The poison behind the Ground Zero mosque

[General Duke]

The poison behind the Ground Zero mosque furoreThe hate-filled sites of Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer have fuelled the fight against the Cordoba centre in New York

 

 

Who would have thought that the most successful joke in the history of Comment is free could become a template for far right hate groups in the US? Yet Ariane Sherine's atheist bus ads now have a grim imitator in New York, where a group calling itself Stop Islamisation of America (SIOA) has put up bus ads with a picture of a plane flying into the twin towers on one side, and on the other, an image of the proposed Cordoba centre.

 

The two people behind SIOA are Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller, who, between them, run two flourishing and hate-filled sites, Jihad Watch and Atlas Shrugs, which link into an undergrowth of far-right websites in Europe, including the skinheads of the English Defence League, but also to respectable rightwingers such as Douglas Murray of the Centre for Social Cohesion, and even the Catholic Herald.

 

Spencer is a Roman Catholic of eastern Orthodox extraction who, for the last 10 years, has propagandised the view that Islam is a religion that commands its adherents to violence, and that Muslims all round the world obey. Jihad Watch, incorporating the earlier Dhimmi Watch, is a roiling cauldron of stories from all over the world to illustrate the treachery and violence of Muslims, the criminal weakness of liberals, and the twisted, hate-filled bigotry of anyone on the right who has ever quarrelled with him.

 

Geller is a libertarian who once worked on Wall Street. For sanity and moderation, she makes Melanie Phillips look like Karen Armstrong. Geller and Spencer have just published a book together, The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration's War on America; her website currently contains 267 stories discussing whether the president is, in fact, a Muslim.

 

To judge from their websites, the important political movement in England is the English Defence League (as Geller calls them, "the courageous English patriots of the much-maligned English Defence League"), and in Europe, the extremist Stop Islamisation of Europe group.

 

Geller hosted a talk in Washington given by Anders Gravers, the founder in succession of Stop the Islamisation of Denmark, and then of Europe, at which he explained the enemy master plan:

 

"The European Union acts secretly, with the European people being deceived about its development. Democracy is being deliberately removed, the latest example being the Lisbon treaty. However, the plan goes much further with an ultimate goal of being a European-Arabian super-state, incorporating Muslim countries of north Africa and the Middle East in the European Union. This is already initiated with the signing of the Barcelona treaty in 95 by the EU and nine north African states, and it became effective the first of January, 2010 – this year. It is also known as the Euro-Mediterranean co-operation. In return for some European control of oil resources, Muslim countries will have unfettered access to technology and movement of people into Europe. The price Europeans will have to pay is the introduction of sharia law and removal of democracy."

 

You'd have thought that listening without giggling to such ravings disqualified anyone from being taken seriously.

 

But Spencer was invited to supper by Murray of the Centre for Social Cohesion when he visited England last autumn, only for the evening to break up before it had even started when a bunch of EDL skinheads turned up at the restaurant, invited along by a supporter of Spencer who was making a video about him and had been interviewing them, too. The difference between the EDL and the various "Stop Islamisation of [your country here]" on the one hand, and the Centre for Social Cohesion on the other, while obvious to Murray, does not seem to have occurred to the American videomaker.

 

Spencer was the subject of a fulsome interview in the Catholic Herald in 2007, which was, in turn, plugged by Damian Thompson in the Daily Telegraph; Thompson was then the Herald's editor-in-chief, and now is a leader writer on the Telegraph. "Major bookstores, gutlessly, refuse to stock Spencer's work," wrote Thompson then, "so here is a link to his main titles. I'd particularly recommend them to anyone who still believes sentimental nonsense about the Religion of Peace or its founder. (For some reason, the name Karen Armstrong springs to mind.)"

 

Thompson and I quarrelled, terminally, when I criticised him for reprinting without checking another Spencer-linked story about a mob of Muslims closing down a hospital in Sydney, which turned out to originate from the imagination of a neo-fascist group there. He hasn't spoken to me since. Neither, though, has he used anything from Spencer on his blog. It looks as if some of the respectable English right has learned its lesson, but in America, Spencer and Geller are still taken seriously.

[Rayyan]

Who let dogs out, why the Muslims in america looking to build an islamic site on that site, giving an opporunity to the haters, skin heads and twisted politicans from neo-nazi camp.the muslims should look another site for the saftey of their community.