Two men have been shot dead after opening fire outside of an exhibit of caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad in Garland, Texas. The exhibit was being held in the Curtis Culwell Center, where the shooters hit security guard Bruce Joiner.
The Muhammad Art Exhibit & Contest was organized by non other than full time bigot and blogger Pamela Geller, president of the American Freedom Defense Initiative. The exhibit was organized by Pamela Geller in response to a Muslim event held earlier this year at the same venue which was meant to combat Islamophobia. A representative of the local Council of American Islamic Relations chapter spoke had this to say about Geller's event:
Alia Salem of the DFW Chapter of the Council of American Islamic Relations says supports free speech. “We should have free speech, and nobody’s stopping her from doing this, go ahead, maybe there’ll be some Muslims entering this, who knows.”
But Salem says she hopes the Muslim Community will ignore this event. “While it is her right, it’s not really in good taste to be honest because it’s just a shameless attempt to get a reaction out of the Muslim Community, that’s how we view it. It’s not any attempt to promote free speech.”
The American Freedom Defense Initiative has been listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
So who is Pamela Geller and what rock did she crawl out from under?
Geller, who began her career as a journalist for the New York Daily News and went on to become associate publisher of the New York Observer, first came to the attention of many Americans in 2010, when she helped to derail the Park51 Project near Ground Zero, condemning the proposed Islamic community center as “shrine to the very ideology that inspired the jihadist attacks” of 9/11 and campaigning for protests throughout the country. Geller continued to rail against the spread of Islam through her blog, Atlas Shrugs, where she wrote of her belief that President Obama is a secret Muslim who wants to destroy the United States from within the White House and is the love child of Malcolm X.
The blogger is also a co-founder, along with Robert Spencer, of the New York-based American Freedom Defense Institute, which says it is committed to preventing “specific Islamic supremacist initiatives in American cities.” The organization rose to international fame when a federal court ruled on grounds of free speech that New York City was required to run the anti-Muslim ads Geller had purchased in 2012.
I find Geller, her organization and her words extremely disturbing. Geller is one of those scary right wingers that we need to keep an eye on. And I'm glad the Southern Poverty Law Center is doing just that.
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