Pamela Geller -- America's Churchill
By Joan
Swirsky
RenwAmerica.com
When Adolf Hitler published "Mein Kampf" in 1926, he
spelled out his vision for Germany's domination of
the world and annihilation of the Jews. Germany
would not have lost WWI, he wrote, "if twelve or
fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the
people had been held under poison gas."
In 1933, Hitler's Nazis took power. The few people
who had read Hitler's manifesto and took him
seriously fled in time to save their lives. But most
– including most Jews – didn't. Comfortable, often
prominent, and fully accepted, they believed in
German society and could not fathom that a madman
actually meant what he said and intended to fully
carry out his malevolent vision.
Even as things grew increasingly menacing – through
Kristallnacht, book burnings, the stultifying
restriction of civil liberties, the expulsion of
Jewish children from schools, the construction of
Dachau, Auschwitz, Treblinka, and other death camps
– there were Jews and others who downplayed Hitler's
ominous threat. Worse, they derided and vilified
those who took him seriously, calling them
fear-mongers and haters and liars. Sound familiar?
Today, the entire world faces the threat of
galloping Islamic terrorism. We see this every day
in every newscast – grisly individual and mass
beheadings, people chained in cages and set on fire,
hundreds of schoolgirls kidnapped, raped, and worse;
Christian churches burned to the ground with their
desperate congregants locked inside; innocent
cartoonists shot dead and their colleagues gravely
injured in France, Jewish babies murdered in their
cribs and strollers. Increasingly, we see "honor
killings" in the United States, as well as other
freedom-smothering manifestations of Sharia law.
What happened in Germany in the 1930s and '40s is
happening in America today, except the assault on
our system is not coming from Nazism, but rather
from radical Islam. The mullahs in Iran and their
surrogates around the world stand at podiums and
declare boldly: Death to America, Death to Israel!
They tell us outright that their goal is to create a
caliphate in which Sharia law is the law of the
land, in which all infidels – anyone who does not
practice or has not converted to Islam – are
relegated to second-class citizenship, draconian
taxes, and groveling servitude, if not outright
enslavement. Some of our own elected officials echo
their words. All of them, like Hitler, rely on
apologists who flagrantly lie about this escalating
threat. Shame on them!
During WWII, Winston Churchill was the proverbial
canary in the coal mine, repeatedly issuing the
earliest warnings to the Western world of Hitler's
psychotic megalomania and evil intentions. Again,
few listened, while prominent, educated, and
sanctimonious types derided and vilified Churchill
and called him a fear-monger and a hater and a liar.
Sound familiar?
Since 2004, when she founded the Atlas Shrugs
website (now
PamelaGeller.com), Pamela Geller has been our
Winston Churchill, warning of the increasingly
aggressive actions of radical Islamists, the
terrifying acts they commit, and their fervent goal
to eviscerate our Constitution and Bill of Rights –
you know, those little documents that afford us
spoiled Americans the right to say what we want, be
it in speech, drawings, art, movies, and music,
without fear of being murdered!
That is why, as journalist Jonah Goldberg
points out, the First Amendment applies to
things that people find offensive, for instance
Andreas Serrano's "Piss Christ," in which the
"artist" urinated in a glass and then placed a
plastic icon of Jesus on the cross into it, or the
Brooklyn Museum of Art's exhibition of a portrait of
the Virgin Mary, which was partly comprised of
pornographic pictures and elephant dung.
As I recall, all the holier-than-thou hypocrites who
are calling for Geller's head were bleating their
support of "free speech" back then.
That is also why people who cherish the First
Amendment agreed that it was okay to have a
loathsome Nazi contingent walk the streets of
Skokie, Illinois (with its formidable Jewish
population) in the mid 1970s, and why other protest
movements have been so powerful and important: for
instance Patrick Henry's bold declaration, "Give me
liberty or give me death"; the Yo No
rebellion in Cuba against its repressive government;
the Boston Tea Party's "no taxation without
representation" protest; Susan B. Anthony's
"illegal" vote for women's suffrage; Henry Thoreau's
demonstrations against slavery; the history-changing
actions of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa
Parks against racial discrimination...the list of
heroic people sounding the alarms is endless.
Throughout history, all of these crusaders for
freedom have been insulted by the cowardly
accommodators among us, the appeasers, the
apologists, and the deluded masses who thought, as
Churchill said, that "the crocodile [of tyranny,
fascism, murder, even genocide] would eat them
last."
Pamela Geller succeeded in literally flushing out
the enemy within, two of the many jihadists in our
midst. Only days after their failed assassination
attempt, ISIS claimed credit for the attack and
embarrassed our Department of Homeland Security into
increasing security conditions at U.S. military
bases and
elevating the threat level in the U.S. to BRAVO
– not the highest level, but pretty damn high!
But instead of praising Geller for her foresight and
courage, cowards and apologists on both the left and
right used the tactics of radical Saul Alinsky
(described in his own manifesto, "Rules for
Radicals"), which are to: "Pick the target, freeze
it, personalize it, and polarize it." Hurling
gratuitous epithets and insults and lying are also
in their repertoire.
But in spite of it all, Geller is not intimidated,
because like Churchill she has truth on her side!
She awarded First Place to a graphic artist who left
Islam for the freedom that the First Amendment
offers.
Still, it is clear that few people have learned the
lessons of September 11th and the 14 years that have
followed about the increasingly urgent need for
vigilance against a deadly serious enemy, and for
the equally compelling need to thank and to
celebrate people like Pamela Geller for risking
everything to protect our priceless freedoms.
As journalist and author Mark Steyn
reminds us, "you've heard them a zillion times
this last week: 'Of course, I'm personally,
passionately, absolutely committed to free speech.
But...and the minute you hear the 'but,' none of the
build-up to it matters."
"...all the nice respectable people are now telling
us," Steyn adds, what Mohammed Atta told the
passengers on 9/11: "Stay quiet and you'll be okay."