Category: Atlas Shrugs

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

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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.



 

 

Death Toll 147 After Muslim Terrorists Target Christians at University in Kenya

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The latest atrocity in the global jihad:

Up to 150 people have been murdered by masked al-Shabaab terrorists who stormed a Kenyan university and shot and beheaded Christians in the worst attack in the country in 17 years.
The group raided the Garissa University College campus shortly after 5am local time yesterday, overwhelming guards and murdering people they suspected of being a Christian.
The death toll rose to 147 last night and the 13-hour siege ended. A total of 79 were injured and 587 were led to safety.
Most of those killed were students but two police officers, one soldier and two watchmen are among the dead. . . .
The attack is believed to be the worst terrorist attack on Kenyan soil since the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi in 1998 which killed more than 200 people.
The terrorists stuck mid-way through Holy Week, the most solemn period in the Christian calendar. Last night, the Christian students were planning to celebrate the Last Supper in preparation for Good Friday.

(Via Memeorandum.) Islamic violence continues daily around the world. Most of this violent savagery goes unnoticed by the major U.S. media. Pamela Geller is one of the few sources who monitors the global jihad regularly. A few of her recent headlines:

UNHRC Confirms 200 Kidnapped Christian Girls
in Nigeria Murdered by Devout Muslim Group

Muslim mob attacks Sikh Temple in the UK

Two New York Muslim Women Arrested in Bomb Plot

No Insurance Available for Jewish Kindergartens in Belgium

Wait — what was that last headline?

A Belgian insurance company has refused to insure a Jewish kindergarten in Brussels.
The company claimed the risk of a terror attack on the European Jewish Association-run institution was too high.
EJA General Director Rabbi Menachem Margolin called on all European governments and heads of European Union institutions to provide security to all Jewish institutions that would satisfy insurance companies, and establish an alternative insurance mechanism that would secure any institution that might fall victim to anti-Semitic attacks.

Read the whole thing. This is both insane and unnecessary.

Sixty years after the Allies defeated Hitler, why should European Jews have to live with this kind of fear every day? Why should Christian students in Kenya have to fear being shot or beheaded by a gang of bloodthirsty Muslim fanatics? And why should Pamela Geller’s American Freedom Defense Initiative have to fight court battles — and media smear tactics — to run its advertisements in Philadelphia?

On Wednesday SEPTA buses first began rolling with ads the transit agency was forced to run after losing a legal battle on First Amendment grounds.
“Islamic Jew-hatred: It’s in the Qu’ran,” state the ads, which feature a picture of Hitler.
Eighty-four articulated buses operating out of three depots will carry the ads, SEPTA said.
That message doesn’t sit well with local Muslims.
“That’s wrong,” said Amira Muhammed, 30, of Northeast Philly, of the ad, after she got off a Route 33 bus carrying the new advertisement. “That’s not in the Koran. It says we have to respect other religions.”
Muhammed was shocked to learn that SEPTA lost a legal battle with the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), which paid $30,000 for ad space, and that SEPTA is required to run the advertisements.
“What we need to do is go in front of City Hall and say that this needs to stop,” she said.

You can’t stop the truth, Ms. Muhammed. The Koran does advocate violence against Jews, against Christians, against everyone who refuses to bow down to the hateful doctrines of the ignorant murderous “Prophet” for whom you are named.

How Irrational Is ‘Islamophobia’?

The truth is not “hate” and facts are not a “phobia.” Some people just don’t want you to know the truth about Islam and its founder.

“Muhammad was a bloodthirsty polygamous warlord
and also the prophet of a religion that
commands the murder of non-believers.”

All honest and intelligent Americans know this to be true. It is simply a fact of history, and anyone who doesn’t know the truth can read Robert Spencer’s books The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam and The Truth About Muhammad. You can read Brigitte Gabrielle’s Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America. You can read Pamela Geller’s Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance. No one has an excuse to be ignorant of the truth, nor should any American ever be afraid to speak the truth.

What we need is more courage. I just gave a donation to the American Freedom Defense Initiative and I hope others will do the same.

“Truth is great and will prevail if left to herself . . . she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.”
— Thomas Jefferson, Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, 1786

 

Canadian Muslim Arrested in Somalia After Reportedly Beheading His 4 Sons

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Pamela Geller at Atlas Shrugged had this story, citing the Blazing Cat Fur blog and, to be honest, my reaction was, “You’re kidding me.”

Surely, this had to be some kind of right-wing Islamophobic urban legend spread by irresponsible Internet gossip-mongers. Because I constantly watch the news — my TV is tuned to MSNBC at this very moment — and if this really happened, you would think maybe the news would mention such an atrocious act of terroristic violence. But I checked around and discovered that this is actually true:

The mother of four young boys who were allegedly beheaded by their Somali-Canadian father says she doesn’t know of any motive for the killings.
Police in Somalia arrested Omar Hassan, 60, after the children, aged 11, 9, 7 and 6, were killed Monday, Qadro Addawe told The Canadian Press.
The alleged slayings happened in the central town of Beledweyne, about 330 kilometres north of the capital Mogadishu.
Speaking from Mogadishu, Addawe said Hassan was a taxi driver in Calgary and had returned home a few months ago.
She said the children had never been to Canada, but had Canadian citizenship through her estranged husband, who had migrated to Canada 30 years ago.
“They were born in Kenya, but they were Canadian because the father was Canadian,” she said.
A regional police commissioner told Agence France-Presse Wednesday that the children’s bodies were found near a village and have been buried.
The news service quoted Col. Isak Ali Abdulle as saying: “The man handed himself in and is in custody now. I think he is not mentally fit but we are questioning him.”

Children beheaded by their father? Just another random coincidence.

In related news, a Democrat finally used the word “jihad.”

But he wasn’t talking about Omar Hassan.

 

 


Islamists Target African Christians

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Pamela Geller today highlights the atrocities against Christians in Nigeria attributed to the Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram.

Boko Haram “has killed hundreds in its campaign to impose Sharia law” since 2010, the BBC reports, describing the latest attacks:

The violence comes on the same day that the Pope — as part of his Christmas Day address — prayed for harmony in Nigeria, lamenting what he called “savage acts of terrorism” that frequently target Christians.
The head of the Christian Association of Nigeria in Yobe, Idi Garba, told AFP that many worshippers at [Evangelical Church of West Africa] “are still missing”.
“I have been informed that six bodies have been recovered,” Mr Garba said.

CNN reports:

At least 12 people died in northern Nigeria when attackers raided two churches during Christmas Eve services, police said.
One assault occurred at the Church of Christ in Nations in Postikum, in Yobe province. Gunmen attacked worshipers during prayer, killing six people, including the pastor, and setting the building on fire.
Worshipers also were attacked at the First Baptist Church in Maiduguri, in Borno state. A deacon and five church members were killed.
They were the latest strikes against Christians in the region. More than 30 people died in a wave of Christmas Day attacks in the north last year, blamed on Boko Haram, a militant group that has targeted Christians and Muslims it considered insufficiently Islamist.

When America is weak, evil is strong. Evil worldwide has been emboldened by the weakness of the Obama administration’s policies.

 

‘There Has Been a Campaign of Disinformation and Smears’

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That’s a quote from a man who is being hounded for his role in the production of the video that did not cause any riots or murders, no matter what that idiot Susan Rice tries to tell you. Pamela Geller at Atlas Shrugged has the worldwide exclusive:

Joseph Nassralla of Way TV and Media for Christ has contacted me to issue a statement about his role in producing the film “Innocence of Muslims.” The last time I saw Nassralla, he had come to our Summer Night for Civil Rights in June in California, and before that I saw him at our September 11, 2011 rally. But now he is being hunted like an animal because of the media’s relentless campaign to destroy and target innocent civilians whom they believe have been critical of Islam. Nassralla is currently in hiding after multiple death threats from Muslims, because of his purported role in producing this video. Now, for the first time, Nassralla has revealed to me the inside story of the making of “Innocence of Muslims.” . . .

Go read the whole thing at Atlas Shrugs.

Why ‘Moderate Islam’ Is Doomed

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Moderation is not a fighting creed. Voices of compromise and tolerance can never prevail in a culture that permits militant radicals to resort to intimidation and violence to achieve their ends. David Herzenhorn of the New York Times reports a brutal lesson from Russia:

MOSCOW — A self-described guerrilla fighter urging strict adherence to Islamic law has claimed responsibility for the killing last month of one Muslim leader and the attempted murder of another, in Tatarstan, a region in central Russia that prides itself on a tradition of religious tolerance.
“On July 19, 2012, on my orders an operation was conducted against the enemies of Allah,” the guerrilla fighter, who identified himself as Muhammad, emir of the mujahedeen of Tatarstan, said in a video posted on an Islamist Internet site that focuses on the predominantly Muslim Caucasus region, including Chechnya.
In the video, he is shown sitting in the woods, with an automatic rifle propped against one knee. He specifically named the victims of the attack last month: Valiulla Yakupov, the cleric in charge of Islamic education in Tatarstan, who was shot and killed outside his home in Kazan, the regional capital; and Ildus Faizov, the chief mufti in the region, who survived a car-bomb attack less than an hour later.
“All praise Allah,” the jihadist, Muhammad, said in the video. “We believe the operation was a success.” He also warned of further violence against Muslim leaders who do not adhere to Shariah, the strict legal code of Islam based on the Koran.
“If any of the imams do not want or cannot carry out the points established by Shariah, they should leave their posts,” he said. “That way, you will be protected from the mujahedeen.”

(Via Memeorandum.) It is useless, as a counter-argument, to point out that the vast majority of Muslims are not violent terrorists, when any who do not share the ideology of the radicals are denounced as “the enemies of Allah” and regarded as acceptable targets for assassination.

In all likelihood, the clerics targeted by “the emir of the mujahedeen” shared their killer’s ultimate goal — the Islamicization of Russia — but were killed because they did not endorse his proposed means of achieving that goal, i.e., an immediate violent uprising. And the profoundly troubling aspect of this, as any objective student of Islamic history must agree, is that the assassin’s co-religionists can scarcely claim that his acts are incompatible with their faith. Islam’s founder was a warrior, who spread his beliefs by the sword, and the Prophet’s successors took up that sword to expand their religious dominion by violent conquest. No matter how sincerely “fundamentalist” a Muslim leader may be, he is vulnerable to the accusation of apostasy if he rejects violent jihad as a means of achieving worldwide Islamic supremacy.

It has become unfortunately fashionable in the West, even among some soi-dissant conservatives, to ignore this unfortunate reality and to denounce as advocates of “Islamophobia” anyone who dares call attention to the dangerous truth about radical Islam.

Witness how the Left greeted Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer in Stockholm and witness, alas, how little notice conservatives give to the battle that Geller and Spencer have so courageously fought.

Hundreds turn out to hear American conservatives speak in Sweden, they are greeted with vitriolic hate by Swedish leftists and — despite the genuinely newsworthy nature of this occasion — where is the Army of Breitbarts to cheer on the conservative heroes?

Robert Spencer mocks the idea that violent Islamic jihadists misunderstand their own religion. His good humor disproves the assertions of his critics that Spencer is a grim hateful fanatic, although Spencer is nevertheless serious about the grim hateful fanaticism of his antagonists, both among the radical jihadists and the radical leftists who side with “the emir of the mujahedeen” against the West.

The Left would have you believe that the danger free people face is not from radical Islam, but from “extremists” like Geller and Spencer. In fact, the danger is from those foolish enough to think that the war against “the enemies of Allah,” which brings death to Muslims in faraway Tatarstan, has ceased to be a danger to America, merely because the jihadis have not recently committed any headline-grabbing terrorist atrocities here. Leftists dishonestly inflame suspicion of the Tea Party, attempting to blame them for the Aurora massacre. (Tucson killer Jared Loughner will plead guilty for his crimes, although the liberal media already convicted Sarah Palin.) Meanwhile, the menace of Islamic extremism remains, waging a worldwide war that we seldom seem to notice anymore.

We are seeing a re-enactment of a familiar theme: The confusion caused by those who insist that we should not fear our enemy, but rather fear those who warn against the enemy. In England during the ’30s, the advocates of appeasement insisted that Churchill was a greater danger than Hitler. More recently, during the Cold War, there were those who claimed that anti-Communist “extremists” like Ronald Reagan were a greater danger than the Communists themselves. And now we find that many fools have been persuaded by those who say that “Islamophobia” is a greater danger than Islam.

Will we be deceived? I am not, although I seldom write on this topic, on which others have far more expertise. My accustomed silence, however, should not be confused with neutrality or indifference. In the aftermath of 9/11, many Americans wrung their hands in perplexity, thinking that somehow our nation had brought this evil upon ourselves.

The liberals asked, “Why do they hate us?” And the eloquent answer came from a Lebanese woman, Brigitte Gabriel: Because They Hate.

There is no safety in cowardly silence. No one deserves to be the victim of terrorism, and the killers alone are responsible for their crimes. Yet we have a duty to defend the innocent against evil and, if we fail in that duty, our failure carried its own burden of guilt.

Those who have the courage to speak out against the danger — including not only Geller and Spencer, but also such witnesses as Nonie Darwish, Wafa Sultan and Ayaan Hirsi Ali — deserve our support. We cannot rely on “moderate Muslims” to restrain the danger, because if proponents of radical Islam cannot terrorize the moderate “enemies of Allah” into silence, they will kill them. How many more “moderates” will have to die before we admit the radical truth?

 





 

Who Is James Wolcott? And Why Would Anybody Want to Know? Or Care?

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Pamela Geller’s commentary about Sandra Fluke has caused a conniption on the part of — you guessed, didn’t you? — Charles Johnson. Mr. Jazzy McBikeshorts then got into a Twitter colloquy with the infamously boring James Wolcott, who decided to bring my name into it. A commenter informed me about this, prompting my Twitter reply:

News Flash: James Wolcott, who for years has had a Vanity Fair column nobody reads, now has a Twitter account nobody follows.

Because you have probably never heard of James Wolcott, it is necessary to explain that he is a cadaverous-looking college dropout who spent years as an unpopular media critic at the Village Voice before becoming an unpopular columnist at Vanity Fair. His knowledge of politics is extremely limited, as I noted in April 2008:

If James Wolcott is being paid by the word, his 3,700-word screed in the June issue of Vanity Fair is the Crime of the Century. The article is presented as describing the “vicious Clinton-versus-Obama rupture at Daily Kos” and thus an analysis of “a party-wide split” among Democrats, but it’s really nothing of the kind. In fact, it’s nothing at all. There is no reporting and very little that could be called research. Just massive paragraph after paragraph of florid prose.

So far as anyone can tell, Wolcott never ventures outside Manhattan and can’t be bothered to do any actual reporting. He has attempted to remain “relevant” by adding a blog that nobody reads to his duties at Vanity Fair, whose publisher apparently hired him as a favor to Wolcott’s wife, an editor for the magazine.

Wolcott’s most memorable contribution to the online world was a 2004 post in which he cheered for killer hurricanes — “Mother Nature’s fist of fury, Gaia’s stern rebuke” — to hit America, and thereby inadvertantly helped re-elect President Bush. 

Last year, Wolcott somehow inveigled Doubleday into publishing his memoir. Nobody read that either, mainly because the author is so notoriously dull, but perhaps also because readers had been warned via a New York Times review that Wolcott “devotes 50 genuflecting pages” of his 258-page memoir to film critic Pauline Kael.

No, I’m not kidding. Really.

To the extent that most blog readers nowadays have any inkling who James Wolcott is, it’s because he has occasionally attempted to generate traffic by taking cheap shots at Jeff Goldstein of Protein Wisdom. Is anyone therefore surprised that a pompous nobody like Wolcott seems to have found a kindred spirit in Charles Johnson?

Readers may be wondering why I would devote an entire 500-word blog post to a couple of windbags like Johnson and Wolcott, but I mainly wanted to use this as an opportunity to point out that Pamela Geller is always interesting, which is why those irrelevant losers hate her so much.

Anyway, the two latest polls — one by Marist and another by Reuters — both show the Ohio Republican primary a dead heat, and I’m thinking about heading to Columbus for the big showdown, which should be a lot more fun than sitting around blogging about James Wolcott.

UPDATE: The Man Who Named the Blogosphere observes that the list of Things Which Are More Fun Than Sitting Around Blogging About James Wolcott is quite long, and welcome, Instapundit readers!

As to the absurd “controversy” that briefly permitted Wolcott to indulge his delusions of relevance, Rush Limbaugh explained his apology to Sandra Fluke today on the World’s Biggest Radio Show.