{"id":18886,"date":"2015-05-10T12:42:51","date_gmt":"2015-05-10T10:42:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/praag.org\/?p=18886"},"modified":"2015-05-10T12:42:51","modified_gmt":"2015-05-10T10:42:51","slug":"ilana-mercer-pamela-geller-offends-shariah-media","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/praag.org\/?p=18886","title":{"rendered":"Ilana Mercer: Pamela Geller Offends Shariah Media"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sandhya SomethingOrAnother is a \u201csocial change\u201d reporter for The Washington Post. (Yes, the WaPo has such a beat.) Ms. Somashekhar (her surname copied and pasted) implied that WND columnist Pamela Geller ought to repent for staging a Muhammad Art Exhibit and Cartoon Contest in Garland, Texas, an event that was briefly<\/em> attended by two, uninvited ISIS-Americans. Sandhya must have been angry because she called<\/a> Geller, in error, \u201ca housewife from Long Island.\u201d Progressives don\u2019t much like housewives.<\/p>\n

Like most Geller haters, Somashekhar (her name copied and pasted) cited the Southern Poverty Law Center as her \u201cscholarly\u201d source for Geller\u2019s hatefulness. The SPLC is a \u201cleftist vigilante group,\u201d explained Paul Gottfried, a real scholar. It is \u201cunmistakably totalitarian in the drive to suppress and destroy deviationists from the party line on race, gender, and \u2018discrimination.\u2019\u201d The \u201c$PLC\u201d<\/a> is as dodgy in its financial dealings as it is in its strong-arming tactics. (Read “Is The Southern Poverty Law Center ($PLC) The Next Financial Bubble?”<\/a>)<\/p>\n

\u201cStupid,\u201d ruled a less obscure enforcer of political correctness, Bill O\u2019Reilly, on Geller\u2019s event. Also at Fox News, host Martha MacCallum suggested Geller ought to have explored kinder, gentler ways of protesting Islam-imposed restrictions on expression.<\/p>\n

Pantomime, perhaps?<\/p>\n

The left-liberal Jon Stewart took the safe route. The idiotic urge to kill over any annoyance was the object of the satirist’s spoof. Stewart’s Thou Shall Not Kill skit<\/a> was hardly cutting-edge comedy. So he livened up the tired shtick with a curtsy in the direction of the Prophet\u2019s avengers. Geller’s group, The American Freedom Defense Initiative, was about hate speech, warned Stewart.<\/p>\n

The biggest clown in the media circus, however, was TV anchor Chris Cuomo. While Geller staged her vital challenge in private; Cuomo, a lawyer, flaunted his “smarts” in public. He tweeted that \u201chate speech\u201d was unprotected by the Constitution. Not everyone was speechless<\/a>. Another of CNN\u2019s cretins, Alisyn Camerota, stood squarely in the corner of the victims: those poor ISIS-Americans whose descent into hell was hastened by a guard at Geller\u2019s Garland cartoon contest.<\/p>\n

It was difficult to tell what it was about Pamela Geller\u2019s position on impolite and impolitic speech\u2014echoed in the 1st Amendment in the Bill of Rights\u2014that so puzzled Camerota. Brow furrowed, she battled to score points against Geller, in an exchange that was more amusing than the Mayweather-Pacquiao match (as ranked<\/a> by National Review). Camerota came short.<\/p>\n

ISIS and its local, low IQ Abduls have since vowed to kill Pamela and anyone who shields her. Duly, Fox News\u2019 Greta Van Susteren worried about the welfare of \u2026 law enforcement. Greta accused Geller of jeopardizing her security detail\u2019s safety. How\u2019s that for ridiculous? First, it is not Geller who is endangering the police; it\u2019s those who would kill her for the words she mouths. Second, protection of an innocent citizen\u2019s life, liberty and property is the one<\/em> legitimate function of government. Besides which Geller\u2019s organization paid thousands out-of-pocket for protection.<\/p>\n

THE FRENCH CONNECTION<\/strong><\/p>\n

Easily the most contemptible of Geller\u2019s critics was a fellow called Jean-Baptiste Thoret, a film critic for the Charlie Hebdo magazine.<\/p>\n

When Islamists hit Charlie Hebdo’s Paris headquarters<\/a>, slaughtering a dozen of its cartoonists; the world, left and right, came out in support. When two ISIS-Americans stormed the Curtis Culwell Center in Garland this month Jean-Baptiste, however, came out <\/a> post-haste to distance the Hebdo from the Geller cartoons.<\/p>\n

From his affectatious conversation with broadcaster Charlie Rose\u2014Jean-Baptiste is French and has little to no English\u2014one gleaned that he believed the sexualized, infantile, witless depictions of the Prophet, produced by the Hebdo crowd, were clever. Conversely, Geller\u2019s exhibit was unintelligent. Or so this fool implied.<\/p>\n

Anyone who\u2019s been made to watch a French film, serious or satirical, knows that the French have no sense of humor or irony. The last truly funny comedian to have made merry in France lived in the 17th century. He, too, was Jean-Baptiste: Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, aka Moli\u00e8re<\/em>. To get a feel for what has since become of French comedy, watch Louis de Fun\u00e8s, whom the French consider a comedic giant. Even your typically humorless Hebdo cartoon\u2014take the one in which the contours of Muhammad\u2019s turban resemble his bare buns, accompanied by the caption, \u201cAnd my butt, you like my butt?\u201d\u2014is wittier than Louis de Fun\u00e8s\u2019 oeuvre.<\/p>\n

Alluding to the intelligence with which Hebdo does commentary, Jean-Baptiste and pal Gerard Biard rejected any parallels between Charlie Hebdo\u2019s defiance of Islamic blasphemy laws and Geller\u2019s defiance of the same laws.<\/p>\n

French cerebral agility is clearly as keen as French humor.<\/p>\n

THE RED CONNECTION<\/strong><\/p>\n

During the communist era, certain, ever-accreting categories of people were deemed unworthy of personhood.<\/p>\n

True right wingers\u2014members of the ancien r\u00e9gime<\/em>, the clergy, the aristocracy, the bourgeois, the business and professional communities\u2014they were \u201ctaken out of circulation\u201d early on in the Bolshevik Revolution<\/a>. Once the Right had been eliminated, during the Great Terror (1936-38), \u201cright-winger\u201d became synonymous with Communists who harbored too great an affinity for the peasantry (in other words, were insufficiently enthusiastic about collectivization<\/a>), and might have oversees the recrudescence of capitalistic practices (namely, making a living).<\/p>\n

Maoist society, as “The Black Book of Communism” illustrates<\/a>, promoted the \u201cbinary division between \u2018red\u2019 categories, such as workers, poor peasants, medium peasants, party cadres \u2026 martyrs of the revolution; and \u2018black\u2019 categories, such as landowners, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, \u2018evil elements,\u2019 and right-wingers.<\/strong> \u2026 The labels stuck no matter what one did later. Even after an official rehabilitation, a right-winger would remain a target for mass campaigns and would never have the right to return to the city. … \u201d (P. 486)<\/p>\n

Broadly speaking, American civil and political society privileges radical left-liberalism. To be of the Left is to be in the cool kids\u2019 corner. Distilled, the double standard toward what is perceived as rightist speech (Geller\u2019s) and left-wing freedom of expression (Hebdo\u2019s) is, in my opinion, a holdover construct of communism.
\n**
\n Ilana Mercer<\/a> is a paleolibertarian writer, based in the U.S. She is a contributor to Junge Freiheit<\/em>, Germany\u2019s finest weekly, and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies. Her latest book is \u201cInto the Cannibal\u2019s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa.\u201d<\/a> Her website is www.IlanaMercer.com.<\/a> Follow her on Twitter.<\/a> \u201cFriend\u201d<\/a> her on Facebook.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sandhya SomethingOrAnother is a \u201csocial change\u201d reporter for The Washington Post. (Yes, the WaPo has such a beat.) Ms. Somashekhar (her surname copied and pasted) implied that WND columnist Pamela Geller ought to repent for staging a Muhammad Art Exhibit and Cartoon Contest in Garland, Texas, an event that was briefly attended by two, uninvited … Continue reading “Ilana Mercer: Pamela Geller Offends Shariah Media”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2957,"featured_media":16009,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[79,80],"tags":[11665,1195,11664,1353],"class_list":["post-18886","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-columns","category-ilana-mercer","tag-boishevik-revolution","tag-charlie-hebdo","tag-jon-stewart","tag-pamela-geller"],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":false,"source_text":false,"source_url":false},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/praag.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/ilana_nuut2.jpeg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18886","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2957"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18886"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18886\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18887,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18886\/revisions\/18887"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/16009"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}