The shootings in Garland, Texas was an inexcusable act of violence, but we need to place a fair amount of blame on the people who hosted this Prophet Muhammad cartoon contest, Pamela Geller and her American Freedom Defense Initiative.
Pamela Geller would have you believe that she is a crusader of First Amendment rights. She would also want you to believe that the cartoon contest depicting the Prophet Muhammad and the $10,000 prize was in the same spirit as the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, which had lampooned Islam and other religions and used depictions of Muhammad. If you take a look at what Geller and the American Freedom Defense Initiative have been up to, you will see they are nothing but a racist hate group intent on eradicating all Muslims.
From a CNN article...
The AFDI is considered an extremist hate group.
The Southern Poverty Law Center lists the American Freedom Defense Initiative as an active anti-Muslim group in its "Extremist Files" database.
"All anti-Muslim hate groups exhibit extreme hostility toward Muslims," said the SPLC, which tracks hate groups.
"Anti-Muslim hate groups also broadly defame Islam, which they tend to treat as a monolithic and evil religion. These groups generally hold that Islam has no values in common with other cultures, is inferior to the West and is a violent political ideology rather than a religion."
The SPLC also describes the president of the Defense Initiative, Pamela Geller, as "the anti-Muslim movement's most visible and flamboyant figurehead."
It has a program called Stop the Islamization of America
Geller is the president of both, and of another group called Stop Islamization of Nations. Her website touts awards from Republican clubs as well as a Creative Zionist Coalition award for Jewish Heroism.
Among the groups' principles: "SION calls for an immediate halt of immigration by Muslims into nations that do not currently have a Muslim majority population."
It also calls for "surveillance of mosques and regular inspections of mosques in the U.S. and other non-Muslim nations to look for pro-violence materials."
It fought against the 'Ground Zero mosque'
In 2010, Stop the Islamization of America rallied against the building of an Islamic community center near Ground Zero, where the World Trade Center's Twin Towers once stood.
"Building the Ground Zero mosque is not an issue of religious freedom, but of resisting an effort to insult the victims of 9/11 and to establish a beachhead for political Islam and Islamic supremacism in New York," the group said.
"Ground Zero is a war memorial, a burial ground. Respect it."
In its protest against the center, the group drafted an ad campaign showing a plane about to hit the World Trade Center with smoke in the background. The ad then features what Geller called the World Trade Center "mega-mosque," questioning why it would be built there.
Daisy Khan of the American Society for Muslim Advancement said the facility would actually be a "community center with a prayer space inside."
"There is a lot of ignorance about who Muslims are," Khan said at the time. "A center like this will be dedicated to removing that ignorance, and it will also counter the extremists because moderate Muslims need a voice."
It's launched controversial ad campaigns on subways
In 2012, the Freedom Defense Initiative launched an ad campaign in the Washington subway system, which read: "In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad."
Jihad -- which means "struggle" in Arabic -- is considered a religious duty for Muslims, though there are both benign and militant interpretations of what it means.
Geller defended the message.
"We don't think it's controversial," she said at the time. "It's truth. Telling the truth now is equated with 'hate' and 'bigotry' in an attempt to silence and demonize the truth-tellers. That makes my ads all the more important."
It wasn't the group's first venture into public transit systems. The Defense Initiative has also drafted contentious ads for the New York and San Francisco public transit systems, though the ads in New York have been under litigation with the Metropolitan Transit Authority.
One ad depicted slain American journalist James Foley moments before he was beheaded by ISIS.
The ad read, in part: "IT'S NOT ISLAMOPHOBIA ... IT'S ISLAMOREALISM."
Foley's family asked Geller's group to pull the ads, which it did.
But Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations said such ads are dangerous.
"These ads are targeted mainly at people who are not Muslims trying to get them to hate Islam and be hostile to Americans Muslims," he said.
We live in a country that protects our right to speak freely, no matter how disgusting and hateful. We have to take the good with the bad, but does that mean every venue has to open their doors to them? The group said it specifically picked Garland's Curtis Culwell Center, a school district-owned facility, because it hosted an event denouncing Islamophobia in January. Would the Culwell Center allow the KKK or a Neo-Nazi group to host a cartoon contest depicting Blacks or Jews as derogatory characters? Just because they have right to preach their hate doesn't mean we have to provide the soapbox to stand on. Lets be clear what the AFDI was doing in Garland, Texas. They were not there to fight for their First Amendment rights, they were there to promote their hateful racist agenda. The shootings are not justified and should be denounced by everyone, but hate begets hate, and hate is what Pamela Geller and her AFDI is all about.