The mainstream media are either stupid or evil – or both.
That is the only reasonable conclusion you can reach from the Daily Beast’s article Thursday that exposed the identities of Pamela Geller’s four daughters and the subsequent decision of major and minor newspapers and magazines throughout the Western world to re-run the story.
As far as media stupidity goes, it’s possible that Daily Beast “reporter” Taylor Lorenz, who outed Geller’s daughters, is too dumb to understand that she put their lives in danger by exposing their identities.
It is possible that the Daily Beast, the Washington Post, the New York Post, Cosmopolitan magazine, and all the rest have no idea that there is a direct link between the fatwa – or Islamic ruling — published by the Islamic State on May 5, 2015 calling for Geller to be “slaughtered,” and ISIS’s attempt the next month to behead her. A Boston court sentenced two area-based ISIS terrorists to prolonged prison terms on December 17, 2017 after finding them guilty of conspiring to behead Geller in June 2015.
Moreover, Lorenz and her fellow ignorant travelers may not even know that ISIS has singled Geller out for murder and that there has already been an attempt on her life. After all, the very same media organs that are now excitedly running stories about how Geller’s daughters went to great lengths to hide the fact that she is their mom, have themselves gone out of their way to hide the fact that ISIS marked their mother for murder and actually tried to kill her.
So for Lorenz and all of her ignorant colleagues who just put the lives of four innocent people in danger, here’s the story that you had the duty to make yourself aware of before you published your shameful “exposes” on Geller’s daughters.
On January 7, 2015, Islamic terrorists stormed the offices of France’s Charlie Hebdo satire magazine and slaughtered twelve writers and cartoonists.
The magazine’s crime?
It had dared to publish cartoons of Mohammed – the prophet of the Religion of Peace™.
A week after the massacre at Charlie Hebdo, leading Islamic jihad apologists and enablers in the U.S. gathered in Garland, Texas for a “Stand with the Prophet in honor and respect” conference. The purpose of the conference was to whitewash the slaughter in Paris and claim it had nothing to do with Islam, while demonizing as racist Islamophobes everyone who drew a connection between Islam and Islamic terrorists murdering in the name of Islam.
The keynote speaker at the conference was Siraj Wahhaj, an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and an associate of the so-called “Blind Sheikh” Omar Abdel Rahman, who masterminded the bombing.
A lot of people were upset when they heard about the event, which they thought — reasonably — was organized to advance the same goal of silencing free speech that the jihadists in Paris had just murdered the Charlie Hebdo writers and artists for exercising. Geller was so upset that she organized a rally to protest the conference.
Thousands joined her outside the convention center at Garland, demanding that jihad be defeated and freedom of speech be defended.
As Geller documents in her book, Fatwa: Hunted in America, rather than join the protesters in opposing the conference organizers’ clear attempt to whitewash the atrocities in Paris, the media instead chose to castigate Geller and the protesters as bigots.
Unbowed and determined to both honor the memory of the Charlie Hebdo victims and ensure that the U.S. does not sacrifice the Constitution to comply with jihadist bullies and terrorists, Geller organized a “Draw Muhammed Contest” in May 2015 at the same convention center in Garland where the jihad apologists had held their conference in January.
As the contest was going on inside the hall, two ISIS terrorists from Arizona tried to storm the hall with assault rifles. They shot an off-duty policeman Geller hired as part of the event’s security before being killed by two on-duty Garland police officers on the scene.
It was the first ISIS attack on U.S. soil.
Rather than stand with Geller and her event participants, the media blamed the victims. It was Geller’s fault that ISIS attacked, they said. She provoked them by holding her contest.
In the wake of the Garland attack, ISIS released a fatwa announcing it had “sent its Lions to achieve [Geller’s] slaughter.”
The fatwa threatened everyone who associates with Geller. Among other things, it said, “Everyone who houses her events, gives her a platform to spill her filth are legitimate targets.”
The danger to her family was clear.
But not for the media. There are two reasons that the likes of the Daily Beast, the Washington Post, the New York Post, Cosmpolitan and all the rest can’t see the danger in publishing her children’s identities.
First, they are too blinded by their hatred for Geller to notice that she really is in danger.
For more than a decade, the media and leftist shock troops, operating in lock step with Islamist groups like the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), have tried to destroy Geller. The radical leftist defamation outfit – the Southern Poverty Law Center –branded Geller and her websites and associated organizations a hate group.
As the SPLC’s then spokesman Mark Potok said in speeches in 2007 and 2008, the SPLC doesn’t identify groups and individuals as hate groups because they are engaged in the propagation of hatred and the incitement of illegal activities. In his words, “Our criteria for a ‘hate group’ … have nothing to do with criminality, or violence, or any kind of guess we’re making about ‘this group could be dangerous.’ It’s strictly ideological.”
Potok explained that the SPLC isn’t concerned with monitoring hate groups — rather, “Our aim in life is to destroy these groups, completely destroy them.”
Once the SPLC branded her a bigot, the media was free to dehumanize her. Every article about Geller includes a mention of the fact that the SPLC has branded her a bigot and a hater. Media Matters ordered the media to stop interviewing her and in one fell swoop, she was blacklisted by the media.
Over the past year, the social media giants have gone to war against her. Facebook and Youtube have decommercialized her pages and erased her videos. Google Adsense banned her. Google scrubbed her website from its search engine. Paypal temporarily closed her account.
And yet, Geller hasn’t been destroyed. Her website, the Geller Report, continues to garner millions of visitors each month. Nothing they have thrown at her, no media blacklist, no Facebook and Youtube and Google ad boycotts and shutdowns have shut her down.
So obviously, the time has come to target her family.
Was particularly notable about Lorenz’s hatchet job is that she didn’t target Geller: she targeted Geller’s children. As far as Lorenz is concerned, Geller is already toast. She has no right to earn a living – or even live, to the extent that Lorenz is aware that ISIS put out a kill order against her.
Lorenz wasn’t interested in beating what she clearly considers a dead horse. She wanted to destroy Geller’s daughters, specifically. If doing so also puts their lives in danger, well that’s their problem, as far as Lorenz and her comrades at the Daily Beast, the Washington Post and all the rest are concerned.
Lorenz is convinced that Geller’s daughters should be destroyed because they do not hate their mother — indeed, they love her. And as they love her, they have had the gall to become successful in their own right.
And that’s the thing of it. Without relation to their mother, Geller’s four daughters have emerged as Instagram stars and new media pioneers. Geller’s daughter Claudia Oshry’s Instagram account @girlwithnojob has nearly three million followers. Claudia built her audience on her own due to her excellence.
Likewise, all of Geller’s other daughters have succeeded on their own, and with one another’s help — with no connections from their mother and despite the Left’s multi-year campaign to destroy her.
Following the Daily Beast’s revelation of their lineage, their employer cravenly betrayed Geller’s daughters.
Oath, the company formed last year after AOL merged with Yahoo, was running a social media show featuring Claudia and Geller’s youngest daughter Jackie called The Morning Breath.
After the Daily Beast outed them, Oath released a statement saying, “The Morning Breath … is being canceled immediately and we have launched an internal investigation and will take other appropriate steps based on the results of the investigation.”
Apparently the answer to the question of whether the media is stupid or venal is that it is both. It is so obsessed with destroying those who do not share its ideology that it cannot see, much less understand, the true enemies of Western civilization.
Geller is treated like a non-person, whom it is okay for ISIS to murder because she advances an opposing ideology — which among other things, points out that as the Left attacks its ideological foes, Islamic jihad is being waged against Western Civilization.
As for her children, as far as the media are concerned, they have no right to work and no right to be protected from murder because they love their mother.
Stupid and evil. But mainly evil.
Caroline Glick is a world-renowned journalist and commentator on the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy, and the author of The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East. Read more at www.CarolineGlick.com.
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