Muslim-Basher Geller Dropped from Jewish Speaking Engagement
The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles canceled a lecture it was going to host by Pam Geller (who is Jewish) just hours before it was supposed to be delivered Sunday morning. The Western Region Chapter of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), was sponsoring Geller’s speech, “Islamic Jew Hatred as the Root
Cause of Failure to Achieve Peace.”
The ZOA is a Jewish advocacy organization that claims more than 30,000 members and bills itself as the oldest pro-Israel group in America, involving itself in educating people about the “truth of the ongoing and relentless Arab war against Israel” and fighting things like “Arab propaganda” on campuses.
An interfaith coalition of Jewish, Islamic and Christian groups had expressed outrage on Saturday that the Federation was going to allow Geller to speak. “We are extremely shocked and alarmed to see a mainstream Jewish organization associating itself with one of the nation’s leading Islamophobes,” the coalition said in a prepared statement.
Geller fired back on her Atlas Shrugs blog, calling out the “Islamic supremacist Jew-haters of Hamas-CAIR” and making references to the Holocaust: “Jewish leadership is on the trains and thinks we will go quietly.” She wrote that though the Federation canceled the event, the ZOA organized a protest within a half-hour of the cancellation, where she was able to give her speech. The ZOA released a statement, posted on Geller’s blog, in which it claimed that the Federation “succumbed to political pressure by Muslim and Left-wing Jewish groups not to let a rational voice of criticism of Islam and its war against Israel be heard on its premises.”
Rational voice?
Geller, executive director of Stop Islamization of America, has ridden anti-Muslim hysteria – most notably her opposition to an Islamic center proposed for Lower Manhattan – to national and international prominence. She has promulgated some of the more bizarre conspiracy theories about Islam and President Obama on her website, including birtherism and claims that Obama is the love child of Malcolm X, that he was once involved with a “crack w----,” and that he is beholden to his “Islamic overlords.”
Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik, the anti-Muslim mass murderer who slaughtered 77 of his countrymen, mostly teens, last July, cited Geller’s writings in his political manifesto. In response to media scrutiny, Geller seemed to justify his attack on a Labour Party summer youth camp by claiming the camp was part of an anti-Israel indoctrination training center and the victims would have grown up to become leaders of Norway who would then flood the country with Muslims who refuse to assimilate, commit violence and live on the dole.
