'Defending' the West, One Word At A Time – Geller Joins WorldNetDaily

Pamela Geller, one of the most visible and influential agitators in the anti-Muslim fear-mongering movement, has an even taller soapbox now that the far-right website WorldNetDaily (WND) announced this week that she would produce a weekly column called "Defending the West" – a column dedicated to her belief that Islam is an "extreme ideology" populated by "savages" and hell-bent on destroying Western values.

"Award-winning 'Blogress Diva' to write 'Defending the West' column," the announcement reads. Her debut article, published Tuesday, is titled "Facebook fascists shut down dissenters." Geller accuses social media giant Facebook of targeting "conservative groups for elimination."

In reality, Facebook is asking all online groups to move their information to a newer format. But Geller sees something more sinister at play. "Clearly this is a politically motivated move, as we move into the presidential election year, to dismantle the apparatus of groups that rely on grass-roots efforts to combat the massive left-wing machinery Barack Obama and Co. used so effectively in 2008," Geller wrote. "And yet it hasn't so much as raised an eyebrow in big-media circles. The left-wing media won't care about the death of free speech in the United States until the crocodile they're feeding turns around and eats them."

Geller is likely less concerned about right- and left-wing media and more about losing her followers on Facebook. Her supporters on Wednesday were quick to excoriate the company.

"This is a violation of our first amendment [sic]," a woman identified as Linda Lee Morris Bollengier commented to a Facebook post about the column. "We need to find an alternative to Facebook that doesn't discriminate against Christians and Conservatives."

Geller's move to WND comes as the website in recent months has become one of the leading voices demanding that President Obama produce his birth certificate, and when he did, leading the charge that the document was forged. Its columnists include Jerome Corsi, best known for his "Swift Boat" twisting of the Vietnam war record of then-presidential candidate John Kerry and more recently for his high-profile accusations that Obama is a fraudulent president, and Joseph Farah, WND's editor-in-chief and self-described "birther king."

So what should the readers of Geller's column expect? Despite having no training in Islamic studies – and only rising to national attention last year for her fiery opposition to a planned Muslim community center she labeled "the ground zero mega-mosque," Geller has been coarse and relentless in her broad-brush denunciations of Islam.

Last year, for example, on her website AtlasShrugs, Geller painted Islam as a religion of savages at odds with the West. "This is about good vs. evil. … This is about the war against the West," she wrote. "In any war between civilized man and the savage, always side with the civilized man."

Geller also has been prone to making preposterous claims: that President Obama is the "love child" of Malcolm X, for example, and that the killing of Osama bin Laden was the result of a coup against Obama. She even once suggested that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, who is Jewish, supports Nazism. Geller also has mingled with European racists and fascists, spoken favorably of South African racists and defended Serbian war criminal Slobodan Milosevic.

Following a relatively unflattering profile in The New York Times last October, in which the newspaper labeled her a "socialite" and "dilettante," Geller responded: "They refer to my work as a 'crusade,' but never refer to the supremacists' jihad as anything nefarious. They refer to my work as waging 'a form of holy war,' but never, ever discuss the real holy war against the west."

Being no stranger to sensationalism – Geller once wore a bikini during an online anti-Muslim rant – she should fit right with the WND crew.