Henry Ford
Footballguy
This conversation will be more helpful to you if you stop making up things you'd like me to have said instead of responding to what I've actually said.
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Muhammad Cartoon Contest in Garland Tx. Hundreds of ISIS In America (1 Viewer)
- Thread starter Dr Oadi
- Start date
renesauz
IBL Representative
timschochet
Footballguy
But that's exactly what I did. You wrote, "That's the tack some have taken here, holding a public exhibition of cartoons should be restricted because somebody might get hurt." I challenged you to name who has done that? Not me. Though I don't mind it being restricted on college campuses, I would not want to see public exhibitions restrictrd elsewhere, and my reasoning about college campuses has nothing to do with people getting hurt. So again, who are the "some people" you are referring to?
SaintsInDome2006
Footballguy
This POV still cracks me up. You basically agree with the view of the Geller artists on this one belief of this one sect of this one religion but they are "stupid" for pointing out their absurdity ("don't draw Mohammed / that's why I draw you") in public what you acknowledge in private. The notion that rights are well exercised when solely done in private is a really poor one.
NorvilleBarnes
Footballguy
Not really.
This isn't poking. This is expression and it's allowed in this country. You don't get to shut it down just because you're offended. Its's really that simple.
timschochet
Footballguy
Did he say anything about shutting it down? What's with you people anyhow? You act like any criticism of this stupid contest is censorship and an assault on the 1st Amendment.
Why not?
Isn't opposing someone just free speech? "Free speech" is nothing more than the notion that the government will not punish speech - it says nothing about individuals, and how they react to any particular "speech".
You don't get to murder anyone - but that has nothing to do with free speech.
SaintsInDome2006
Footballguy
I think I get it now. The argument isn't that the state or Feds should halt speech when its offensive, even allegedly "provocative" speech, and let's face it's not legally possible to do so in this country anyway. No the argument is that citizens should undertake such censorship themselves, or be cowed or shamed into doing so, to accomplish as a practical matter what cannot be legally.
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msommer
Footballguy
SaintsInDome2006
Footballguy
It hasn't been explicitly stated that way. Isn't the argument that the Geller cartoonists should not have held this event? If so isn't the argument that others should withhold speaking this kind of provocative speech in other similar situations?
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timschochet
Footballguy
i don't understand your use of the term shouldn't. I think it was stupid and hateful myself. But it's up to them if they want to be stupid and hateful.
msommer
Footballguy
Free speech is not guaranteed free from consequence.
The lawfulness of that consequence (and indeed of the speech itself, e.g. libel) will be handles by the courts
SaintsInDome2006
Footballguy
SaintsInDome2006
Footballguy
You're again not contradicting me, of course it's up to them. "People" are saying they shouldn't have done it. I'm guessing you're also saying others shouldn't do hateful and stupid things (as you see it) of their own accord.
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msommer
Footballguy
At least you can strike me from the list of those making the bolded argument.
AFAISI Geller is making the argument that her free speech should be guaranteed from consequence.
G
General Tso
Guest
Horribly said. Poking back is not showing up with guns and bombs ready to kill scores of people.I can't believe anyone actually liked this post. We are equating cartoon drawing to mass murder. Amazing.
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squistion
Footballguy
You can't believe anyone liked the post, probably because you don't seem to understand the point he was making.
No one is equating cartoon drawing to mass murder. Please. He specifically mentioned that the response to the poking was not rational and didn't go to your Straw Man argument suggesting that the response to the cartoon drawing was somehow equivalent or justified.
Henry Ford
Footballguy
Henry Ford
Footballguy
Because what you stated earlier was that it could be restricted based on "inciting violence." Were you worried guilty people would get hurt?
NorvilleBarnes
Footballguy
NorvilleBarnes
Footballguy
Oh good grief - I'll play along and explain, but only for a little while. The fundamental muslims are the ones who want to shut it down - you know this.
What's with us people is that we get the underlying concept at hand. What's with you people so easily distracted? I want to scream every time someone says something like "was it a good cartoon" or "are they cartoonist for a living" or "what a stupid contest". Sorry if I don't join in and mock the silliness of the contest when there are armed nutjobs out to massacre those engaged in the perfectly legal silliness.
Irishidiot handle?
renesauz
IBL Representative
Didn't say we should shut it down...people are allowed to be stupid. But I do think we should be critical of it and call it what it is- offensive and stupid, instead of trying to celebrate it and try to hold it up as some important expression of "Free Speech".
rockaction
Footballguy
If people can't realize through debate that these homicidal maniacs chill free speech with the assassin's veto, then maybe humor will do it.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/10/snl-draw-muhammad_n_7252262.html?ncid=txtlnkusaolp00000592
All the more reason to draw this consistently.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/10/snl-draw-muhammad_n_7252262.html?ncid=txtlnkusaolp00000592
All the more reason to draw this consistently.
G
General Tso
Guest
I saw that last night. Good skit, and very suprised to se it done.Just wondering, is it also illegal under Sharia Law to talk about blaspheming Muhammad?
rockaction
Footballguy
This is probably the best answer.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/14/opinion/islams-problem-with-blasphemy.html?_r=0
NorvilleBarnes
Footballguy
msommer
Footballguy
cstu
Footballguy
Which is why I've stated repeatedly that the problem with Islam is not the Quran but the Hadiths.
G
General Tso
Guest
Yes you have, and you've been absolutely correct.The Hadiths can be more easily modified, no? I mean, it's a scholar's interpretation of the text itself. This would seem to lend credence to the idea of putting more pressure on Muslims to change their ways. The silence and inaction from the Muslim world is becoming more and more alarming to me. And it argues for MORE pressure from Geller and others to address these terrible interpretations.cstu said:
Does anybody in here support Muslim hypersensitivity regarding Muhammad and blasphemy interpretations? Does anyone think that a religion, any religion, is beyond reproach or social criticism? And does anyone not believe in satire and political cartoons as an appropriate method for social criticism? We all agree that what Geller did here was legal and should be legal. But what we haven't discussed is, why was it a bad idea? Because it was hurtful?
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cstu
Footballguy
It would be difficult to "correct" the Hadiths at this point since too many respected Islamic scholars have studied them. A better path for Islam to take is the Quranist one - an outright dismissal of all Hadiths. It's not even clear which Hadiths are outright fabrications. At least by following the Koran only, Muslims can be assured that it's authentic from the time of Muhammad (other than its order, which was put together after his death).
Free speech should be legal - period. The current problem is that interpretations of the Hadiths have given people the support they need to kill when they've been offended (the Koran leaves punishment up to God).
Muhammad claimed he was only a prophet and didn't want images of him so that he wouldn't become an idol. In fact, Muslims have made him an idol even without images. A non Muslim creating an image of Muhammad shouldn't be offensive to Muslims since that's not what Muhammad was concerned with.
Extremist Muslims (which IMO includes a lot of Sunnis who I consider 'fundamentalists' because they interpret the Koran more literally) think it's their job to kill anyone who offends their religion. However, the Shia Muslims I know think the cartoons are unnecessary and offensive for the sake of being offensive, but don't think anyone should be killing over them.
It's free speech for me to advertise a "Burn A ###### Mannequin On A Cross Day" on my farm but when a black person shows up to kill me no one is going to feel sorry for me. Something is a bad idea if it serves no useful purpose other than to offend people.
That is unless you're talking about it's pissing on a Crucifix or likening the Christian God to a "Flying Spaghetti Monster". Then it's really edgy and funny.
timschochet
Footballguy
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/05/10/in-pam-geller-s-world-everybody-jihads.html
he day after two gunmen were killed by police while trying to shoot their way into a Garland, Texas community center hosting a Mohammed cartoon contest, reformist American Muslim activist Zuhdi Jasser appeared on Fox News not only to condemn the attack but to unconditionally affirm the right to free expression—including the right to insult Islam—and praise defiance against blasphemy bans.
What Jasser graciously did not mention was that the people whose speech he was defending—contest organizers and anti-Islam polemicists Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer—had viciously attacked him in the past. In a 2011 articlepublished by the right-wing website The American Thinker in response to Geller’s screed on the same site, Jasser documented the duo’s smear campaign in which he was sometimes dismissed as a faux Muslim and sometimes denounced as a camouflaged extremist practicing taqiyya, the doctrine which supposedly allows Muslims to lie in the cause of Islam.
This sordid episode is typical of the way Geller and her comrade-in-arms Spencer, co-founders of the American Freedom Defense Initiative, conduct their misnamed “anti-jihadist” battle. It is also a good example of why the two are no heroes for free speech. No, Geller did not “provoke” the terror attack in Garland, as a number of pundits (and even the New York Times editorial board) have deplorably suggested; her cartoon contest is not the moral equivalent of the attack, and she does not need to apologize for the exercise of her First Amendment rights or for the terrorists’ actions. She does, however, have to answer for a lengthy record of peddling anti-Muslim hysteria, targeting Muslims’ First Amendment right to worship, smearing innocent people as jihadists, and even excusing the slaughter of Muslims in the former Yugoslavia. We cannot allow terrorists to curb our speech; but we also cannot allow them to turn hatemongers into heroes.
Whatever valid concerns Geller, Spencer, and their allies may raise about political Islamism wind up being eclipsed by the fact that they not only conflate Islamist radicalism with all Islam but make disturbingly little distinction between criticism of Islam and hostility toward Muslims.
In a contentious interview with CNN host Alisyn Camerota Monday, Geller indignantly denied that she paints Islam “with a broad brush,” declaring that she is “anti-jihad” and “anti-sharia.” But for the most part, she and Spencer make almost no secret that they regard radical Islam as indistinguishable from Islam itself.
Spencer, a prolific author who has a degree in religious studies and whose tone is more judicious than Geller’s, does not quite state outright that non-extremist Islam is impossible. Nonetheless, he calls Islamic reform “quixotic” and “virtually inconceivable,” and sweepingly describes the faith of “millions” of Muslim immigrants in the West as “absolutely incompatible with Western society.” When America’s first Muslim congressman Keith Ellison (D-Minnesota) chose to use a Quran in his swearing-in ceremony, Spencer flatly stated that “no American official should be taking an oath on the Qur’an.” His 2005 best-seller, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), has such chapter titles as “Islamic Law: Lie, Steal and Kill.”
Critics accuse Spencer of cherry-picking and distortions. While these charges often come from sources with biases of their own, there is no doubt that his account of Islamic history is blatantly one-sided. Thus, he tries to rebut the “PC myth” that Jews in the Middle Ages fared better under Islamic rule than in Christian Europe by quoting from a 13th Century papal bull that affirmed the rights accorded to Jews—but fails to mention the many expulsions of Jewish communities from European countries and glosses over crusader massacres of Jews.
When Spencer writes about moderate Muslims, it is invariably to disparage them as deluded, insincere, or irrelevant. His targets include reformist Muslims who are strongly critical of radical Islamism and have themselves been accused of being Islamophobic shills: Jasser, self-styled “Muslim refusenik” Irshad Manji, Sufi Muslim convert Stephen Schwartz. They also include Kurdish fighters battling the Islamic State: last October, a Spencer post on his site, JihadWatch, reported a Kurdish woman’s suicide bomb attack on ISIS troops in a besieged town under the jeering headline, “Kurdish Muslima carries out moderate jihad/martyrdom suicide attack against the Islamic State,” and sneered at the idea that “the foes of the Islamic State are all moderate.”
Spencer ostensibly disavows bigotry; yet a 2006 JihadWatch post,—written by the site’s co-administrator Hugh Fitzgerald but posted by Spencer himself—suggests that the most peaceful, non-violent, and even secularized Muslims are still a danger to the West as long as they have not explicitly renounced Islam, because either they or their children may revert to a more militant form of the faith.
Both Spencer and Geller relentlessly hype the Muslim peril in the U.S. Every violent crime by a Muslim becomes a one-person jihad, from a mentally ill Bosnian teen’s shooting spree at a Salt Lake City shopping mall to a drug addict’smeth-fueled rampage assaulting customers and staff at a Seaside, California Walmart.
In 2011, Geller sounded the alarm about “Vehicular Jihad in Arizona,” where a man named Ajaz Rahaman was found dead after crashing his SUV into a shopping center storefront and hitting three cars in the parking lot. Later, Geller apparentlyscrubbed the story from her site when it was confirmed that Rahaman, a respected ob-gyn, had died of a massive heart attack while driving. The deleted post, preserved in a blog feed archive, also mentioned a “vehicular jihad” incident in San Diego in which a taxicab driven by an Egyptian immigrant jumped a curb and injured 35 people; Geller forgot to mention that the police determined the cabdriver had fallen asleep at the wheel.
Homicidal (and suicidal) non-Muslims can be recruited to the cause as well. In 2007, Gellerharped obsessively on the notion that Virginia Tech mass shooter Seung-Hui Cho, a Korean national and a Christian, was a secret jihadi because of the mysterious “Ismail Ax” tattoo on his arm. Two years earlier, Spencer was one of the bloggers flogging the theory that Joel Hinrichs, a University of Oklahoma engineering student who killed himself by detonating a homemade bomb in his backpack near the campus football stadium during a game, was a Muslim convert and had planned a suicide bombing inside the stadium. This speculation was based on these incredibly incriminating clues: Hinrichs had recently grown a beard, had lived a few blocks from a mosque, and had a Pakistani roommate.
This Muslims-under-the-bed paranoia also drives distortion-riddled reports about the alleged encroachment of “sharia law” in America—which can mean nothing more than utterly innocuous accommodations for practicing Muslims such as ritual foot baths on university campuses and at airports.
Take the “sharia courtroom” scandal in 2012, in which a Muslim judge in Pennsylvania was said to have let a Muslim immigrant off the hook for assaulting an atheist who had marched in a local Halloween parade dressed as “Zombie Mohammed.” The only grain of truth in this story was that the judge, Mark W. Martin, had quite inappropriately lectured the victim for abusing his First Amendment rights before dismissing the harassment charge for lack of evidence. But Martin, a Republican and an Iraq war veteran, was (as he confirmed to the media) a churchgoing Lutheran; the confusion was based on a misheard line in the audio of the court session.
Undeterred, Geller continued to insist that Martin was a “sharia judge” who had declared himself a Muslim in the court hearing and was probably lying about it in the aftermath—because, of course, Muslims lie.
Geller herself has a rather strained relationship with the truth. In 2011, sheagreed to settle a defamation suit by removing from her site several posts suggesting—with no evidence—that Columbus, Ohio attorney Omar Tarazi had ties to the terrorist group Hamas. Tarazi was the attorney for the parents of Rifqa Bary, a runaway Ohio teen who became a cause célébre for the “anti-jihadist” set when she took refuge with a pair of Florida pastors she had met online, claiming that her Muslim parents were going to kill her for converting to Christianity.
If Muslims in the Geller/Spencer universe are always presumed guilty of jihadism, any non-Muslim seen as too soft on Islam is branded a “dhimmi”—a term that, historically, denotes the subject status of Christians and Jews under Muslim rule. Even Bernard Lewis, preeminent Middle East historian and longtime critic of Islamic radicalism, once ended up on the “Dhimmi Watch” wall of shame on Spencer’s site. Lewis has weathered his share of attacks for alleged anti-Islamic and anti-Arab views. But he has run afoul of the “anti-jihadists” for taking too positive a historical view of Islamic civilization. Geller, meanwhile, has castigated Lewis in more colorful terms as an “apologist for Islam” and even for “Islamic Jew-hatred.”
Another strong critic of Islamism, Michael Totten, an award-winning foreign correspondent whose work has appeared in such publications as Commentaryand The Wall Street Journal, has been targeted by Geller for writing too sympathetically about Bosnian and Kosovar Muslims.
“I got on the hit list of Pamela Geller and her flock of honking geese when, while reporting from Bosnia and Kosovo, I wrote about Serbian ethnic cleansing and war crimes,” Totten told me in an email. “She insists not only that Serbian ethnic cleansing didn’t occur—never mind that I know some of the victims and visited some of the ethnically cleansed areas in person—but also that ‘every major US paper in 1999’ supposedly ‘debunked’ the ethnic cleansing that every knowledgeable and serious person knows happened. The woman lives in an alternate universe.”
Totten’s run-in with Geller highlights another troubling aspect of her views: a propensity for Bosnian Muslim genocide denial and for valorizing Serbian mass murderers as leaders of anti-jihadist resistance. (“The Serbs dared to fight. That’s what this is all about,” she wrote in a 2011 post.) Spencer has generally stayed quiet on this issue, but one his closest associates, writer and academic Srdja Trifkovic, is not only a denier of Serbian war crimes but a former advisor to one of the accused perpetrators, Bosnian Serb politician Radovan Karadzic.
Kejda Germani, the Kosovar émigré writer who documented the Spencer/Trifkovic connection five years ago, wrote at the time that Spencer and his associates’ “shrill and unfortunately universally accepted identification with ‘the counter-jihadist movement’ is severely detrimental to the efforts of respectable intellectuals standing up to Islamofascism.”
In fact, what’s obfuscated by the hate is that some “anti-jihadists” do have legitimate points that are too often dismissed by liberal commentators in debates over Islam and Islamophobia.
It is true, for instance, that Islamist radicalism cannot be treated as simply a perversion of Islam when it is backed by scriptural passages and much Islamic theology. It is true that, at present, radical ideology is vastly more powerful and more mainstream in Islam than in other major religions, and even some clerics praised as moderates—such as Egyptian cleric Yusuf Al-Qaradawi—justify the death penalty for apostasy and homosexuality. It is true that troublingly large majorities of Muslims in many countries, including Afghanistan, Egypt, and Pakistan, support sharia law—the real, on-the-books version—and executions for religious and moral offenses. (It’s also important to note that Muslims in Turkey, Central Asia, and the former Yugoslavian states generally do not).
It is true that while American Muslims hold notably moderate views, radicalization is a real problem. (Consider the career of radical imam Anwar Al-Awlaki, killed in a U.S. drone strike in 2011, who served a large congregation in Northern Virginia and preached at many other mosques before going to Yemen in 2004 to fight for Al Qaeda.) It is true that, as reformist American Muslim writer Asra Nomani argued in a recent essay in The Washington Post, the charge of “Islamophobia” often gets hurled at critics of Islamic extremism.
But treating Islam as a monolith, denying the possibility of reform, and demonizing Muslims en masse is not the answer. If Christianity and Judaism could transcend their scriptural and theological baggage once used to justify fanaticism and oppression, there is no reason to believe that Islam cannot do the same. Spencer has argued that Islamic reform has no theological foundation, but he ignores the work of such 20th Century thinkers as Mahmoud Mohammed Taha, who made the case for the abrogation of the Quran’s later, harsher texts by the earlier, more peaceful ones (rather than vice versa). Today, there are Muslim scholars who champion a revision of Islamic orthodoxy on everything from women’s rights to religious freedom. In 2004, over 2,500 Muslim academics from 23 countries signed a petition to the United Nations condemning “Sheikhs of terror” who use Islamic scriptures as justification for political violence.
This is why, while we must stand by Geller as a victim of an outrageous attack on fundamental speech rights, it would be a tragic mistake to treat her or Spencer as leaders in the fight against the radical ideology that has been called Islamism or Islamofascism.
In his 2011 response to their attacks, Jasser warned that “Geller’s and Spencer’s genre is headed in only one direction—declaring an ideological war against one-fourth of the world’s population and expecting to neutralize the Islamist threat by asking Muslims to renounce their faith.” It is, perhaps literally, a dead end.
he day after two gunmen were killed by police while trying to shoot their way into a Garland, Texas community center hosting a Mohammed cartoon contest, reformist American Muslim activist Zuhdi Jasser appeared on Fox News not only to condemn the attack but to unconditionally affirm the right to free expression—including the right to insult Islam—and praise defiance against blasphemy bans.
What Jasser graciously did not mention was that the people whose speech he was defending—contest organizers and anti-Islam polemicists Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer—had viciously attacked him in the past. In a 2011 articlepublished by the right-wing website The American Thinker in response to Geller’s screed on the same site, Jasser documented the duo’s smear campaign in which he was sometimes dismissed as a faux Muslim and sometimes denounced as a camouflaged extremist practicing taqiyya, the doctrine which supposedly allows Muslims to lie in the cause of Islam.
This sordid episode is typical of the way Geller and her comrade-in-arms Spencer, co-founders of the American Freedom Defense Initiative, conduct their misnamed “anti-jihadist” battle. It is also a good example of why the two are no heroes for free speech. No, Geller did not “provoke” the terror attack in Garland, as a number of pundits (and even the New York Times editorial board) have deplorably suggested; her cartoon contest is not the moral equivalent of the attack, and she does not need to apologize for the exercise of her First Amendment rights or for the terrorists’ actions. She does, however, have to answer for a lengthy record of peddling anti-Muslim hysteria, targeting Muslims’ First Amendment right to worship, smearing innocent people as jihadists, and even excusing the slaughter of Muslims in the former Yugoslavia. We cannot allow terrorists to curb our speech; but we also cannot allow them to turn hatemongers into heroes.
Whatever valid concerns Geller, Spencer, and their allies may raise about political Islamism wind up being eclipsed by the fact that they not only conflate Islamist radicalism with all Islam but make disturbingly little distinction between criticism of Islam and hostility toward Muslims.
In a contentious interview with CNN host Alisyn Camerota Monday, Geller indignantly denied that she paints Islam “with a broad brush,” declaring that she is “anti-jihad” and “anti-sharia.” But for the most part, she and Spencer make almost no secret that they regard radical Islam as indistinguishable from Islam itself.
Spencer, a prolific author who has a degree in religious studies and whose tone is more judicious than Geller’s, does not quite state outright that non-extremist Islam is impossible. Nonetheless, he calls Islamic reform “quixotic” and “virtually inconceivable,” and sweepingly describes the faith of “millions” of Muslim immigrants in the West as “absolutely incompatible with Western society.” When America’s first Muslim congressman Keith Ellison (D-Minnesota) chose to use a Quran in his swearing-in ceremony, Spencer flatly stated that “no American official should be taking an oath on the Qur’an.” His 2005 best-seller, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), has such chapter titles as “Islamic Law: Lie, Steal and Kill.”
Critics accuse Spencer of cherry-picking and distortions. While these charges often come from sources with biases of their own, there is no doubt that his account of Islamic history is blatantly one-sided. Thus, he tries to rebut the “PC myth” that Jews in the Middle Ages fared better under Islamic rule than in Christian Europe by quoting from a 13th Century papal bull that affirmed the rights accorded to Jews—but fails to mention the many expulsions of Jewish communities from European countries and glosses over crusader massacres of Jews.
When Spencer writes about moderate Muslims, it is invariably to disparage them as deluded, insincere, or irrelevant. His targets include reformist Muslims who are strongly critical of radical Islamism and have themselves been accused of being Islamophobic shills: Jasser, self-styled “Muslim refusenik” Irshad Manji, Sufi Muslim convert Stephen Schwartz. They also include Kurdish fighters battling the Islamic State: last October, a Spencer post on his site, JihadWatch, reported a Kurdish woman’s suicide bomb attack on ISIS troops in a besieged town under the jeering headline, “Kurdish Muslima carries out moderate jihad/martyrdom suicide attack against the Islamic State,” and sneered at the idea that “the foes of the Islamic State are all moderate.”
Spencer ostensibly disavows bigotry; yet a 2006 JihadWatch post,—written by the site’s co-administrator Hugh Fitzgerald but posted by Spencer himself—suggests that the most peaceful, non-violent, and even secularized Muslims are still a danger to the West as long as they have not explicitly renounced Islam, because either they or their children may revert to a more militant form of the faith.
Both Spencer and Geller relentlessly hype the Muslim peril in the U.S. Every violent crime by a Muslim becomes a one-person jihad, from a mentally ill Bosnian teen’s shooting spree at a Salt Lake City shopping mall to a drug addict’smeth-fueled rampage assaulting customers and staff at a Seaside, California Walmart.
In 2011, Geller sounded the alarm about “Vehicular Jihad in Arizona,” where a man named Ajaz Rahaman was found dead after crashing his SUV into a shopping center storefront and hitting three cars in the parking lot. Later, Geller apparentlyscrubbed the story from her site when it was confirmed that Rahaman, a respected ob-gyn, had died of a massive heart attack while driving. The deleted post, preserved in a blog feed archive, also mentioned a “vehicular jihad” incident in San Diego in which a taxicab driven by an Egyptian immigrant jumped a curb and injured 35 people; Geller forgot to mention that the police determined the cabdriver had fallen asleep at the wheel.
Homicidal (and suicidal) non-Muslims can be recruited to the cause as well. In 2007, Gellerharped obsessively on the notion that Virginia Tech mass shooter Seung-Hui Cho, a Korean national and a Christian, was a secret jihadi because of the mysterious “Ismail Ax” tattoo on his arm. Two years earlier, Spencer was one of the bloggers flogging the theory that Joel Hinrichs, a University of Oklahoma engineering student who killed himself by detonating a homemade bomb in his backpack near the campus football stadium during a game, was a Muslim convert and had planned a suicide bombing inside the stadium. This speculation was based on these incredibly incriminating clues: Hinrichs had recently grown a beard, had lived a few blocks from a mosque, and had a Pakistani roommate.
This Muslims-under-the-bed paranoia also drives distortion-riddled reports about the alleged encroachment of “sharia law” in America—which can mean nothing more than utterly innocuous accommodations for practicing Muslims such as ritual foot baths on university campuses and at airports.
Take the “sharia courtroom” scandal in 2012, in which a Muslim judge in Pennsylvania was said to have let a Muslim immigrant off the hook for assaulting an atheist who had marched in a local Halloween parade dressed as “Zombie Mohammed.” The only grain of truth in this story was that the judge, Mark W. Martin, had quite inappropriately lectured the victim for abusing his First Amendment rights before dismissing the harassment charge for lack of evidence. But Martin, a Republican and an Iraq war veteran, was (as he confirmed to the media) a churchgoing Lutheran; the confusion was based on a misheard line in the audio of the court session.
Undeterred, Geller continued to insist that Martin was a “sharia judge” who had declared himself a Muslim in the court hearing and was probably lying about it in the aftermath—because, of course, Muslims lie.
Geller herself has a rather strained relationship with the truth. In 2011, sheagreed to settle a defamation suit by removing from her site several posts suggesting—with no evidence—that Columbus, Ohio attorney Omar Tarazi had ties to the terrorist group Hamas. Tarazi was the attorney for the parents of Rifqa Bary, a runaway Ohio teen who became a cause célébre for the “anti-jihadist” set when she took refuge with a pair of Florida pastors she had met online, claiming that her Muslim parents were going to kill her for converting to Christianity.
If Muslims in the Geller/Spencer universe are always presumed guilty of jihadism, any non-Muslim seen as too soft on Islam is branded a “dhimmi”—a term that, historically, denotes the subject status of Christians and Jews under Muslim rule. Even Bernard Lewis, preeminent Middle East historian and longtime critic of Islamic radicalism, once ended up on the “Dhimmi Watch” wall of shame on Spencer’s site. Lewis has weathered his share of attacks for alleged anti-Islamic and anti-Arab views. But he has run afoul of the “anti-jihadists” for taking too positive a historical view of Islamic civilization. Geller, meanwhile, has castigated Lewis in more colorful terms as an “apologist for Islam” and even for “Islamic Jew-hatred.”
Another strong critic of Islamism, Michael Totten, an award-winning foreign correspondent whose work has appeared in such publications as Commentaryand The Wall Street Journal, has been targeted by Geller for writing too sympathetically about Bosnian and Kosovar Muslims.
“I got on the hit list of Pamela Geller and her flock of honking geese when, while reporting from Bosnia and Kosovo, I wrote about Serbian ethnic cleansing and war crimes,” Totten told me in an email. “She insists not only that Serbian ethnic cleansing didn’t occur—never mind that I know some of the victims and visited some of the ethnically cleansed areas in person—but also that ‘every major US paper in 1999’ supposedly ‘debunked’ the ethnic cleansing that every knowledgeable and serious person knows happened. The woman lives in an alternate universe.”
Totten’s run-in with Geller highlights another troubling aspect of her views: a propensity for Bosnian Muslim genocide denial and for valorizing Serbian mass murderers as leaders of anti-jihadist resistance. (“The Serbs dared to fight. That’s what this is all about,” she wrote in a 2011 post.) Spencer has generally stayed quiet on this issue, but one his closest associates, writer and academic Srdja Trifkovic, is not only a denier of Serbian war crimes but a former advisor to one of the accused perpetrators, Bosnian Serb politician Radovan Karadzic.
Kejda Germani, the Kosovar émigré writer who documented the Spencer/Trifkovic connection five years ago, wrote at the time that Spencer and his associates’ “shrill and unfortunately universally accepted identification with ‘the counter-jihadist movement’ is severely detrimental to the efforts of respectable intellectuals standing up to Islamofascism.”
In fact, what’s obfuscated by the hate is that some “anti-jihadists” do have legitimate points that are too often dismissed by liberal commentators in debates over Islam and Islamophobia.
It is true, for instance, that Islamist radicalism cannot be treated as simply a perversion of Islam when it is backed by scriptural passages and much Islamic theology. It is true that, at present, radical ideology is vastly more powerful and more mainstream in Islam than in other major religions, and even some clerics praised as moderates—such as Egyptian cleric Yusuf Al-Qaradawi—justify the death penalty for apostasy and homosexuality. It is true that troublingly large majorities of Muslims in many countries, including Afghanistan, Egypt, and Pakistan, support sharia law—the real, on-the-books version—and executions for religious and moral offenses. (It’s also important to note that Muslims in Turkey, Central Asia, and the former Yugoslavian states generally do not).
It is true that while American Muslims hold notably moderate views, radicalization is a real problem. (Consider the career of radical imam Anwar Al-Awlaki, killed in a U.S. drone strike in 2011, who served a large congregation in Northern Virginia and preached at many other mosques before going to Yemen in 2004 to fight for Al Qaeda.) It is true that, as reformist American Muslim writer Asra Nomani argued in a recent essay in The Washington Post, the charge of “Islamophobia” often gets hurled at critics of Islamic extremism.
But treating Islam as a monolith, denying the possibility of reform, and demonizing Muslims en masse is not the answer. If Christianity and Judaism could transcend their scriptural and theological baggage once used to justify fanaticism and oppression, there is no reason to believe that Islam cannot do the same. Spencer has argued that Islamic reform has no theological foundation, but he ignores the work of such 20th Century thinkers as Mahmoud Mohammed Taha, who made the case for the abrogation of the Quran’s later, harsher texts by the earlier, more peaceful ones (rather than vice versa). Today, there are Muslim scholars who champion a revision of Islamic orthodoxy on everything from women’s rights to religious freedom. In 2004, over 2,500 Muslim academics from 23 countries signed a petition to the United Nations condemning “Sheikhs of terror” who use Islamic scriptures as justification for political violence.
This is why, while we must stand by Geller as a victim of an outrageous attack on fundamental speech rights, it would be a tragic mistake to treat her or Spencer as leaders in the fight against the radical ideology that has been called Islamism or Islamofascism.
In his 2011 response to their attacks, Jasser warned that “Geller’s and Spencer’s genre is headed in only one direction—declaring an ideological war against one-fourth of the world’s population and expecting to neutralize the Islamist threat by asking Muslims to renounce their faith.” It is, perhaps literally, a dead end.
timschochet
Footballguy
SaintsInDome2006
Footballguy
Let's try to leapfrog this issue finally, Tim?
Are you willing to agree to that, is that pretty much how you view it?
Henry Ford
Footballguy
Clifford
Footballguy
Tim, all you have contributed to this thread is that you have no idea where you stand on free speech other than you discourage speech that is potentially offensive to a religion, unless it is done by the South Park guys, sort of, some of the time.
It's amazing that you can use so many posts and yet still fall well short of even offering a solid position on the subject.
timschochet
Footballguy
timschochet
Footballguy
No. But we needn't celebrate it either.
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Henry Ford
Footballguy
timschochet
Footballguy
We needn't celebrate what Geller is doing, or encourage her (as General Tso has done) or call her a hero (as rockaction has done). We can and should celebrate her right to do it all day long and condemn anyone who attempts to violently interfere with that right. But none of this changes the fact that she's a very bad person and not to be celebrated.
Henry Ford
Footballguy
Make that change, and I'm good. Although, I keep looking for where rockaction called her a "hero." I couldn't find it, and I searched each page individually for the word "hero." I keep coming up with your posts using the word "hero."
timschochet
Footballguy
im willing to make that change but with the college campus exception which you already know how I feel. As far as rockaction he either used the word hero or said something equally praising I can't recall. That's his prerogative and I'm not trying to rip him for it; I just disagree- I don't think this woman is worthy of his praise.
Van Dyman
Footballguy
G
General Tso
Guest
I'll continue to encourage anyone who challenges radical Islam and Sharia Law, Tim. You obviously don't seem to have a problem with it, which boggles my mind. It's evil that dwarfs any of the other crap you get so indignant about, like bigoted words coming from people like Geller.
timschochet
Footballguy
Thank you.
timschochet
Footballguy
OK. I just disagree with you. I don't think she's "challenging" radical Islam. I also don't regard Sharia Law as a threat the way radical Islamic violence is a threat.
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