The Village Voice’s war on …… Pamela Geller

 

The Voice did a piece on me, and as hit pieces go, it's sort of sickly sweet, in that lefty poisonous way, of course. Most of the personal stuff is wrong; I am guessing he got that from the NY Times cover story that ran back in October 2010. It's a silly piece. Pity, I thought Greg Howard might rise above the leftist dogma and write something worthwhile.

Atlas readers will have a good chuckle. I know I did. I am not fisking it. It would be too time consuming. So much wrong, too little time. There are the usual wild falsehoods about my supposedly receiving fantastic sums of money, and crazy distortions of my message, such as his claim that I said that Islam is going to "overrun" the U.S. "not in
decades or years but in months." Oh, really? When did I ever say such a thing? It's impossibly bad, in a sophomoric kind of way. Howard's writing reminds me of Ed Wood directing. It's oddly endearing, she said, "batting her eyelashes."

At the same time it's dripping with the usual leftist condescension toward conservatives, the tea party, anyone and everyone who stands for freedom, combined with a dollop of catty misogyny ("trophy wife," "her beauty and her charm [are] her main weapons" — say what?)

Also, I never said the war was lost. I said we lost in the last election. And that we did.

"Pamela Geller's War" Greg Howard, Village Voice

Eleven years ago, Pamela Geller declared war on savages who
were trying to take over the world. This November, she admits she lost.

Geller, 54, one of the most polarizing women in the country, is but a
foot soldier in this war—a cog, but a large one that grows larger every
day. When I meet her at an upscale coffee shop blocks away from her
tony midtown apartment, she is in full combat gear.

"You're a kid!" she cries when I reach out to shake her hand. Her
Long Island accent, thick from her childhood, is distracting from the
start. I'm not a kid, but I decide it doesn't matter, because she's
absolutely giddy. Geller's mouth is parted in a silent laugh, and she
raises both of her hands like she doesn't know whether to hug me or
touch my face. I feel like a baby Labrador. It's not a terrible feeling.

We buy coffee and take a table near the back of the shop.

There's a reason why Pamela Geller's name is almost invariably
preceded by "The Beautiful" at her speaking events. Today, she's wearing
a chic leather jacket over a form-fitting black turtleneck, and her
trademark diamond-encrusted "Love" charm is hanging from a necklace.
She's wearing loose curls, tawny locks falling over her shoulder. It's
almost December, and even though she posts 10 to 15 times a day from
home on her wildly successful blog, atlasshrugs2000.com,
her golden skin is still sun-kissed, and her large light-brown eyes
peer from behind impossible eyelashes that rest upon her sculpted
cheekbones whenever she blinks or winks or bats her eyes at the kid 30
years her junior.

When she speaks, she does so passionately, leaning in and lowering
her voice, then pushing back in her chair and pointing with both hands.
She never breaks eye contact, even to take a sip from her
lip-gloss-smudged coffee lid. When we agree on a point or I amuse her
with a quip or turn of phrase, she applauds. She's charming, magnetic
even. I decide I like her, and then I decide that I hope she likes me.

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She's viewed by "leftists," as she calls her critics, as a monster,
the animalistic id of the racist, paranoid right, a supremacist leader
of arguably the most extreme wing in the Tea Party, who knowingly
interacts with bigots and xenophobes. She's the face, literally, of the
Southern Poverty Law Center's national anti-Muslim hate-group page. Of
the six New York City anti-Muslim groups listed on the page, she founded
three of them herself (Stop the Islamization of America, the American
Freedom Defense Initiative, and her blog, Atlas Shrugs). Most recently,
she has drawn ire for a series of public-transit ads she has run in New
York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. Most read: "In any
war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man.
Support Israel. Defeat Jihad."

Geller fights her war on two fronts. The first is against Islam
itself, which she calls "the most radical and extreme ideology on the
face of the earth." The second is against Barack Obama. Geller, a
secular Jew, is a pro-choice, pro-marriage-equality Manhattanite raised
by liberal parents. But when it comes to the president, Geller holds
nothing back. She has devoted the past four years of her life to
fighting his re-election, because the war is already here, and we've
already lost if the most powerful man on the planet is, as she calls
him, "an Islamophiliac": a lover of Islam.

She helped launch the birther movement before the president was even
elected. And in a 2009 blog post, she wrote that Obama had slept with a
crack whore and posted nude photos of Obama's mother, supposedly taken
in 1960 by alleged black communist Frank Marshall Davis. They turned out
to be fakes. Keith Olbermann has twice named her Worst Person in the
World. In 2010, she led protests against the Islamic community center
near Ground Zero and published a book with her openly anti-Muslim
partner in crime, Robert Spencer, called The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration's War on America. She stops short of calling Obama a Muslim in public, though she tells me, "He clearly favors Islam."

Looking at her now, though, she doesn't seem like a monster. I
know it's all for show, of course, her beauty and her charm. They're
her main weapons in the war, along with her website, and how she has
been able to navigate and thrive in the far-right,
old-white-man-dominated world of the Tea Party and the American
anti-Islam movement. When you're a symbol, appearances matter. And her
very appearance, the fact that someone like her—a pretty, secular,
socially liberal New Yorker—would be on the front lines of the war, adds
credibility to the cause.

Read the awful rest here.