Salon Joins Daisy Khan: It’s all Geller’s Fault

AP

Blogger Pamela Geller and Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf

A group of progressive Muslim-Americans plans to build an Islamic
community center two and a half blocks from ground zero in lower
Manhattan. They have had a mosque in the same neighborhood for many
years. There's another mosque two blocks away from the site. City
officials support the project. Muslims have been praying at the Pentagon, the other building hit on Sept. 11, for many years.

In short, there is no good reason that the Cordoba House project
should have been a major national news story, let alone controversy. And
yet it has become just that, dominating the political conversation for
weeks and prompting such a backlash that, according to a new poll, nearly 7 in 10 Americans now say they oppose the project. How did the Cordoba House become so toxic, so fast?

In a story last week,
the New York Times, which framed the project in a largely positive,
noncontroversial light last December, argued that it was cursed from the
start by "public relations missteps." But this isn't accurate. To a
remarkable extent, a Salon review of the origins of the story found, the
controversy was kicked up and driven by Pamela Geller, a right-wing,
viciously anti-Muslim, conspiracy-mongering blogger, whose sinister
portrayal of the project was embraced by Rupert Murdoch's New York Post.

Here's a timeline of how it all happened:

• Dec. 8, 2009: The Times publishes a lengthy front-page look
  at the Cordoba project. "We want to push back against the extremists,"
  Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the lead organizer, is quoted as saying. Two
  Jewish leaders and two city officials, including the mayor's office, say
  they support the idea, as does the mother of a man killed on 9/11. An
  FBI spokesman says the imam has worked with the bureau. Besides a few
  third-tier right-wing blogs, including Pamela Geller's Atlas Shrugs site, no one much notices the Times story.

• Dec. 21, 2009: Conservative media personality
  Laura Ingraham interviews Abdul Rauf's wife, Daisy Khan, while
  guest-hosting "The O'Reilly Factor" on Fox. In hindsight, the segment is
  remarkable for its cordiality. "I can't find many people who really
  have a problem with it," Ingraham says of the Cordoba project, adding at
  the end of the interview, "I like what you're trying to do."

• 
  (This segment also includes onscreen the first use that we've seen of
  the misnomer "ground zero mosque.") After the segment — and despite the
  front-page Times story — there were no news articles on the mosque for
  five and a half months, according to a search of the Nexis newspaper
  archive.

• May 6, 2010: After a unanimous vote by a New York City community board committee to approve the project, the AP runs a story.
  It quotes relatives of 9/11 victims (called by the reporter), who offer
  differing opinions. The New York Post, meanwhile, runs a post
  that day, "Monster Mosque Pushes Ahead in Shadow of World Trade Center
  Islamic Death and Destruction." She writes on her Atlas Shrugs blog,
  "This is Islamic domination and expansionism. The location is no
  accident. Just as Al-Aqsa was built on top of the Temple in Jerusalem."
  (To get an idea of where Geller is coming from, she once suggested that Malcolm X was Obama's real father. Seriously.)

• May 7, 2010: Geller's posts
  the names and contact information for the mayor and members of the
  community board, encouraging people to write. The board chair later reports getting "hundreds and hundreds" of calls and e-mails from around the world.

• May 8, 2010: Geller announces
  SIOA's first protest against what she calls the "911 monster mosque"
  for May 29. She and Spencer and several other members of the
  professional anti-Islam industry will attend. (She also says that the
  protest will mark the dark day of "May 29, 1453, [when] the Ottoman
  forces led by the Sultan Mehmet II broke through the Byzantine defenses
  against the Muslim siege of Constantinople." The outrage-peddling New
  York Post columnist Andrea Peyser argues in a note at the end of her column a couple of days later that "there are better places to put a mosque."

• May 13, 2010: Peyser follows up with an entire column
  devoted to "Mosque Madness at Ground Zero." This is a significant
  moment in the development of the "ground zero mosque" narrative: It's
  the first newspaper article that frames the project as inherently wrong
  and suspect, in the way that Geller has been framing it for months.
  Peyser in fact quotes Geller at length and promotes the anti-mosque
  protest of Stop Islamization of America, which Peyser describes as a
  "human-rights group." Peyser also reports — falsely — that Cordoba House's opening date will be Sept. 11, 2011.