Riding buses during rush hour in Washington, D.C. can be unpleasant, but doing that with a brazenly Islamophobic ad plastered on their sides, linking Arabs and other Muslims to Hitler and his venomous ideology, can be even more unpleasant. In fact, downright revolting. But that’s what Washingtonians like myself have to put up with these days.
This travesty is part of a campaign launched by the so-called American Freedom Defense Initiative, a little but quite vociferous off-the-wall group, led by a fanatic Zionist called Pamela Geller, from a middle-class Jewish family in Long Island. The ad on the buses, not just in the nation’s capital but also in New York and San Francisco, says: “Islamic Jew-hatred: It’s in the Qur’an.” It shows a life-size replica of that much-heralded photo of Haj Amin Al-Husseini meeting with Hitler in Berlin in the late 1930s. The caption describes the Mufti of Jerusalem as “the leader of the Muslim world,” and calls on the US to end all aid to “Islamic countries.” Screwball enough? There’s more.
Clearly, most Washingtonians — no country bumpkins, they — find the ad repugnant, or just plain infantile. Petula Dvorak, columnist for the Metro section of the Washington Post, for example, writes gingerly, in an effort not to step on anyone’s toes: “There is no doubt that insensitive, harsh, graphic and inflammatory ads can do more harm than good.” But the Washington Metropolitan Transit Authority can’t do anything about it. The first Amendment guarantees Americans the right to free speech, regardless of how unpopular, coarse or controversial it may be. Indeed a precedent had already been set in New York when Geller bought space for another equally incendiary ad in the city’s subways. The transit agency there turned down the ad. Geller’s Freedom Defense Initiative then went to court.
A federal judge, in adjudicating the case, effectively said, sorry, nothing we can do about it, free speech is free speech. The transit agency’s objections were overruled. The ad was then plastered all over subway trains. In bold type, it said: “In a war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad.”
The 46-year-old Geller, a college dropout, has also partnered with one Robert Spencer to form a group called Stop the Islamization of America, which has developed links to racist and fascist organizations in Europe. Both are ardent supporters of the English Defense League. On her log, Geller has written that she shares the EDL’s goals, claiming, “We need to encourage rational, reasonable groups that oppose Islamization of the West.”
To be sure, there have always been pockets of bigotry in the US, hate groups that directed their venom at minorities, particularly early on against Catholics. Catholics in the mid-1850s, like Muslims today, fared badly. The Know Nothing Party at the time, for example, emerged exclusively to “purify” American society by limiting or ending the influx of Irish and German Catholics into the country. (The kooky name derives from the fact that party proceedings were secret, and when a member was asked about them, he replied, “I know nothing.”)
This racist, or at least aggressively nativist sentiment was equally directed at Jews, men of color, Hispanics, Japanese and Native Americans. The times, of course, have changed. A Catholic went on to become the 35th president of the United States in 1961, and just last week, half of the US Senate called on the National Football League to order the owner of the Washington Red Skins to change the name, which is offensive to Native Americans, who see it as pejorative. All other minorities have long since prospered in what is today called a politically correct age.
All of which attests to the fact that though Americans may suffer bouts of rage at a certain ethnic segments of the population in their midst — say Japanese after Pearl Harbor, Hispanics after massive illegal immigration, Muslims after 9/11 — the center holds. As a collectivity, America is a community of laws and institutions and Americans are for the most part decent folk who will have no truck with racist rhetoric.
Meanwhile, Charles Johnson summed it all up, in a few words, when he described what Pamela Geller really was. Johnson, a moderate conservative, ran a website that Geller, a secular Jew, used to contribute articles for. In one such article, she posted a critique of the Islamic Halal practice of slaughtering sheep, that she described as “cruel” and “uncivilized.” Johnson, who knew that the Halal practice in Islam is identical to that in Judaism, was to say later, after he broke with Geller, and she went her separate, hatemongering way: “My God, she’s stupid.”
