[ April 17, 2024 ]
This is wonderful. Heads will be exploding across this great country of ours. I understand and respect Eric Allen Bell's intellectual journey. I am glad he has reasoned his way through the darkness. It is difficult. The loss of friends, work and professional support is stinging, but also revealing. They were not his friends, not really. The professional loss is acute. They always accuse of us being in the business of hate. Laughable. This is a calling, and there is no money on our side. We work and turn over our lives to the fight because it's the right thing.
Eric Allen Bell has been blessed with knowledge and wisdom. That is his miracle.
What Is Right About Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer Eric Allen Bell FrontPage Magazine, March 1
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[Editor's note: The article below is written by Eric Allen Bell, a filmmaker who was recently banned from blogging at the “Daily Kos” because he wrote three articles that ran afoul of the mindset there, specifically naming “Loonwatch.com” as a “terrorist spin control network.” Don't miss Eric Bell on Frontpage's television program, The Glazov Gang.]
I write this mainly for the benefit of so many of my Liberal friends. I know you have good hearts, but have been badly deceived by your peers and leaders when it comes to the threat of Jihad, and the character of those few brave individuals, who have had the courage to risk everything, to stand up for liberty and human rights…
BACKGROUND:
In the summer of 2010 I was invited to write an article for Michael Moore. I was in production on a documentary I was calling “Not Welcome” regarding the backlash against construction of a 53,000 square foot mega mosque in the middle of the American Bible Belt. His endorsement gave me a huge boost with the Hollywood crowd. Having worked in the entertainment industry for years, this was not my first film, but it was to be my first documentary. So when I went on to write a few more articles for MichaelMoore.com the wheels were greased for me to get into a room with the right people, and secure the finishing funds I needed to complete post production. And if there is one thing Hollywood loves (almost as much as congratulating itself), it’s the story of an innocent minority group being wrongly persecuted, preferably in the South, especially if the antagonist happens to be the Religious Right. And as my editor and I assembled the first 25 minutes, of the 300 hours of footage shot, this film promised to deliver just that. “Wow, I really wasn’t expecting this. I would like to thank the members of the Academy, Michael Moore and the Prophet Mohammed for making all of this possible…”
But then the winds changed direction. It seems that fate had issued a Fatwa against my perfect plan. The Arab Spring sprang into action and ruined everything, as it degenerated disappointingly into the Islamist Winter. It was as if I had been slapped upside the head by reality, thus knocking off my blinders and causing me to ask a lot of inconvenient questions. I was left wondering if there was perhaps more to the story of so-called “revolution” than what had been portrayed on Al Jazeera and “Democracy Now with Amy Goodman”. You can read more about this in an article I wrote for Front Page Magazine here: “The High Price of Telling the Truth About Islam”.
I took a second and more critical look inside Islamic scripture, comparing and contrasting the countless acts of Islamic terrorism, with specific commands to carry out these violent and barbaric attacks on innocent infidels as ordered in the Koran, the Hadith, and the Sunnah. And after much difficult soul searching I had realized I was making more than just a documentary. I was making a terrible mistake. So I went back to my backers and told them how I had changed the outline of the documentary, to include a critical examination of the violent dimension that informed so much of the Islamic world today, and throughout history, and how desperately this story needed to be told, and I consequently lost the backing to my film.
As a writer who had written over a hundred articles for The Daily Kos, a liberal blog which receives about a million visitors a day, I wrote 3 articles outlining what I had learned about Islam, it’s execution of homosexuals and how hundreds of millions of women around the world were living under Islamic gender apartheid. I called attention to this as a human rights issue, human rights being in theory a big concern among Liberal audiences. The warm reception that followed included being labeled a “bigot” a “right winger” and an “Islamophobe” in the hundreds of subsequent reader comments, demanding that my “hate speech” be banned. And after that the Islamophobia watchdog site, Loonwatch.com created a link for readers to write directly to the editors of DKOS, demanding my voice be silenced. And I was immediately banned from ever writing for The Daily Kos.
In the weeks that passed I received many “goodbye” texts and emails from friends letting me know that we were no longer friends. I saw my name get smeared in print – lies, misquotes, distortions, character assassination. Loonwatch.com named me the “Loon At Large”
(UPDATE: Since appearing on the Michael Coren show and telling my story about how Loonwatch put my name out on the street in the Islamic world, Loonwatch has since pulled that article from their site. Thank you very much Michael Coren!).
My friend count on Facebook took a hit. My blog, which has had over 23 million visitors and usually receives at least a million visitors per month, got hacked over and over for weeks before my traffic rebounded. And, many of my subscribers left the site, telling me that I was “spreading intolerance and ignorance”. On donations and ad revenue I took a massive financial hit. For so many who had known me for so long, I had become nothing more than an “intolerant hate monger”
PAMELA GELLER:
In the process of defending myself from all of these accusations, in a desperate attempt to distance myself from those names that had become synonymous with “Islamophobia” at least in my circle, I made critical remarks about Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller – comments meant to distinguish myself from the real “hate mongers” but comments that turned out to be uninformed and just simply just not true. I thought they were true at the time. But having only recently sipped from the well of knowledge, I had not yet flushed all of the Kool Aid out of my system.
For example, in a Daily Kos piece (before my excommunication for blasphemy) I wrongly lumped Pamela Geller in with Pastor Terry Jones, a religious zealot who preaches burning the Koran. A simple YouTube search will yield no shortage of remarks made by Geller, stating she opposes the burning of books, all books, and that furthermore she is not anti-Muslim, does not advocate persecution or hatred of Muslims, and even goes so far as to point out that it is in fact Muslims themselves, who are the biggest victims of Islamic violence. The number of times she has spoken out for the hundreds of millions of Muslim women, who suffer under gender apartheid alone, is evidence that Pamela Geller is not a hate monger, but rather a fearless advocate for human rights – including the rights of Muslims.
It is amazing, the human capacity for seeing only what we want to see. And it is especially humbling, I can tell you, when one identifies that unattractive quality within oneself. But the freedom that comes with trading in your cozy conclusions for difficult questions is well worth the cost. Everything is up for grabs. You evolve.
In taking the time to really get to know who Pamela Geller is and what she has done to earn this sensational media status, as some sort of evil hate monger, this intolerant fanatic who opposes religious freedom, I finally did some long overdue research of my own. And soon after simply scratching the surface, it was immediately clear that the bold stance Pamela Geller took publicly against the Ground Zero Mosque was absolutely right. Spot on, in fact damned near clairvoyant.
This shameless shrine, this 13 story Islamic gloating tower was to be financed with $100 million from the “Cordoba Initiative” an organization with very questionable ties to Jihadi interests – to be run by Imam Rauf and promoted by his wife Daisy Khan (pronounced “Con”).
Cordoba, by the way was at one time the capital of an Islamic Caliphate and the city where Muslims had converted a Cordoba church into the third largest mosque in the world – an inconvenient truth that those of us in the Liberal world were told was simply misunderstood. But when the spin doctors at CAIR failed to convince the skeptics, this mysterious $100 million Islamic fund rebranded the name of the victory mosque, to simply “Park 51”. It kind of sounds like an exclusive night club from the seventies, except without the liquor or cocaine, and where the women must throw a sheet over their heads and keep their mouths shut.
No matter how the Cordoba Initiative tried to spin this story, Pamela Geller kept on insisting this was a mosque. According to press releases parroted by left leaning media outlets, “Park 51” was more like a YMCA, where old people could play bingo or shuffle board or whatever they do. There would be Mommy and Me classes and the center just happened to have a prayer room on the top two floors for Muslims to pray. (also known as a mosque). Never mind that this mosque would overlook the site of the collapsed World Trade Center, where thousands of innocent people lost their lives after Islamic terrorists struck on 9/11. And never mind that construction of a mosque this close to Ground Zero was perfectly consistent with 1,400 years of Islamic conquest. This was to be a victory mosque the whole family could enjoy. And if you don’t like it, then you’re a racist and a bigot and a right wing Islamophobe. Did I mention that the new facility was designed to “bring the whole community together”?
As an advocate for cultural sensitivity for the American people (we could use more of those), Pamela Geller gave numerous television interviews. She was hammered and grilled mercilessly as an intolerant fanatic by a highly biased media, but she did not back down. She kept her cool and she stuck to the facts. For instance, fragments of a hijacked airliner had reportedly landed on the Burlington Coat Factory (the piece of Ground Zero real estate which was swooped up using questionable sources, to become the Victory Mosque). She asserted that the proposed site was in fact sacred ground, a war memorial, and not at all an appropriate place to build a $100 million “shrine to the very ideology that inspired the attacks of 9/11”.
I used to think that this was too broad a statement to make. I used to think that connecting Islam to 9/11 was somehow unfair. I used to not think, and think that I was thinking. And it seems for many of us Gen X’ers “educated” in government run schools, this type of not thinking was how we were taught to think. And the institutions of “education” told us that this type of not thinking was called “tolerance”. Applied evenly, one could learn to tolerate Communism, Nazism or even the President of Iran. See Oliver Stone’s son and recent convert to Shia Islam as Exhibit “A”.
So why did Pamela Geller call Islam an “Ideology” and not a religion? Perhaps this was because Islam is only a small part religion. In large part Islam is a tyrannical political system, and very much a barbaric legal system (the Sharia) practiced by hundreds of millions of Muslims in Islamic countries around the world and growing. And all three components go together to form what is known as “Islam” the so-called “religion of peace”. And yet so many in the mainstream media twisted Ms. Geller’s words to make it sound as if she were a crackpot, who actually thought that a mosque was going to be built on the site of the actual Twin Towers, while ignoring her valid points, or else cutting her off before she could finish making a valid point. And this is what so many of us wanted to believe, what we needed to believe – because the alternative meant that maybe she was right, and this went against a culture that raised us to believe all belief systems are of equal value and must be respected equally because anything less was unfair.
A huge portion of American culture is dominated by a naïve and usually well-intentioned view – that one must always side with the perceived victim in any conflict. And terrorist-linked organizations such as the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) have done a masterful job of manipulating this predisposition in painting a picture of Islam in America as the victim. Never mind the fact that Islam itself is perhaps the greatest victimizer in the world today. The perception that Islam is the underdog in America has allowed CAIR to bully and infiltrate the media, either by calling them out whenever they feel that Islam has been slighted or, more recently, creating an atmosphere where media outlets such as the New York Times are voluntarily censoring themselves.
For a religion that is so easily offended by the simplest slight, such as drawing a cartoon or burning a book, one would hope that a Muslim cleric with a hundred million dollars behind him could find another location – one that does not offend millions of Americans. And this was a point that Pamela Geller never backed down from, even though she knew that she could be risking her life.
ROBERT SPENCER:
There were two defining incidents that caused me to eventually do a full 180 on my views concerning Islam as a mostly peaceful religion with a few bad apples. The first one I have already mentioned in “The High Cost of Telling the Truth About Islam”. Briefly:
“I flew back to Nashville to shoot a conference on whether or not Islam was conducive with Democratic Values and on the way to my hotel room I learned that my cab driver was from Egypt. I asked him how he felt about the fall of Mubarak, a dictator worth over $70 billion dollars while so much of his country was living in poverty and he told me he was concerned. Concerned? Wasn’t this good news? The cab driver was a Coptic Christian and he told me that he feared for his family back home. “If the Muslims take control, and they will, it will be very dangerous for my parents and my sisters. I’m scared for them right now”. After that conversation, I started to pay more attention to the news coming from the Islamic world in the Middle East. Over the coming months I watched as the Muslim Brotherhood gained political power in Egypt. I saw that cab driver’s worst fears come true as Coptic Christians were attacked by Islamic mobs. I saw Tunisia institute Sharia, the brutal Islamic Law. After Libya fell, the Transitional Council also instituted Islamic Law. The nuclear armed Islamic government of Pakistan arrested and punished those who cooperated with the United States in killing Osama Bin Laden. A woman under the Islamic government of Afghanistan faced execution for the crime of being raped. Similar news stories emerged from Iran. A man who typed “there is no god” as his Facebook status in Indonesia, the largest Islamic country in the world, was arrested for blasphemy.”
Also, I read a book by Robert Spencer called “The Truth About Muhammad: Founder of the World’s Most Intolerant Religion”. I knew his reputation for being an “Islamophobe” as I had been a reader of Loonwatch.com for over a year – a site which is obsessed with Robert Spencer, and is aligned with another site called SpencerWatch.com – both of which go to great lengths to depict him as the worst human being in the world.
When I picked up “The Truth About Mohammed” I kept waiting for that moment when he would reveal himself to be the “Loon” they said he was and I could stop reading. But that moment never came. As it turns out, all of these horrible things I was reading about Mohammed could not possibly be “Islamophobic” because they were all coming directly from Islamic scripture. Everything he said was based on what Islamic sources, the Koran, the Hadith and the Sunnah, were saying about Mohammed. There was very little editorializing. Spencer was merely reporting in a very non-sensational way, what Muslims are taught about the life of their prophet.
I checked this out for myself. Not only did I want to disbelieve what I was reading, but I needed to disbelieve it. If what Robert Spencer was saying about Mohammed was true, then I had to rework my entire documentary, rethink my entire worldview, possibly lose backing (that hurt) and even have to go back and admit to my readers that I had it all wrong. I really, really wanted Robert Spencer to turn out to be a “Loon”. But he simply is not.
In fact, Robert Spencer is one of the only people out there telling the truth about Mohammed and successfully getting through to a significant number of people. And although I had seen him appear on news shows that I don’t like, being interviewed by people that I don’t agree with, there was absolutely nothing in his book that promoted his religion or promoted a partisan political point of view. He was simply stating the facts. And if I could detect any kind of agenda from this at all, any hint of this being in any way personal for him, it was pretty clear that his concerns had to do with protecting human rights.
From there I watched a documentary that Robert Spencer was featured prominently in (which I very highly recommend) called “Islam: What the West Needs to Know”. Again, I did my homework and it all checks out. From that point I watched nearly everything I could find on YouTube with Robert Spencer in it. Then I read “The Complete Infidel’s Guide to the Koran”.
Since first sharing my change in perspective on Daily Kos and later on Front Page Magazine, I had the honor of speaking with Robert Spencer on a number of occasions. In fact it was he who reached out to me when my articles on Daily Kos got me banned. We have since been on radio programs together and I receive his JihadWatch.com email regularly. In keeping with the style of his books, Jihad Watch merely reports the facts concerning all the many acts of Jihad that have happened that day or week, with plenty of links to independent news sources from around the world, to substantiate what is being said. JihadWatch.com more than anything has been, and continues to be, incredibly eye-opening and an excellent source of reference material, for anyone who is serious about understanding the very real threat of Jihad – including Stealth Jihad, both here at home and around the world.
Countless millions of people fall victim to Jihadists every single day. This is perhaps the worst human rights nightmare facing the world in our time. And, there are tragically so very few people out there who are risking their neck, quite literally, to bring us accurate information concerning this. Quite frankly I find most (but certainly not all) of the sites that are critical of Islam to be either hateful or else too religiously motivated for me. And my sense is that this has a lot to do with maintaining the false perception that the Counter Jihad movement is partisan or religiously motivated. JihadWatch.com is the best, as far as I am concerned, when it comes to getting the facts in a reliable, non-partisan, non-proselytizing format.
Go. Read the rest.
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21 Comments
12 years ago
Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer are huge Free World heroes. They speak TRUTH and speak out for victims.
God bless and protect them always.
12 years ago
I read some of Eric’s articles on his blog on religion and liked it very much then I read some of his articles on politics and hated it. I stopped reading what he wrote. He is now in a place I have been for a long time: an atheist with conservative common sense but no tolerance for government muddying up our lives with their social issue crap. But Islam is different, as Pamela as always said, it is a religious, political and social evil that threatens every human being on the planet. I commend Eric for using his very gifted brain to think through the issues of the day and not allow himself to be labeled or pigeon-holed. It is very difficult to be anti-theist and anti-liberal in today’s world. Eric welcome to my world. 🙂
12 years ago
It is a powerful example of how the deep study of facts can only lead to the truth.
12 years ago
Whenever you have a group of people who insist that you must believe a certain way or die, that group and its ideology must not only be opposed but exposed.
Thank you, Eric, for having the courage to speak out about this very important subject.
12 years ago
Sometimes it takes only a little curiosity and a little digging to find the truth. I’m so glad Eric did. And what courage it takes to admit your mistakes and forge ahead. It’s not easy. Losing friends. It’s not easy. But you have to do in your heart what you feel is right and just.
Once you read Atlas and Jihad Watch you realize it’s not editorial spun out of thin air. Most of it is based on news stories. News stories that move American loving people into action. I’m so grateful for Robert and Pamela. Boy have they opened my eyes and that of many of my friends.
Welcome to the dark side Eric. Find friends and comfort here.
12 years ago
You are not alone, Eric Alen Bell, I went through something like this. (The funny thing is they just freak out and unfriend you, but none of them have it in them to check or even ask if there is anything actually factually wrong with what you said…) Well, truth is stronger than deception, they’ll come around eventually and I won’t even ask for an apology, I was deceived, too …Keep doing what you do!
12 years ago
Muslims threaten WND
http://www.wnd.com/2012/02/muslim-threats-against-wnd-heat-up/
“Pamela Geller, who writes at AtlasShrugs and long has waged battles against the encroachment of Islamic religious law in the United States, said while she was not familiar with the group, the methodology is common.
“The tactic is pure Islamic supremacist intimidation, a tried-and-true strategy that they employ frequently,” she said. “They cannot answer us, so they try to shut us down.”
Geller repeatedly has fought over the right to have ads criticizing Islam in the same locations as ads that promote Islam. She frequently has to go to court to get the same access that pro-Islamic organizations are freely granted.”
12 years ago
Are you kidding me? Everything is right with Pamela and Robert!!!
God bless you both!!!
12 years ago
With the loss of Andrew, it deepens the meaning of when we say “god bless you Pamela and Robert!”
OT – Can you report on Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s finding about the fake birth certificate and Selection Service Registration? I’d like to hear your take on the subject.
12 years ago
I hoped and expected that someone else would raise this first, but “fools rush in where angels fear to tread.”.
Is Eric Bell a match for Dr. Sina’s docudrama script? He is likely to have difficulty finding and funding other projects, and the Life of Moe could win him awards and fame on a global scale.
12 years ago
It is very exciting to read this and be a witness to someone brave, like Eric, who has been willing to take an honest look at an issue so contrary to his original paradigm.
More grace and power to you Eric, as you travel down this path, I am sure you will make many new and genuine friends.
12 years ago
“The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.” ~ Winston Churchill
12 years ago
Ali Sina wants to make a movie about the life of Mohammed. Maybe you could help him on that project.
12 years ago
Nice to read about someone who has escaped from the cult of Leftism. Welcome to reality Mr. Bell!
12 years ago
I’ve been following Eric Bell’s “awakening” thru this great site, but this latest article – stepping up and outright praising the dynamic duo of Robert & Pamela/Spencer & Geller – was especially enlightening and encouraging! And a great tribute, as another poster commented, to the power of the Truth. Also, indirectly, a fitting tribute to the irreplacable and awesome Andrew Breitbart, who, following another path, also escaped the numbing non-think ideology of the Looney Left.
12 years ago
“”But the freedom that comes with trading in your cozy conclusions for difficult questions is well worth the cost. Everything is up for grabs. You evolve.””
The truth shall set you free but first it will make you miserable. It now is crystal clear that this is the path we must take if we want to remain free.
Thank you Pamela. Thank you, for making me miserable!
12 years ago
Don’t you just love the truthful ring of Bell’s ideas and his peals of praise for Spencer and Geller? Hopefully the truth about Islam will mug more PC lefties and turn them into ringing Liberty Bells drowning out the din of Islamic propaganda.
12 years ago
Glad you saw the light Eric!
I think the only way to truly understand the left is to define their maxim: Opinions based on opinions become ‘fact’. It’s postmodernism at it’s fullest extent, gleefully ignoring and subduing reality–“Just because gravity is true for you doesn’t mean it’s true for me!”.
12 years ago
“Former Kos Kid: What Is RIGHT about Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer”
Simple Answer: EVERYTHING!
12 years ago
I’m sorry, I seem to have missed the point of this article. After the obvious “Islam is not Christianity “, what’s your point?
Basically, what I see is a whole lot of people who want to be able to say Islam is wrong without rightfully being called racist. If you ask me, Christianity is just as “wrong”. Look at the Catholic Church at the time of the Inquisition and how it was justified by the Bible. There is no difference between the Catholic Church circa 1400’s and 1500s and Islam today.
“Perhaps this was because Islam is only a small part religion. In large part Islam is a tyrannical political system, and very much a barbaric legal system (the Sharia) practiced by hundreds of millions of Muslims in Islamic countries around the world and growing.”
One could, at one time, just as accurately substitute “Catholicism” for “Islam” in the quote above. The Church WAS part of a tyrannical political system for centuries, it WAS part of the legal system for centuries (and THAT had much to do with the Founding Fathers including “Freedom of Religion” in the Bill of Rights). Look back at what the Spanish did to the native populations of the New World if they refused to convert to Christianity.
Everything you say about Islam today could have been said about Christianity – the only difference is one was active 5 or 6 centuries ago and Islam is active today. Just listen to someone like Santorum or the rest of the GOP Presidential candidate clowns and you see that Christians today are poised to be the next intolerant hate group ready to push Christian “law” on everyone. Hell, they have been pushing for a Christian theocracy in America since the Religious Right first hit the political sphere in the 80s!
Like it or not Islam is a religious belief first and foremost. Like it or not, the US Constitution grants the freedom of ALL religions. Like it or not, the West may have to change it’s rhetoric and be FAIR and address some of the reasons behind Jihad (because Muslims do have a point when they accuse the West of exploitation and abuses) If this was an article about Christianity , talking about the evils of the Inquisition, advocating “convert or be slaughtered” policies while injecting themselves into politics and the legal system, wouldn’t you expect Christians to believe the author was “against” them? Wouldn’t you expect Christians to declare a “Holy War” against the enemies?
Your big problem with Islam, and the problem of those commenting, is that it’s Islam not Christianity.
12 years ago
I don’t much care if any one’s religion is tolerant or intolerant, extreme of moderate – whatever those terms can mean. I do care if they give full faith and loyalty to the decomcratic republican poolitical culture of the United States, and not to any plan to make America and Islamic state. Where I spend eternity is your problem – how you live here is mine,.
