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Pam Geller’s Glory: How Many Prophet Muhammad Cartoon Contests Does It Take to Lift Us Out of Defilement?

Pam Geller’s Glory: How Many Prophet Muhammad Cartoon Contests Does It Take to Lift Us Out of Defilement?
June 24
06:15 2015

Pamela Geller, the conservative so-called political activist says she will not be intimidated by death threats. She does not want to die, she says, but she will not live as a slave.

She’s 59 years old and, from my madcap assessment of history, she happens to be the freest slave in the world. And one of the most self-righteous.

Geller’s words are heroic for a modern day anti-Islamic blogger and activist, and at first glance many Americans will get in stride with her crusade to protect the First Amendment. If there’s one way the American populace is geared toward thinking, it’s, “If it’s free, I’ll support it.”

Free_Speech_Careless_TalkThis would include, according to Geller, drawing the most insulting cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad as possible. Because she was met with the kind of armed resistance she needed and her event had prepared for during the Garland, Texas cartoon drawing contest, Geller feels she’s proving her point.

Sean Hannity, too, if you can stand his voice, asked Geller’s opponents, “So what part of the First Amendment’s freedom of speech don’t you understand?”

For minds into more nuanced thinking, you might remember that fighting words, or words meant specifically to provoke someone to violent action are not necessarily protected and can be scrutinized on a case-by-case basis.

Which was exactly Geller’s plan with the Prophet Muhammad cartoon contest. To provoke a reaction by a fundamentalist Muslim who suffers from the same narrow patterns of thought that folks like Sean Hannity do.

And so there was a violent incident that day in Texas, and two men who fit that exact bill came a-shootin’ and they lost their lives.

RUMINATE ON IT AWHILE

You’ll see Geller on TV often, playacting the Constitutional Champion. She uses a lot of wind to break down her opinions as gracefully as an old goat chomps down a rotten shoe into mush. It’s easier to swallow that way, but it’s a lot of work.

Geller has about four different compartments of thought from which she regurgitates her rough talking points, and then she chews them over and spits them out until you’re sympathetic to her claim that she’s a captive awaiting slaughter in a tyrannical world run by Islamists. If you didn’t know any better, that is. Because it all brews in the same trashy place filled with acid and bile.

WHO WAGES THE WAR?

Geller stirs up a storm about freedom of speech and an imminent threat of Islamic law overtaking the very foundations of our Constitution, as if jihadists are running the world.

From my vantage point, I don’t see the Muslims running the world. I see them scattered into small, disorganized groups the world over, almost so perfectly defeated in every way, but still holding onto a religious thread or two, that one can’t help but wonder if it’s been done by design.

West_Bank_Barrier_cartoon_by_LatuffI don’t see Muslims using fighter jets to drop Napalm on villages, to drop bunker busters on world leaders without a shred of evidence to wage war, or using drones to blow up apartment complexes and marketplaces to wipe out bloggers and preachers calling for violent resistance to having their lands occupied. I haven’t seen any jihadists whip cruise missiles from the sea into Yemeni farming villages to wipe out children and women, all in order to nail a low-level blogger for Al Qaeda.

The destruction in the Middle East has been beyond anything a Westerner can comprehend.

One million directly and indirectly killed by the invasion in Iraq, four million refugees. That’s not even counting Bush Sr’s invasion, nor Clinton’s egregious Baghdad bombing. There have been thousands of innocent Muslims killed or maimed in Afghanistan from drone strikes. Tens of thousands of civilians dead in Libya from NATO airstrikes to provide air cover for Al Qaeda rebels, many who later joined ISIS. And let’s not forget Israel’s violent decades-long human rights abuses and acts of war that’s created the open air concentration camp called Gaza.

If you want to denigrate the idea of Muhammad, that’s your right. But Geller acts like she’s the one in an uphill climb for her right to peace, prosperity, and the ability draw stick figures of famous religious icons in public. She bawls like a woman who won’t be able to rest without black market tranquilizers until she can hit a personal high-mark with her slander of one of the most impressive humans to have ever lived and had his life meticulously recorded by his companions.

How many cartoon contests will it take to realize her goal? How many blindfolded third-graders does it take to pin a tail to a donkey? These are questions that cannot be answered. Not for an imam or a blogger mom.

Geller lives a life steeped in defilement. She’s a showboat of a woman and runs on pure ego. Her higher aspirations of a world of free speech are illusory. She’s got to keep making her name somehow, and playing up the fear of Islam to a Western world steeped in such profound ignorance of that religion is the ideal calling for someone who shares the same profound intellectual laziness as Ronald Reagan.

Why would anybody take social or spiritual cues from a liar and an alarmist? She says she will not tolerate the “wholesale slaughter” of people trying to draw the Prophet. But what about the wholesale double century of slaughter of Muslims in sovereign Muslim lands by Britain, France, Israel, the US military, and NATO forces? Does that have anything to do with the escalating rhetorical tension that eventually persuades some of the more radical people to act out violently while carrying a blackened version of the Islamic banner?

Who is having their human rights and privileges violated most egregiously? Maybe pissing on the last thing that countless millions of shattered Muslims have left–religion and God’s Messenger–is the last straw. When order and honor are bombed out of daily life, when the marketplaces are destroyed, the electricity grid in shambles, and there’s no more running water, you’d better believe religious beliefs become zealous. The physical world loses its luster.

CARTOON CONTESTS ARE FOR KIDS

Who, though, would turn making fun of the Prophet Muhammad into an Integrity Crusade? You don’t have to keep him sacred in your heart to recognize a human so compassionate and brilliant that he whipped the wild Arab tribes into a respectable, unified empire. When I compare Geller’s ideology with Muhammad’s, it’s not difficult to choose which one I’d rather follow.

Why denigrate a man who gave rights to Arab women over a thousand years before our so-called feminist movement? Before the Prophet, Arab men could beat their wives, could take as many wives as they wished, and the women had no rights that men had to respect. Islam made it clear that man and wife have rights over each other. It defined them clearly with no tolerance for abusive behavior. It defined the boundaries for a respectful divorce, if that was the only recourse.

Muhammad also ended infanticide. The common practice was to bury baby daughters for families that would rather have had a boy. He put an end to slavery. His companions used their money to buy slaves from the rich Quraysh tribal leaders, and then set them free.

Muhammad also went hungry to feed others in his growing community in Madina. He ordered the end of usury, cheating of one’s neighbor, and instilled the idea of fair business and trade practices. He established a higher order of hygiene and cleanliness. He demanded rights for the poor and sick. He smiled a lot. At the end of his life, he told his people to be good to their women, to treat them well.

What has Pam Geller done? Who has she helped? Who has benefited from her?

Did anybody in Garland, Texas draw a cartoon so magnificent that it was an instant, as we called it in elementary school, “fridge hanger?”

HERE’S SOMEONE WHO SHOULD BE UPSET

While I take the First Amendment seriously for the sake of my own freedom of expression, the people who should really be whining about their loss of rights are people like Tarek Mehanna, a man put into jail for translating Arabic texts that the Feds told us were dangerous.

Glenn Greenwald called Mehanna’s 17-year jail sentence “one of the most egregious violations of the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech in quite some time….”

Mehanna, it seems, is in jail for taking too much liberty in his guarantee of the First Amendment. His case teaches us that you have the right in America to be a practicing Muslim, but then you can’t actually have moral opinions that don’t support the wholesale slaughter of Muslims in Muslim nations. The combination is too wicked.

If you’re going to be Muslim in America, you have to be a weak, tired one. A Muslim with no appreciation for the metaphysical nor the political. A Muslim who looks the other way while his brothers and sisters are gunned down and bombed in Gaza and left with nothing but sticks and stones to defend themselves against a nuclear nation armed to the teeth with American weapons.

I feel bad for Pamela Geller. She’s a lonely old goat that’s trying to have a few more days in the sun before being put out to pasture. She wants to be a leader, and the easiest, simplest, vaguest phantom to fight is the contrived fear that Islam is going to wipe out our freedom of speech, even though, if you open your eyes to the right situations, you can see it’s not Islam doing the wiping.

You can tell a tree by the kind of fruit it produces. Leave cartoons to children and the mentally deficient. Raising the status of people, empowering them through a unified idea of an eternal Supreme Being that commands respect for family and community and rights for the poor and sick and denounces slavery and defilement is for adults.

[West Bank concentration camp by Carlos Latuffe; bewitching goat stare photo by FlyingCoyote]

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