The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The Left Is Attacking Free Speech — and Helping ISIS Target Its Enemies

Posted on | March 5, 2018 | Comments Off on The Left Is Attacking Free Speech — and Helping ISIS Target Its Enemies

 

Last week brought further attacks on free speech from the Left. Daily Beast reporter Taylor Lorenz doxxed the daughters of Pamela Geller. If you know Geller — and I’ve been her friend since 2007 — you know that it is a dishonest smear to call her “Muslim-hating.” She is a ferocious opponent of radical Islam, but she is also a defender of those innocent Muslims who are victims of radical Islam. This distinction doesn’t matter to leftist idiots like Taylor Lorenz, of course. Anyone who is identified as “right-wing” is considered fair game by the radical Left. Facts don’t matter, and neither does simple human decency:

The children of conservative commentator Pamela Geller have been harassed and their social media talk show has been canceled after the Daily Beast revealed Geller was their mother.
In her article titled, “The Instagram Stars Hiding Their Famous, Muslim-Hating Mom, Pamela Geller,” the Daily Beast’s Taylor Lorenz doxed the women as Pamela Geller’s daughters. They had not disclosed the family link, perhaps due to the recurring death threats from Muslim extremists that Geller receives.
Following the release of Lorenz’s article, which was heavily criticized on social media, Geller’s four children immediately began to receive harassment and violent messages.
Comments included: “Racist piece of shit!,” “Fuck you, racist,” “Racist bitch,” and “Swine,” the majority of which was sent to Geller’s most famous daughter, Claudia, who runs the popular Instagram account “girlwithnojob” which has 2.8 million followers.

Think about this for a minute: Claudia Oshry spent years building a massive online audience with a non-political message, entirely separate from and unrelated to her mother’s popular conservative blog. Yet the tie of kinship was used as an excuse to attack Claudia and her siblings, because of their mother’s alleged “Islamophobia.” My own children, incidentally, have at times been harassed by my various left-wing enemies. My general attitude toward evil trolls is “never let them see you sweat” — these monsters take sadistic pleasure in thinking they’ve inflicted suffering on their targets — but a few years ago, the FBI arrested one of my harassers who was sent to federal prison as a result.

Pamela Geller’s enemies are even more vicious:

A Massachusetts man was convicted [in October 2017] of plotting to behead conservative blogger Pamela Geller and kill other Americans on behalf of the Islamic State group.
Jurors found David Wright guilty of all charges, including conspiracy to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization and conspiracy to commit acts of terrorism transcending national boundaries. . . .
Prosecutors said Wright, his uncle and a third man conspired to kill Geller because they were upset she organized Prophet Muhammad cartoon contest in Texas in 2015. During the contest, two other men opened fire outside and wounded a security guard before they were killed in a shootout with law enforcement assigned to guard the event.
Wright’s uncle, Ussamah Rahim, told Wright on a recorded phone call later that month that he couldn’t wait to attack Geller and decided instead to go after “those boys in blue,” referring to police. Wright told his uncle that was “beautiful” and encouraged him to delete all the data from his computer before carrying out his attack.
Hours later, Rahim was shot and killed by authorities after he lunged at them with a knife when they approached him in Boston. The attack on Geller, who has spearheaded scores of events across the nation to decry Islamic extremism, was never carried out.

If you know that ISIS wants Geller dead, is it so difficult to understand why Geller’s daughters deserve to have their privacy respected? The only purpose served by Taylor Lorenz’s disgusting “journalism” was harassment — to punish and attempt to silence Geller by attacking her daughters. Caroline Glick explains this succinctly:

The mainstream media are either stupid or evil — or both.
That is the only reasonable conclusion you can reach from the Daily Beast’s article [Feb. 28] that exposed the identities of Pamela Geller’s four daughters and the subsequent decision of major and minor newspapers and magazines throughout the Western world to re-run the story. . . .
It is possible that the Daily Beast, the Washington Post, the New York Post, Cosmopolitan magazine, and all the rest have no idea that there is a direct link between the fatwa — or Islamic ruling — published by the Islamic State on May 5, 2015 calling for Geller to be “slaughtered,” and ISIS’s attempt the next month to behead her. . . .
For more than a decade, the media and leftist shock troops, operating in lock step with Islamist groups like the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), have tried to destroy Geller. . . .

You should read the whole thing, which recounts the history of the media’s complicity in the whitewashing of radical Islam. It is astonishing that Geller — a Jew targeted for death by an Islamic fatwa! — is being smeared as a proponent of “hate” by liberal journalists.

What bothers me about incidents like this is how liberals, because of their mindless loyalty to the Democrat Party, are willing to attack anyone who disrupts the propaganda narrative dictated by the Democrats’ narrow partisan interests. There was a time — and I’m old enough to remember it — when Democrats defended Israel against her enemies, but that has changed in the past 30 years. Democrats have increasingly pandered to constituencies (including our decadent academic elite) who are perversely sympathetic to the radical Muslims who are determine to see Israel wiped off the map. Liberals have turned against Israel because, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Republicans were identified as pro-Israel “neocons” and therefore anti-Muslim. Because the Bush administration was seen as the enemy of Muslims (despite the idiotic “religion of peace” rhetoric of some Republicans), Democrats apparently decided they must be pro-Islam, and began smearing the GOP as “Islamophobic.” This kind of simple-minded partisanship is the only possible explanation for such useful idiots as Taylor Lorenz.

 

Well, I am not always a Neutral Objective Journalist, because I have personal principles that sometimes obligate me to choose sides. One of these is Genesis 12:3 — an eternal promise of the eternal God, which no Christian should take lightly. More than once in my career, I’ve watched helplessly as right-wing acquaintances have let themselves be pulled into the gravitational orbit of anti-Semitism, which predictably resulted in their destruction. Even while I am willing to stipulate that so-called “neocons” have been responsible for foolish policies (e.g., the invasion and occupation of Mesopotamia, which almost every intelligent conservative now recognizes as a strategic blunder), it is a grievous error to blame such blunders on a “Zionist” conspiracy. However, just as some simple-minded liberals like Taylor Lorenz let themselves be fooled into attacking Pamela Geller as an “Islamophobe,” so also have some people on the Right gone drifting off into toxic Jew-hatred.

Cui bono? Who benefits if the Right allies itself with anti-Semitism, even if what is offered as “evidence” of such an alliance is a thin tissue of guilt-by-association smears fabricated by the Left? The direct beneficiary of this should be obvious — the Democrat Party. Meanwhile, however, we find that conservative Jews like Pamela Geller are libeled as “Islamophobes” by the same dishonest liberal media which would otherwise have us believe that all Republicans are Jew-haters!

No one should be deceived by the Left’s propaganda. Any conservative who is hesitant to defend Pamela Geller (they think she is “extremist” or whatever) is a fool. The reason Geller is under attack is because she is effective and influential, especially in exposing the Left’s sordid de facto alliance with radical Islam. Geller is a ferocious fighter, and we cannot afford to lose her. If we let the Left silence our most powerful voices, what shall become of the rest of us? Who will defend our right to free speech?

Like I keep saying, people need to wake the hell up.



 

 

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