Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi to seek revenge.
“We must not show that we are cowed into silence by violence. But that silence is what the mainstream media is recommending,” Geller said in a Tuesday afternoon email.
Geller’s suspect theory about the rising tide of Islam sweeping across the United States was only bolstered by the Islamic State’s dubious claim that the shooters were associated with the group. She continued to make media appearances Tuesday, pushing back against Donald Trump and other critics who accuse her of taunting Muslims, oddly likening herself to a civil rights icon.
“What would he have said about Rosa Parks?” Geller, referring to Trump, asked on Fox News. “‘Rosa Parks should never have gone to the front of the bus — she’s taunting people?’”
“I will not bridge my freedom so as not to offend savages,” said Geller, who was previously best known for her opposition to a mosque near Ground Zero in New York.
Geller has a history of provocative statements like this, and is willing to make more in the aftermath of the attack in Garland, Texas. She’s the president of the of the American Freedom Defense Initiative, a group that the Southern Poverty Law Center lists as a hate group. She’s also called Obama a closet Muslim and railed against Muslims while wearing a bikini.
She continued her role as provocateur in her email to FP. First, she praised the Garland police guarding the event for being “prepared, determined, and courageous” and for saving lives. She said she was not outside the Curtis Culwell Center when the shooting occurred.
Geller also made clear her anti-Muslim campaign would continue and warned what happened in Garland was bound to happen again.
“There is a war on free speech and this violent attack is a harbinger of things to come.”
Photo Credit: AFP
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