Pam Geller is pleading for understanding in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in Oslo, allegedly perpetrated by a right-wing anti-Muslim extremist named Anders Behring Breivik. Geller, alongside other American anti-Islam bloggers such as Robert Spencer, is favorably quoted in Breivik’s 1,500 page manifesto.
Libelblogger Charles Johnson is claiming that the Norway shooter is a “Pamela Geller fan,” and that he is actually Fjordman, whose articles I have published here at Atlas on occasion. He has persisted in this even though Fjordman is online tonight and clearly not under arrest. This shows how desperate Johnson is, and how low he will sink. In reality, the shooter is not Fjordman. I have met Fjordman, I know his identity, and he is not Anders Breivik. This is just a sinister attempt to tar all anti-jihadists with responsibility for this man’s heinous actions.
That doesn’t mean that she believes it’s absurd to blame bloggers for the killings. In fact she believes one blogger in particular might bear responsibility–Charles Johnson, one of her biggest critics.
There is only a single and insignificant reference to me in Breivik’s manifesto. The 55 references to Spencer are mostly quotes from Muslim scriptures. But Breivik cites LGF numerous times, in a very different way. He includes a long diatribe against Charles Johnson, whom he clearly admired until he felt betrayed enough to snap. The killer speaks about Charles Johnson obsessively and wrings his hands about Johnson’s turn to the left. Could this perhaps have been the provocation? Could this have been what caused him to snap?
It’s not so much that guilt-by-association is wrong, as Geller implicitly suggests today by linking the moderate Imam behind the so-called Ground Zero mosque Faisal Abdul Rauf to an Islamic scholar in Malaysia “where Rauf is a promiment figure.”
Moreover, she adds, “If anyone incited him to violence, it was Islamic supremacists. If anything incited him to violence, it was the Euro-Med policy.” So even though Breivik was anti-Islam, the Muslims and liberals are still to blame for him killing people, not the anti-Muslim writers he admired. To Geller, guilt-by-association, It’s only wrong if it might make Geller guilty.
