Recently, I was one of the featured speakers at the inaugural statewide Tea Party Convention in Tennessee’s Smoky Mountains. This was despite efforts by the unindicted co-conspirator, terror-tied Muslim Brotherhood front group, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), to get me dropped from the speaker list. They issued a press release full of lies about me. That’s what I’d expect from CAIR, but the mainstream media quickly jumped in – and there followed some textbook examples of exactly how liberal media bias works.
Associated Press reporter Erik Schelzig contacted me for comment on CAIR’s libel. He wrote this to me: “I’m a reporter with The Associated Press doing a story on CAIR’s demands that Panel [sic!] Geller be dropped from this weekend’s Tennessee Tea Party Convention in Gatlinburg. They say SIOA is a hate group and should not be represented. Any response?”
Here is what I wrote to Schelzig: ”
Erik, Stop Islamization Of America [SIOA] is one of America’s foremost organizations defending human rights, religious liberty, and the freedom of speech against Islamic supremacist intimidation and attempts to bring elements of Sharia to the United States. CAIR is an unindicted co-conspirator (Holy Land trial), Hamas-linked front for the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States.
Schelzig came back with this: “Thanks for contacting me. Was hoping to get a comment from you on CAIR’s allegation that yours is a ‘hate group.’ I assume you reject this, but wanted to get direct response.”
You’ll notice he didn’t say anything about the clear evidence that CAIR itself is a genuine “hate group”; instead, he was focused on CAIR’s defamatory claim that SIOA is one. So I answered:
Ah, I thought I did. CAIR characterizes the defense of free speech, the freedom of conscience, and equality of rights for women — all of which are denied by Islamic law — as ‘hate.’ I don’t.
After all that, not one word of my statement made it into the report, and nowhere in it was CAIR identified as the unindicted co-conspirator, Hamas-linked Muslim Brotherhood proxy that it demonstrably is.
Nothing on CAIR’s background. Here are some fast CAIR facts:
- Several officials convicted of terror offenses — notably Ghassan Elashi, founder of CAIR’s Texas chapter, who was involved in the Holy Land Foundation Hamas funding case, and Randall Ismail Royer, CAIR’s former national communications director, who was one of the Virginia paintball jihadists training to fight in Afghanistan against us forces. There have been others.
- CAIR officials have repeatedly and consistently refused to condemn Hamas and Hizballah as terrorist groups.
- CAIR has opposed virtually every antiterror measure introduced since 9/11. It was involved in the flying imams case when the imams attempted to sue the passengers who reported them — an attempt which, if successful, would have intimidated people and made them afraid to report suspicious behavior by Muslims for fear of getting sued.
- CAIR’s cofounder and director, Nihad Awad, has declared his support for Hamas. Before CAIR he and the other cofounder, Omar Ahmad, were with the Islamic Association for Palestine, which has since been closed down as a Hamas front. CAIR was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation jihad charity case, which involved funding for Hamas.
- Omar Ahmad and CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper have both made Islamic supremacist statements about how they want to see the U.S. ruled by Islamic law, which denies free speech, the freedom of conscience, and equality of rights for women and non-Muslims.
Why did Erik Schelzig deem all this unfit to print? Why instead did he give a hearing to a deliberate campaign to smear me and the Tea Parties?
Erik Schelzig is not alone, or unusual. He is just another mainstream media reporter. And another one is Linsey Davis of ABC‘s World News Tonight. Last Thursday I did a 15-minute segment with Davis. Not long after we finished filming, she told me that the story would not run on Sunday, as originally planned, but had been bumped until next week because spokesmen for the mosque were “unavailable.” Well, I guess the mosque leaders suddenly changed their minds, because the story did air Sunday night. Daisy (“Let’s turn 9/11 into something very positive!”) Khan, the wife of the 9/11 mosque imam, Feisal Abdul Rauf, was given abundant time to spin her strands of taqiyya – Islamic religious deception.
Khan tells ABC that “tragedy of 9/11 affected us all.” A hurricane is a “tragedy.” An act of war is not a tragedy, it’s an act of war. Yet predictably, in ABC’s segment, Khan is given the largest chunk of time, compared to nine seconds of FDNY Deputy Chief Jim Riches, whose son was killed in the World Trade Center on 9/11, and eight seconds of…Pamela Geller.
Journalism is dead in the corrupt and useless mainstream media.