US woman behind Prophet exhibition an anti-Islam extremist

CLEVELAND, Ohio - THE recent event in an obscure Texas town targeted by two Islamic extremists who were shot dead before they could kill anyone was organised by a woman known as an extremist herself.

In fact, the few Americans who had heard of Ms Pamela Geller before the failed terror attack on May 3 knew her as an anti-Islamic campaigner with views so outrageous she was even denounced by fellow provocateurs the likes of billionaire Donald Trump.

"The last thing we need is an obnoxious blowhard like Geller to go out and start trouble when there's no reason for it," he told Fox News last Tuesday.

Mr Trump was referring to the "Draw Muhammad" competition organised by Ms Geller in Garland, Texas, far from her home in New York.

About 200 people - most, like herself, from outside the Dallas suburb - attended the event that offered a US$10,000 (S$13,290) prize for the kinds of cartoons offensive to Muslims that also instigated the bloody attack on the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine in January.

"The US has enough problems without publicity seekers going out and openly mocking religion in order to provoke attacks and death," Mr Trump wrote on Twitter, following the Texas incident.

Ms Geller, 56, is the president of not one, but two, anti-Muslim groups - the American Freedom Defence Initiative (AFDI) and Stop the Islamisation of America (SIOA).

Born on New York's Long Island to a Jewish family, she is a college dropout who got her start working in advertising and marketing for the New York Daily News, then as associate publisher of the New York Observer.

Married once for 17 years before a 2007 divorce, and a mother of four, Ms Geller - in a 2012 interview with the Village Voice - attributed her move to anti-Islamic causes to the shocking Sept 11 attacks on the United States in 2001.

She subsequently started writing a blog, Atlas Shrugs - named for the Ayn Rand novel. On it, she denounced radical Islam and, in 2006, ran caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad first published in Denmark that ignited violent protests in Copenhagen.

In 2009, her SIOA began a campaign to stop the building of a mosque and Muslim cultural centre near the former site of the World Trade Centre (WTC). That raised her profile on the American media stage.

In an interview with The New York Times, she said she believed that when Muslims "pray five times a day… they're cursing Christians and Jews five times a day" and warned of "creeping syariah" in the US, referring to strict Islamic law.

Her group also ran ads in New York, San Francisco and Washington that linked Islam in general to terrorism. One of them, which appeared in 39 New York subway stations for a month in 2013, set quotes from the Quran against a photo of the burning WTC.

Ms Geller went so far as to claim that US President Barack Obama was secretly a Muslim and the child of an affair between his Caucasian mother and controversial American black activist, Malcolm X.

As the Washington Post noted last week, it was just such "wild rhetoric" that prompted the US Southern Poverty Law Centre to add AFDI to its list of "hate groups". Britain has also banned her from travelling there.

Security at the Texas event, at which even children were present, was heavy. The mayor of Garland himself was not happy about Ms Geller's choice of his city, supposedly because it had been the site of a gathering of Islamic leaders last year.

The two gunmen who attacked the cartoon event were reportedly inspired, if not directed, by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). They were shot and killed by a Garland policeman who was providing security for the event.

Ms Geller reacted with an "I-told-you-so-type" piece in Time magazine last Wednesday.

"The attack in Garland showed that everything my colleagues and I have been warning about regarding the threat of jihad, and the ways in which it threatens our liberties, is true," she wrote. "Islamic law, syariah, with its death penalty for blasphemy, today constitutes a unique threat to the freedom of speech and liberty in general."

Garland Mayor Douglas Athas, echoing most Americans, was not buying into Ms Geller's line. "She picked my community, which does not support in any shape, passion or form, her ideology," he told the Dallas Morning News.

"But at the end of the day, we did our jobs. We protected her freedoms and her life."

zach@sph.com.sg

This article was first published on May 11, 2015.
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