Pamela Geller Takes Center Stage After Texas Shooting

Pamela Geller is the co-founder of the American Freedom Defense Initiative. The blogger and political commentator says she helped formed the group in order to stop the “Islamisation of America” and “creeping sharia” in America. It is with this point of view that Pamela Geller organized an art show, in which participants attempted to draw the best cartoon centered around the Muslim prophet Muhammad.

That event, held deep in the heart of Texas was enough to make a couple of angry young men open fire at the event presumably because they didn’t like Muhammad depicted as a cartoon. Pamela Geller might not have wanted this kind of thing to happen, but she certainly couldn’t have been that surprised. Pamela Geller’s event took place just a few months after a similar shooting left a number of journalists and editors dead at the French Magazine, Charlie Hebdo.

As the BBC points out, Pamela Geller didn’t seem remotely shaken by the shootings outside the Texas event, commenting after the smoke had cleared that, “The idea we are going to bridge our freedom, our most basic inalienable right in order to not offend savages, is egregious, it is outrageous.” As the Washington Post points out, this is hardly the first time that Pamela Geller has taken center stage when it comes to issues surrounding Islam.

Pamela Geller led the effort to stop a Mosque from being built at Ground Zero in New York City back in 2009. During that fight, she made the comment that the only, “moderate Muslim is a secular Muslim” and that when Muslims “pray five times a day … they’re cursing Christians and Jews five times a day.”

While the Texas shooting is something everyone should agree is deplorable, it should be pointed out that the blogger has herself said and done enough things that the Southern Poverty Law Center has dubbed her organization a hate group. Pamela Geller doesn’t agree with the characterization that she is actually anti-Muslim. The outspoken activist says that she is actually just anti-Jihad. She has even gone on record as being someone who loves Muslims.

That kind of distinction isn’t swallowed by some people. There are plenty who have pointed to this Texas event as being something that was meant to anger, upset and incite. That doesn’t make the shootings right, but it does make one wonder, why Pamela Geller believes she had to demonstrate her rights the way she did.

[Photo Courtesy MSN.com]