Pamela Geller, the veteran Muslim-basher and co-founder of the rabidly anti-Muslim group Stop Islamization of America (SIOA), has won over a whole new set of supporters: American white supremacists. They just can’t seem to get enough of her since her agitation began against a planned Islamic community center and mosque proposed for a site near Ground Zero in New York City.
Geller has never been shy about her anti-Islamic views. In May, she spent $10,000 for anti-Islam ads to be placed for a month on 40 New York City buses. Among other things, the ads directed Muslims to a website urging them to leave the “falsity of Islam.” But that’s just the start — Geller’s fear-mongering against Muslims seems to know no bounds. “As their numbers and influence grow, they will be attempting a political takeover, and if that doesn’t work, they will turn to further intimidation, murder and terrorism — just as they’ve already proved in dozens of countries around the world,” Geller says of American Muslims. Geller, who once delivered a videotaped anti-Muslim rant while frolicking in the surf in a bikini, is also a “birther” who doesn’t believe President Obama is an American citizen. (Media Matters for America provides comprehensive documentation of Geller’s many anti-Muslim, bigoted and otherwise remarkable statements.)
Geller’s Muslim-bashing has resonated with certain conservatives, several of whom, including former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, have come out against the Muslim community center. But Geller’s views are now also finding support from nearly every sector of America’s racist right. This is rather surprising because Geller is Jewish, a fact that is normally enough to dissuade radical rightists from too tight an embrace. Apparently, Geller is a Jew the racist right can love.
On the oldest and largest white nationalist forum, Stormfont.org, Geller’s anti-Islamic blog posts have been shared on several occasions. In January, for instance, “Thunderbird” posted several links to Geller’s writing and that of another Jewish woman who writes for the anti-immigrant hate site, VDARE.com. “Thunderbird” asked her fellow haters whether these “notorious right wing conservative Jewish bloggers are … on our side on many issues.” A compatriot, “GE Bonaventure” replied, “Jewish Nazi’s, Fascists, right wingers etc. are small in number but they can make sense.”
In May, “skinjob88” (88 is neo-Nazi code for “Heil Hitler”) gave Geller high praise on Stormfront: “In my country and the rest of Europe, [Muslims] are pushing for Islamification, they are killing good White teenagers and raping young White girls, they inter-marry and inter-breed with their family members. Don’t think for one minute the US is safe from Islam.” But the support wasn’t unanimous. One Stormfronter expressed anger that Geller seemed blind to the horrors of non-white races. In April, “Teutonic Beubonic” wrote: “She singles out Muslim immigrants in Europe for their uncivilized animal-like behavior and likeliness to commit crime, yet she refuses to mention anything about blacks or Latinos in the U.S. … Shame on her.”
Over at the Rebellion blog, run by the racist neo-secessionist group League of the South, head blogger “Old Rebel” has more than once expressed support for Geller’s anti-Islamic views. In August, referring to Geller’s protests in New York, the poster said that “[i]f the globalist elite has its way, more Muslims will be colonizing us.” “Anonymous” posted in reply: “Islam comprises much more than a cult. Islam, unlike any other religion I challenge you to name, is a top to bottom political movement that spans government, law, culture and worship practices that, when it achieves hegemony, tolerates no deviation from any of its aspects without severe penalty.”
American Renaissance, a race science outfit whose leader has written that black people are incapable of sustaining civilization, has posted more than one Geller column on its website. This past January, the group featured a Geller piece from The Washington Times that asserted that Muslims were attempting to replace European law with Islamic law. Her message resonated with American Renaissance’s readers. “It won’t be long before Muslims will be voting to end democracy in Europe and replacing it with Islamic law,” wrote one anonymous poster.
Geller’s work has been particularly popular at the National Policy Institute (NPI), a white nationalist organization that calls itself an “advocacy group for America’s historical majority” — white people. NPI has posted repeatedly about the planned New York center and NPI supporters have signed on to Geller’s message that Islam is bad for the U.S. This past month, in a typical comment to NPI’s boards, “bob” wrote: “[W]e need to keep the Muslims from doing what they have done to the UK and many other parts of Europe. … It is unwise to help violent people gradually take over the country and it is not mercy or justice for anyone to let them destroy it.”
The white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens, which has close ties to NPI, couldn’t agree more. The group had this to say on its blog about the planned New York mosque: “This USED TO BE America.”
Perhaps part of the reason that Geller is getting a hearing with these extremists is that she shares more than just their anti-Muslim views. This past April, Geller defended the South African apartheid-defending terrorist Eugene Terre’Blanche after he was found murdered. She blamed his death on “black supremacism.”
“The whites in South Africa are keenly aware of the plans to kill them, better known as ‘The night of the long knives,’” Geller wrote on her blog Atlas Shrugs. “They expect it to happen very soon after the death of Mandela, but to tell this to the world is a waste of energy. Atlas has been reporting on this horror that the savages in the media ignore.”
And Geller has been defending and working with organizations that are blatantly racist and anti-Semitic. This past June, Geller spoke at an event in Paris put on by the Bloc Identitaire, which opposesrace-mixing and “Islamic imperialism.” Geller also is a proud supporter of the English Defence League (EDF), described by Salon.com as “a far-right street movement that sprang up in the United Kingdom earlier this year to protest planned construction of mosques and to stoke fear of Islam more broadly.” According to the Guardian, EDF members have been involved in violent anti-mosque protests, made violent statements that included the threat that an EDF member may one day “murder” any Muslims he can get his hands on, and has engaged in “racism” and “virulent Islamophobia.”
No wonder some of America’s racists have found common cause with Geller, given her support of an apartheid leader and blatantly racist European groups, not to mention her untrammeled Muslim-bashing. And no wonder, too, that Newt Gingrich has just decided to drop out of the upcoming SIOA rally against the planned Muslim community center scheduled for September 11. Pamela Geller may be getting a little too toxic for anyone with claims to be part of the political mainstream, no matter how thin those claims may be stretched.
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