Pam Geller on the NY Times's "Distortions, Inaccuracies, and Lies"

From Atlas Shrugs:

As expected, the New York Times did an extraordinarily nasty and fallacious piece on me. It is full of distortions, inaccuracies and lies from beginning to end.

Referring to me using terms like "socialite," "dilettante," and other words invoking silly, superficial, purposeless women, is downright farcicial. Show me a socialite who is fighting for American values 20 hours a day. I don't even have lunch, let alone gala charity events. The only thing worthwhile in this piece is the actual interview, which is, frankly, all that really matters. But let's have a cursory look at this piece, shall we?

The numbers quoted from my divorce settlement are grossly, wildly inaccurate. I don't want to air dirty laundry in public, but there is absolutely no truth to what Anne Barnard and Alan Feuer "reported" about this. And although I do not want to get into personal matters, how do they know that my deceased ex "didn’t always agree" with what I was saying? Did they employ a ouija board? Just for knowing, this claim also is patently false.

Of course they hold up my lack of journalistic "credentials" as a disadvantage. Clearly we see how this "advantage" has rendered the New York Times and the rest of the fraternity of credentialed journalists hopelessly inaccurate and incapable of objectivity and responsible journalism. Why no piece like this on Daisy Khan, or Feisal Abdul Rauf, or Sharif El-Gamal?

Here is credentialed journalism: they say without explanation that I "posted doctored pictures of Elena Kagan, the Supreme Court justice, in a Nazi helmet." They don't bother to mention that the Kagan photoshop came after it was revealed that Kagan had cited in her thesis a German Marxist who became a Nazi when Hitler took power. They claim that I said that "a young Barack Obama slept with 'a crack whore,'" without mentioning that in that post I was making a point about unfair journalists (like these Times writers), constructing a reductio ad absurdum about media bias.

Just to show how avid and careful they were in their quest for the facts, they have me video blogging from an Israeli beach. Won't Fort Lauderdale be surprised to find out that the Zionist war machine is now occupying Florida beaches? Richer still was their reference to "arching her bikini-bared back provocatively." Please. I was submerged in the water with my kids in the background. Talk about easily titillated! I never arched my back except to swim away. They've been spending too much time with the Taliban. And they fault me for equating Palestinians with Hamas. The Palestinians elected Hamas, but who cares?

I know they spoke to Pamela Hall, but she is not mentioned in the article. They asked her what my worst traits were, but she must not have given them any grist for their mill.

It's revealing how many times they refer to my "Long Island-accented voice" and upbringing. It says more about them than it does about me. It's elitist, it's snobbish, and it's condescending.

But while they have room for that, you'll notice that the Muslim Brotherhood is nowhere mentioned in this piece, although I referred to them extensively. Even when they referred to the halal Campbell's Soup story, they declined to mention ISNA or the Muslim Brotherhood, only referring to a nameless Islamic group. Why is the New York Times so solicitous or afraid of the Muslim Brotherhood, that they won't mention its name? Nor do they mention the mega-mosque's earlier name, Cordoba Initiative, although it was only known as such for many months.

They refer to my work as a "crusade," but never refer to the supremacists' jihad as anything nefarious. They refer to my work as waging "a form of holy war," but never, ever discuss the real holy war against the West.

They say Paypal branded me a hate site. I know that facts are irrelevant, but they didn't.

In talking about my role in the mosque controversy, they say:

Two days later, Ms. Geller invited readers to protest the “9/11 monster mosque being built on hallowed ground zero,” in a post that was among the first to spread the misimpressions that the project was at the World Trade Center site and would solely house a prayer space.

Who's misimpressioning here? The site of the building is Ground Zero. You can have your own opinion, but you can't have your own facts. That building was hit by the landing gear from one of the planes, and destroyed. It is part of the Ground Zero attack site. And I never said that the building would solely house a prayer space. (Note "prayer space": the Times can't bring itself to call it a mosque, even though the prayer space in this building will be a mosque.)

Even the links they provide are deliberately deceptive. When deriding me for calling Sharif El-Gamal a thug, they don't link to his rap sheet or his threatening of a moderate Muslim. They only link to the post about his being a tax deadbeat, which is not about his thuggishness.

They minimize the mortal threat to Rifqa Bary's life, mischaracterizing her father's death threat to her for leaving Islam for Christianity as Rifqa having "accused her parents of abuse." They say I helped draw "vociferous objectors to a hearing this summer on a since-scrapped proposal for a mosque on Staten Island." Here again, they make no mention of the fact that it was a Muslim Brotherhood mosque. "Vociferous objectors" is Times-speak for patriots and defenders of freedom.

As far as the public school madrassa in Brooklyn goes, I referred extensively to Pamela Hall's seminal work. She was responsible for taking what should have been a Pulitzer-Prize-winning picture of the Almontaser-sanctioned "Intifada NYC" t-shirt. They quote the head of the school, Dabah Almontaser, saying: “New York is the cosmopolitan city of the world. They figured that if they could do it here, they could do it anywhere. And sadly, they did.” Do what? Fight for justice? Stand up against the jihad against Israel? Stand up against a public school being made into a madrassa? I would do it again. And going to Almontaser for her take on the madrassa is like going to the fox for his take on the henhouse.

They gave space to hit-and-run insults from anonymous people at the New York Observer, which was swarming with doctrinaire leftists like Mike Tomasky and Joe Conason, and note: they made no mention of the fact that I worked all my life, from the time I was thirteen. I worked full-time from the time I was seventeen. My high school was on split session; I got out at noon and worked til eight. I worked through college, and never stopped working until I left to raise my children in my late thirties. "Socialite," my eye!

The New York Times said: "And Ms. Geller said, without evidence, that the center’s financing might be tied to terrorists." We know that Rauf is a leading member of the Perdana Organization, the single largest financier of the Turkish terrorist group's jihad flotilla against Israel. Rauf and Daisy Khan have received funding from the Xenel Corporation. The connection between Xenel and al Qaeda, according to the Orlando Sentinel, was persuasive enough that the city of Orlando decided to cancel the contract it had previously awarded to Xenel. The involvement Bin Laden-tied Xenel led to the cancellation of a different 100-million-dollar project in Florida. If such ties would cancel a convention center, why not a 100-million-dollar Islamic supremacist mega mosque at the site of largest attack on American soil by these same players? And yet the Times says I have no evidence.

They ridicule the idea of taqiyya, calling it "the hiding of true beliefs, religiously sanctioned for Muslims, usually minority Shiites, under hostile rule." They don't mention that the idea of religious deception in Islam is not just held by Shi'ites, but is founded on the Koran, which tells Muslims that they can pretend to be friends with unbelievers to "guard themselves against them" (3:28). A hadith explains this as meaning "We smile in the faces of some people, but behind their backs we curse them." That sounds like Rauf, with his love for religious dialogue in English and rejection of it in Arabic, to me.

They claim that I am branding Rauf a "radical Islamist," when in fact his own words are those of a radical: "We tend to forget, in the West, that the United States has more Muslim blood on its hands than al Qaida has on its hands of innocent non Muslims. You may remember that the US-led sanctions against Iraq led to the death of over half a million Iraqi children. This has been documented by the United Nations. And when Madeleine Albright, who has become a friend of mine over the last couple of years, when she was Secretary of State and was asked whether this was worth it, said it was worth it." Referring to jihadis, he says: "How do you tell people whose homes have been destroyed, whose lives have been destroyed, that this does not justify your actions of terrorism? It's hard. Yes, it is true that it does not justify the acts of bombing innocent civilians, that does not solve the problem, but after 50 years of, in many cases, oppression, of US support of authoritarian regimes that have violated human rights in the most heinous of ways, how else do people get attention?" Rauf calls Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi "a very very well known Islamic jurist, highly regarded all over the Muslim world" -- Qaradawi has approved of Palestinian suicide bombings and genocide of the Jews. It was on Qaradawi's authority that Hamas began to use women in suicide attacks. He has called for "drastic" punishment of homosexuals. (Video here.)

They refer to the pain expressed by those who oppose the Ground Zero mega mosque as "heckling." And I had to laugh, of course, when the New York Times said that Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin were getting their talking points from me. Has anyone told Rush yet?

Barnard and Feuer write, "Opposition to Park51 grew — and with it, antipathy for Islam." It wasn't "antipathy for Islam" -- that is more of that racist-Islamophobic-anti-Muslim nonsense. It was outrage at the lack of compassion and sensitivity to the pain and the grief the mega mosque organizers were causing. To suggest that I provided the vocabulary to express this grief, under the guise of "worries about Islam," is laughable. It is justifiable concern about slaughter in the name of jihad, Islamic supremacism, the subjugation of women, and gender apartheid. The dead can't speak.

They're snarky about anyone who goes off the reservation, but they actually refer to the disinformationalists and propagandists of Media Matters as a "media tracking group," and not the left-wing propaganda hate site that it is, void of facts -- like this article. They say: "Her claims were disputed often enough that the liberal media-tracking group Media Matters called on stations (ineffectually) to stop presenting her as an expert." They do not and cannot, however, cite one example where I was actually wrong; instead, they just resort to ad hominem attacks. The Times is implying in this that I was so inaccurate that the smear machine Media Matters called on stations to stop featuring me in the interests of accuracy, when actually Media Matters was afraid that some of the truth was getting out to the public despite their best efforts. That they mention Loonwatch, a Goebbels-style hate site, speaks volumes.

And they say this about the EDL: "Ms. Geller went on to champion as patriotic the English Defense League, which opposes the building of mosques in Britain and whose members have been photographed wearing swastikas. (In the interview, Ms. Geller said the swastika-wearers must have been “infiltrators” trying to discredit the group.)" They don't mention that the EDL unequivocally supports Israel, waves the Israeli flag, has a Jewish division, has Hindu and Sikh members, and does have an ongoing problem with leftist infiltrators joining their rallies in order to try to discredit them by making racist or neo-Nazi statements.

They expose themselves completely when brushing over the death of Aqsa Parvez. They never mention why she didn't have a headstone in the first place (because she brought dishonor to the family, which is why she was murdered, and that dishonor did not merit her being remembered after death). They put "honor killings" in quotes, as if it were something I made up. In all their combing through my site, they seem to have missed this post. Is it any wonder that these reporters don't understand the whole idea of compassion and decency in regard to the Ground Zero mosque, when they put the term "honor killings" in quotes?

One thing the Times got right: the picture of me accompanying the article is accurate!