Anti-Muslim Activist Geller Attacks Latest SPLC 'Intelligence Report' Issue
It didn’t take long, following Tuesday’s release of the Summer 2011 edition of our Intelligence Report magazine, for one of the principal figures profiled in it – professional Muslim hater Pamela Geller – to “warn” the SPLC that she and her allies will continue their efforts to panic Americans into believing that an Islamic caliphate could take over the United States and impose Shariah law any day now.
Geller was one of 10 anti-Muslim activists profiled in the issue’s cover story, “Jihad Against Islam,” which reports that the recent surge in conservative politicians, media figures and organizations fretting about Islam in America is not a spontaneous response to real danger, but rather a deliberately engineered campaign by a small group of obsessed alarmists bent on turning legitimate concerns about terrorism into broad-based prejudice and hatred against all Muslims.
This issue of Intelligence Report also includes “Inside the DHS,” an interview with former Department of Homeland Security (DHS) analyst Daryl Johnson, who says that the department has effectively gutted a unit that analyzed the terrorism threat from right-wing extremists. That action came in response to a 2009 DHS report on domestic extremism that was wrongly criticized as tarring all conservatives as potential terrorists. Johnson, who describes himself as a conservative Republican, was the principal author of that report.
Also featured is a first-hand report, “Anger on the Land,” about the tense relations between some southwest Colorado residents – including some antigovernment “Patriots” – and federal officials seeking to limit public access to wilderness areas in the San Juan National Forest. Another article, “Black vs. Blue,” provides a rare look inside a shadowy network of black bloggers – possibly remnants of a black supremacist religious cult – who celebrate the murders of police officers.
The cover story, “Jihad Against Islam,” focuses on a core group of American anti-Muslim activists whose far-fetched theories of a sophisticated global Muslim conspiracy to infiltrate and destroy Western governments, schools and institutions languished, rightfully, on the remote fringe of sensible society for nearly two decades. But fueled largely by conservative angst over the nation’s new black president with the ominously familiar Arabic middle name – Barack Hussein Obama – the group’s hyperbolic rants began to gain traction in the mainstream during the last three years. Geller emerged into the public consciousness in 2010 protesting against the Park51 project – which she shrewdly dubbed the “Ground Zero mega-mosque” – in New York City. For the first time, the hapless contingent of anti-Muslim zealots had a dynamic and charismatic pitchwoman to peddle its propaganda.
Geller’s response to the Intelligence Report article, which she published Wednesday in her AtlasShrugs blog, predictably referred to the SPLC as “subversive … anti-American … shills for Islamic supremacism” – terms she uses for any group or individual who disagrees with her extremist views. As always, she sees conspiracies everywhere: “The leftist/Isalmic [sic] machine is greasing its well-worn wheels to combat the increased awareness in America of jihad and Islamic supremacism, particularly in light of the looming tenth anniversary of the Islamic declaration of war on America on September 11th.”
But she stamped her feet petulantly, vowing to continue her efforts to undercut the dignity and constitutional rights of American Muslims – such as the right to build a house of worship on properly zoned land – no matter what her critics say. “I have not yet begun to fight, quislings,” she wrote. “And let me warn you, SLPC [sic] … [anti-Muslim protests] will get bigger, more broad-based, and more widespread.”
