Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Pamela Geller, the founder, editor, and publisher of AtlasShrugs.com. She is the executive director of Stop Islamization of America (SIOA), as well as the Freedom Defense Initiative (FDI), and is a regular columnist for the American Thinker, Human Events, and other publications. She is the author of the new book, Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance. She will be speaking at the Wednesday Morning Club, at the Beverly Hills Hotel on 9641 Sunset Blvd, on Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2011 at 11:30 a.m. To make reservations, click here.
FP: Pamela Geller, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
Congratulations on your new book.
The title is quite provocative. How come?
Geller: Well, Jamie, the very name evokes a visceral reaction in people — particularly in those hard-wired for delusion. But that is exactly what is happening. My organization, the American Freedom Defense Initiative and its Stop Islamization of America program is a human rights entity dedicated to the freedom of speech, which is under attack, as well as to the freedom of religion and to individual rights. These are basic, fundamental principles of the American republic, and they are in danger of being stripped away and seized from us. This book is dedicated to keeping that from happening.
FP: Enlighten us on how an attack on freedom of speech and individual rights is connected to terrorism and Islamization.
Geller: The violent jihad is the most obvious manifestation of jihad. Remember the Fort Hood jihadist, the Times Square car bomber, the Christmas day underwear bomber, the Christmas Tree Lighting bomber in Portland, the Fort Dix Six, and so many others? But the real war on America is also being waged in the universities, the public schools, the courtrooms, the Internet, the workplace, the grocery store, the neighborhoods, and on the airwaves. That is the stealth jihad, the hidden war. And it is to teaching you how to fight that war—where and how and on what grounds—that this book is dedicated.
Islamic supremacists are more assertive in the United States than they ever have been before. They’re building large mega-mosques in communities where the local Muslims can neither fill nor afford them. They’re demanding—and receiving—special privileges for Muslims in workplaces, and special installations for Islamic prayers in public universities, as well as in airports and other public facilities. Islamic law places Muslims in a special class, giving them rights that non-Muslims do not have.
They’re bringing back prayer in public schools—but only for Muslims, while insisting that Christians, Jews, Hindus, and Buddhists can assert no such Constitutional privilege under our law: they are seeking special legal status for Islam. They’re shutting down the national debate that we urgently need to have about Islam and Islamization. They are They’re shutting down the national debate that we urgently need to have about Islam and Islamization. They are demonizing as “bigots,” “racists,” and “Islamophobes” anyone who suggests any anti-terror measure, or who asks the Muslim community in the U.S. to do something effective about the jihadists and Islamic supremacists in their midst. demonizing anyone who suggests any anti-terror measure, or who asks the Muslim community in the U.S. to do something effective about the jihadists and Islamic supremacists in their midst, as “bigots,” “racists,” and “Islamophobes.” (Islamic law considers any critical examination of Islam to be blasphemous and subject to the death penalty.) They’re persecuting anti-jihad activists in the courtroom and private citizens who dare to report suspicious behavior by Muslims.
FP: I think it would be fair to say that most Americans don’t know that any of this is happening. Correct?
Geller: Yes, Jamie. And that’s why the Islamic supremacists are also working as hard as they can to shut down the rapidly growing anti-Sharia movement nationwide, and to prevent any more states from passing anti-Sharia laws like the one 70 percent of Oklahomans voted for in November 2010—only to see the will of the people overruled by a liberal activist judge who maintained, contrary to obvious fact, that Sharia was merely a private religious law, and not the authoritarian political system involving dominance and the subjugation of unbelievers that it really is.
They’re working to muzzle free speech, criminalizing criticism of Islam by means of “hate speech” laws they will manipulate to shut up their opponents and anyone who dares speak out against their Islamization agenda. This is in line with the international war on free speech that is being pursued by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).
The Muslim Brotherhood​, a global organization dedicated to the establishment of Islamic political law in all the countries of the world, is also working through its supposedly “moderate” front organizations like the Muslim American Society (MAS) and CAIR, which tries to intimidate Americans (as in the “Flying Imams” case) into being afraid to oppose jihad activity or even report suspicious behavior by Muslims. And these very organizations have infiltrated senior levels of the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security​, the Department of Justice, et al, to advance their agendas and make them law.
Muslims are working in the United States now to make sure that Islam dominates, by destroying our Constitutional freedoms.
FP: How do you know that?
Geller: Because they’ve told us, Jamie. The Muslim Brotherhood, according to a captured internal document of that international pro-Sharia organization, is dedicated in America to “a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.” Omar Ahmad, the cofounder and longtime Board chairman of the nation’s leading “Muslim civil rights group,” the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), also once let the mask slip in a speech he gave to a Muslim audience in California in 1998. Ahmad said, “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on earth.” CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper expressed the same desire in a 1993 interview: “I wouldn’t want to create the impression that I wouldn’t like the government of the United States to be Islamic sometime in the future.”And one of the leading Muslim spokesmen in the United States, the imam Siraj Wahhaj​, who in 1991 became the first Muslim cleric to give an invocation to the United States Congress, has warned that the U.S. will fall unless it “accepts the Islamic agenda.” He has also said, “If only Muslims were clever politically, they could take over the United States and replace its constitutional government with a caliphate.”
I also know that Muslims are working in the United States now to make sure that Islam dominates by destroying our Constitutional freedoms because of the actions of Muslims themselves. Just look at their feverish attempts to restrict free speech and enact hate speech and hate crime laws, their relentless litigation jihad against truth-tellers and fearless patriots, and so much more. When used by Islamic supremacist groups, such phrases as “hate speech” and “hate crime” in reality mean honest discussion of the Islamic supremacist imperative to impose Islamic law over the world. They do not want critics explaining the actual goals of political Islam: they do not want their aggressive aims exposed, and they obfuscate those aims by labeling the truth about them “hate speech.”
FP: So where does this book come in?
Geller: Jamie, every free citizen must join this fight. I wrote this book to show them how. The separation of mosque and state is essential to preserving American freedom and our way of life. Yet the Islamic supremacists have made real inroads. Over the last few years, we have seen the encroachment of Islam on the secular marketplace.
FP: What is the gravest threat that Islamization poses?
Geller: The restriction of the freedom of speech. Under the guise of charges of hate speech leveled against freedom fighters who dare to tell the truth about Islam, the dark shadow of the Sharia looms ever so large. The OIC has labeled the speech of people who speak the truth about Islam, such as Geert Wilders​, a world leader and one of the leading contenders to be the next Prime Minister of the Netherlands (and head of its third-largest party), as “hate speech.” This is an attempt to squelch the truth about the Islamic agenda in the West. In Islamic law, slander doesn’t refer to telling falsehoods about someone, but to saying things that may well be true, but that a person does not want known or spoken of.
As absurd as this is, it has seeped into the public discourse in America and Europe as well. In the West, insulting or defaming Islam is also a societal crime, punishable not by death, but by character assassination. And if they advance Sharia, what they are in effect attempting to advance is an agenda that will result, some day in the future, in making the speaking of truths about Islam that Muslims don’t wish you to know punishable by death.
Do you want to live in a country where you could be put to death for saying what you think about Islam? Or about Catholicism? Or any other religion?
FP: What would you say to those who think this scenario is impossible in terms of America and the West?
Geller: Consider this: What I am suggesting as a consequence of Sharia is happening right now in the world in places where Islamic law reigns supreme. Right now a woman is in prison in Pakistan and awaiting death for blasphemy. This is Islamic law, and this is the Islamic law that Muslims want to bring to the West.
The very idea that truthful speech about Islamic supremacism and jihad could be categorized as hate speech and/or criminalized is the equivalent of shredding the Constitution. The fundamental principle of free speech is the protection of all speech, not just speech we like. Because who decides what’s good and what’s forbidden? CAIR? The United Nations? The Organization of Islamic Cooperation?
That is precisely the role that CAIR and the OIC would like to play in American society. We cannot and will not allow them to do so because free speech is the line in the sand. Once free men have lost that basic human freedom, they have no other recourse but to resort to violence.
FP: Okay, so how does the book equip people to fight back?
Geller: Stop the Islamization of America explains why what is happening is happening, and how you must fight it. It is an action plan for the preservation of our freedoms enshrined in our Constitution.
Trust me, when you see a giant mosque going up on your tiny tree-lined street, where there are no churches and there are no synagogues and there are no businesses and there are no Muslims, it’s no accident.
And there are ways you can fight back. Do it. Paraphrasing Ayn Rand: The question isn’t who is going to let you, it’s who is going to stop you.
FP: This does sound like what people need. Can you give us some more details?
Geller: Well, Jamie, the book includes a four-step plan to protesting mosques effectively, and an illuminating case study. It also contains a twelve-point plan and much more advice and direction, plus five courses of action that freedom fighters should avoid. It includes direction on how to spot and avoid media traps, and how freedom activists can fight back when charged with “Islamophobia.” There is much more, of course: the shocking details of the high-level agreements that opened the door for the Islamization of America are included in the book, among other startling revelations, including new information about the full extent of Muslim Brotherhood​ infiltration in the Department of Justice, and its brazen pro-Muslim activities, including its “Monthly Outreach Meetings” with Muslim and Arab groups at the Civil Rights Division.
I’ve also got revelations about the close ties between the Justice Department and the Islamic Society of North America, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, and the Muslim Students Association – all of which are linked to the Muslim Brotherhood. I expose the connections of the organizers of the Ground Zero Mosque to the Muslim Brotherhood; how the Justice Department is fighting for Sharia in the U.S.; how public officials in Detroit, New York, San Francisco and elsewhere are kowtowing to Islamic supremacists’ demands to curtail free speech about Islam; Islamic schools that receive public money –
FP: Islamic schools are receiving public money in the U.S.?
Geller: Yes, Jamie, right here in the U.S.
FP: That’s astounding.
Geller: That’s not all. The meat you buy at your local supermarket could be halal – even though it is not labeled or advertised as such. And you can also read in the book about the shocking details of the travesty that is the 9/11 victims memorial: its plans to put the unidentified remains of 9/11 victims seven stories underground inside a museum that charges admission — and which will include lavish profiles (above ground, of course) of the 9/11 hijackers. Then there is the American Bar Association’s coverup of its work to resist anti-Sharia initiatives. Also, my colleague Robert Spencer and I have developed AFDI’s new Threats to Freedom Index, identifying the groups that are the greatest enemies of the freedom of speech and other freedoms.
FP: That is much needed. Can you tell us what groups are on the list?
Geller: CAIR and the SPLC certainly are, along with the Center for American Progress. But to find out the rest, you’ll have to get the book.
FP: Thank you for joining us, Pamela Geller.
We encourage all our readers to get their hands on Stop the Islamization of America!
And we hope everyone that is able can come watch Pamela Geller speak at the Wednesday Morning Club, at the Beverly Hills Hotel on 9641 Sunset Blvd, on Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2011 at 11:30 a.m. To make reservations, click here.
Jamie Glazov is Frontpage Magazine’s editor. He holds a Ph.D. in History with a specialty in Russian, U.S. and Canadian foreign policy. He is the author of the critically acclaimed and best-selling, United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror. His new book is Showdown With Evil. He can be reached at jamieglazov11@gmail.com.