While she is well known for her opposition to Islamist terror, with her notoriety for anti-Muslim rhetoric, Pamela Geller, as a subject, was someone whom I generally avoided.
Islamism, with its determined mission of suppressing dissent and its fostering of ideals that inevitably lead to terror and repression, is despicable. But just as despicable is prejudice against Muslims and the presumption of guilt or sympathy for terror simply because of someone’s ethnic or cultural background. I didn’t know if Geller’s words justified her reputation as a bigot and, to be honest, I didn’t find her interesting enough to inquire, so to my thinking she was irrelevant. (…)
It seemed to me that it would be worthwhile to hear what Geller had to say for herself, rather than to make a judgement based on what others said about her, so I accepted an invitation to hear her speech. (…)
There was nothing “anti-Muslim” in anything she said. Her fight is with Jihadism, a fanatical ideology which promotes violence and terror. Geller said her principal motivation is the struggle to preserve individual liberty, which Islamism, like Marxism, fights to repress.
