The Education of Pamela Geller
Alex Knapp flags this paragraph from a New York Times profile of Muslim-baiting blogger Pamela Geller.
She spent the next year educating herself about Islam, reading Bat Ye'or, a French writer who focuses on tensions over Muslim immigrants in Europe; Ibn Warraq, the pseudonym for a Pakistani who writes about his rejection of Islam; and Daniel Pipes, whom she ultimately rejected because he believes in the existence of a moderate Islam.
This is grotesque to me. It's like saying that that someone spent a year educating themselves about Christianity, reading Chrisopher Hitchens, an English writer who wrote articles focusing on the "crimes against humanity" of Mother Teresa, Friedrich Nietzsche, a former seminary student who wrote at length about his rejection of Christianity, and Sam Harris, whom they ultimately rejected because he believes in the existence of moderate Christianity.
If you put that in a profile of an anti-Christian blogger, you would know immediately that they're a fraud and simply not worth listening to.
If you want to listen the fruits of Geller's self-education, check out her interview with 60 Minutes from a few weeks ago. Note, though, that after the interview, Geller helpfully provided some important context in which to watch the segment: 60 Minutes "is part of the Islamic supremacist agenda."
My all-time favorite Geller moment is still the time she published proof that Barack Obama is the illegitimate love child of Malcolm X. (She now disclaims the theory, but says she published it because "the writer did a spectacular job documenting Obama's many connections with the Far Left.")
Geller would be easy to dismiss and not take seriously…if it weren't for the fact that a disturbing and growing number of people take her seriously.
