Pamela Geller's anti-Muslim group, the American Freedom Defense Initiative, will attempt to launch a new ad campaign in Washington, D.C., using the winning image from the group's controversial Muhammad cartoon contest held in Garland, Texas.
Geller, who has pushed for controversial anti-Islam ads in big city transit systems before, said she submitted the ads to the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) in the hopes that the cartoon will run on city buses and in Metro train stations.
"Because the media and the cultural and political elites continue to self-enforce the Sharia without the consent of the American people by refusing to show any depictions of Muhammad or showing what it was in Texas that had jihadists opening fire, we are running an ad featuring the winning cartoon by former Muslim Bosch Fawstin from our Muhammad Art Exhibit and Cartoon Contest in Garland, Texas," Geller wrote in a statement on Breitbart.
WMATA confirmed to TPM that the transit authority received the American Freedom Defense Initiative's ad request on Friday and that the ads are under review.
On one hand, free speech. On the other hand, I'd love to see CAIR run ads depicting a cartoon of Jesus or Moses in an unflattering light and see how people suddenly have a problem with free speech.
And if Geller believes in free speech so much, let's have her post the cartoon on her front door, as one TPM commenter suggested.
While I understand your point about CAIR running a counter campaign, the fact is that most Christians and most Jews have repudiated Geller and her toxic stance. The question, to which I confess that I do not know the answer, is what kind of punch could be landed on Geller and her allies without dragging in a whole bunch of innocent people.
ReplyDeleteBecause this sort of thing happens all the time. Forty years ago, in the context of armor tactics in the Fulda Gap, I was handed the appropriate metaphor: a boxer who can not lay a glove on his opponent, so every round he throws an elbow at the guy's manager - it feels good, but it might well lose the fight. Personally, I think that one component of the Charlie Hebdo disaster is that the cartoonists were punching down on the Moslems as a side show in their epic battle with le Pen and the French Right - little suspecting that a tiny subset of the 1.5 billion Moslems would decide to start shooting, for what ever their actual motivations might have been. Again, personally, I am not convinced that literal iconoclasm was the driving force although I am confident that Geller and her gang are sufficiently addlepated to believe that it was.
A fundamental maxim of the military art holds that you can not win the war on the defensive: you can inflict loses, and you can postpone defeat, but to impose your will upon your enemy and bring the war to a successful conclusion you must ultimately go over onto the offensive. The gibbering idiots at the Daily Kos are certainly offensive these days in their howling for Bernie, and I predict that they will soon find themselves impaled upon their own enthusiasms, but they are without question taking the battle to their enemies: the perfidious neoliberal Third Way New Democrat corporate sellout shills. Again, as you suggest about with respect to CAIR, what steps can we take against Geller and her cronies that will actually make them pay a painful price for their obnoxious provocations? Clearly they do not care about us laughing at them any more than we care about them gibbering at us. This is precisely where intelligence and imagination command a premium.
She won't be happy until she gets some innocent Americans killed so she can say "I told you so."
ReplyDeleteEveryone just ignore the goat feltching halfwit, and with any luck we might soon have another case of spontaneous human combustion on our hands.
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