There so many bloggers who are doing the essential work that the enemedia, the academics and the most cursed of all, the intellectuals, abandoned long ago. There is a brilliant little blog by a student at a London university, where "you would hardly believe the state things are in these days. The Christian Union at this university is under siege from Islamic societies, and open advocacy for Israel would be a deathwish." Indeed it would, and US university campuses are under siege as well.
The blog, Defend the Modern World, wrote an extraordinary essay on my work and the vilification of champions of freedom. Please read it and check out the blog. Bookmark it. There are bright young people who get it.
People wonder why I subject myself to the slings and arrows, the smears and outright lies, the defamation and ruination of my name and reputation. Because I am fighting for freedom and the fight is righteous and I know I am right. I know no other way.
The Heroism of Pamela Geller January 25, 2013
The community of people threatened by Islam contains many colors and creeds. The intellectual luminaries of its activist community reflect this, in so far as they are as diverse as the swathe of humanity they represent. There are ex-Muslims (Ayaan Hirsi-Ali, Ibn Warraq), Hindus (VS Naipaul), Leftists (the late Christopher Hitchens, Nick Cohen, Paul Berman), homosexuals (Leopold Smith), feminists (Lionel Shriver, Fay Weldon) all grouped among that number, each bringing with them their own reasons for standing up to this nefarious global bully and their unique insights into how best to do it in the future. Homosexual defiance of Islam is roundly applauded even by sections of the left. Non-white ex-Muslim females, having escaped confinement in the third world, such as Ms. Hirsi Ali, are also – though they are sometimes controversial – accepted as having naturally come to their opinions. The same with feminists, atheist Marxists and Christian conservatives. Whether or not, people disagree with what these people have to say or with the way in which they say it, they are ‘trusted’ to have arrived at their views via an organic, understandable process; one that we can all relate to. Even the most doctrinaire leftist still has enough insight within him to imagine what it must be like to be gay in Pakistan, or a woman in Saudi Arabia, or a feminist locked in an abusive marriage in the West. The leftist would rather we don’t dwell on these things too much, but he is happy enough to allow these things to be opposed.
What cannot be tolerated however, is the opposition of an ordinary civilian; that is, someone who did not need to fight Islamism but chose to do so. This is a problem because choosing to fight for justice when one could have had an easy life is a heroic myth jealously guarded by the left. As such, it simply cannot happen on the right. There must always be another explanation. Nobody can come to right-wing views except by an unromantic or devious process. This belief is well represented by the case of Pamela Geller.
Ms. Geller is what we might call an extraordinary ordinary person. Brought up in the West rather than in the Middle East, Ms. Geller had no obvious reason to stand up for the millions of Muslim women whose path she never needed to cross. Educated in the relatively plush surrounds of American colleges, she had no obvious reason to stand up for those denied the right to learn to read. She chooses to do this. She stands up for her sex, her society and her civilization (and allows herself to be hated for it) simply because it is the right thing to do as a Woman, a Jew, and an American.
This kind of explanation, the Left simply will not stand for. It tramples over so much of what they hold dear. The presumptions which undergird their rationale – the imagined world of selfish, cigar-smoking bankers, facing off against a righteous world of hungry brown people, is at odds with the Geller story. In this story, one has a Jew (which as an innuendo is almost interchangeable with both ‘banker’ and ‘capitalist’), who is also an American (once again =’capitalist’), and a defender of Israel (interchangeable with both ‘Zionist’ and ‘racist’) – in other words, a racist, Zionist American Banker.
Even one of these charges is deemed sufficient for the Left to scream ‘evil!’, but having them ganged together in the same person is enough to make a liberal choke up Bran Flakes. And yet in the Geller story, this Zionist banker is working everyday not on behalf of Goldman Sachs, but on behalf of ravaged women in Afghan villages, acid-scarred schoolgirls in Pakistan, and illiterate Egyptian, Tunisian, and Iranian women – all of whom have been trained to see her as the enemy.
Not for the first time, the Left is here wholly wrong. Geller is not a monster but an icon of bravery, and a much underappreciated and abused one. Her heroic blog Atlasshrugs has done more to raise awareness of the Islamist issue than any national newspaper. She goes further than most but never over-steps the line separating truth from falsehood. She is rarely sued (or at any rate successfully) despite being vehemently despised by many powerful (and wealthy) sections of society. In a more honest age she would be setting the standard for feminist activism and courage. In this age, she is ‘sowing hate’ and ‘division’, or she is a ‘Zionist’ aiming to launch an offensive alliance against Islam by manipulating evidence.
Go read it all.
