“Truth is the new hate speech,” Pamela Geller intoned to a standing-room-only crowd of 250-300 people at the Great Neck Chabad on Sunday, with another 300 people outside watching the event on a Jumbotron video.
“In the Middle East, they use bullets, bombs and bloodshed to deny reality…here they demonize, marginalize and assassinate your name when you speak the truth.”
Geller was unsubtly referring to the attempt by Long Island’s remarkably intolerant “interfaith” community – including Habeeb Ahmed of the Islamic Center of Long Island – to shut down her scheduled appearance at the Great Neck Synagogue where her topic was to be “The Imposition of Sharia in America.”
In fact, the synagogue’s executive board did cancel her appearance, citing “legal liability and potential security exposure of our institution and its member families…especially our children…”
Obviously the decision was not unanimous. According to a Great Neck Synagogue board member Phil Orenstein, “This was a crushing blow to freedom of speech in America…the thugs and bullies win, and we, the decent, freedom-loving people in New York, lose.”
Of course, the executive board could have – and should have – gone before a bank of microphones to name names and describe in depth the kind of veiled or overt threats they received, and then repudiated those threats decisively. But they didn’t.
And that includes a communication they received from Arthur Luxenberg, a partner in Weitz and Luxenberg, who is on the board of the North Shore Hebrew Academy, which rents space from the Great Neck Synagogue. The letter threatened a lawsuit if anything horrible happened and demanded that the synagogue pay for two security guards.
Not at all incidentally, in my view, Sheldon Silver, the powerful Speaker of the New York State Assembly since 1994, is a member of the Weitz & Luxenberg law firm. Did the edict to cancel Geller come from Albany?
After all Geller, the mother of four, is no less a threat to their intentionally false and malevolent narrative than was Sarah Palin, another gorgeous, brilliant, trailblazing, fearless woman who they tried – but utterly failed – to destroy.
The campaign to quash Geller’s speech was conducted over a period of weeks, during which the Great Neck Synagogue was harassed, threatened, and bullied by an unseemly collection of Muslim and leftist agitators, as well as left-wing rabbis Michael White and Jerome Davidson, the former rabbi of Beth El synagogue, who is known for becoming apoplectic at the very idea of having a menorah on the Village Green.
Not a cross or a crèche, mind you, but a menorah!
As Geller has written: “When have rabbis (Davidson and White) ever shown the same indignation they are now showing about my talk when leaders of groups linked to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, and even the convicted murderers of Jewish children, have spoken on college campuses and at mosques in the United States?
Where were White and Davidson when Muslim Students Association members menaced and even physically attacked Jewish students on college campuses, and shouted down and physically intimidated Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren at the University of California-Irvine, preventing him from speaking?
Where were they when Islamic jihadists targeted synagogues in the New York City area for terror attacks?
When White and Davidson boast about their close relationship with the Islamic Center of Long Island, did they ever discuss the vile anti-Jewish rantings of one of the former officials of that mosque, the late Ghazi Khankan, who preached there regularly and blamed Israel, `the enemy of Muslims and Arabs,’ for 9/11?
“Instead,” Geller says, “they smear me for fighting against Islamic Jew-hatred.”
Within moments of the Great Neck Synagogue cancelling Geller’s appearance, Rabbi Yossi Geisinsky of the Chabad of Great Neck immediately invited her to speak.
No one will be surprised to hear that Luxenberg contacted the rabbi – who only a couple of months ago survived a near-death experience at North Shore Hospital. But this time, the lawyer couldn’t use his “concern for children” card because there are no students at Chabad.
Did he threaten to withhold future contributions? Whatever their exchange was, Rabbi Geisinsky let Luxenberg know that his board of directors was Hashem!
Only hours later, Rabbi Bernhard Rosenberg of Congregation Beth-El of Edison, N.J., asked Geller to speak later the same day, an invitation she accepted.
How rare it is to be given the opportunity to show one’s real character, values, menschiness – and to step up, as rabbis Geisinsky and Rosenberg did, to embody these traits! Those who witnessed their behavior, like me and my husband Steve and the people we drove to the event, felt we were in rarefied company, to say the least.
Geller’s stirring speech, in which she urged “whatever action you can take” to combat the anti-American, anti-human, anti-freedom ideology of radical Islam, was attended by numerous dignitaries including New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind, Pastor James David Manning of the Atlah Church in Harlem, constitutional law scholar and attorney David Yerushalmi, et al.
Her speech was preceded by a talk given by Greg Buckley Sr. As veterans lined the periphery of the Chabad building with pro-military, pro-America, pro-Israel, pro-freedom and anti-Sharia signs and flags waving in the breeze, and a heart-wrenching collage of his son propped up behind his microphone, Mr. Buckley described the cold-blooded murder – the so-called green-on-blue murder – by an Afghani jihadist of his son Lance Corporal Gregory Buckley, Jr., 3rd Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Div, II Marine, Expeditionary Force, killed at the age of 21 on August 10, 2012.
Lance Corporal Gregory Buckley Jr., was working out with fellow marines in the gym when he was shot with an assault rifle by the 19-year-old assistant of the “allied” Afghan district police chief who Greg was charged with training, who immediately shouted “I did Jihad!” The killer was apprehended but soon released to uphold the Obama administration’s policy of “cultural sensitivity” to the needs of the Afghanis.
Greg Buckley Sr. called for swift justice for the murderer of his son and demanded his prosecution as a terrorist on American soil. Visit https://www.facebook.com/GregBuckleyJr to help.
Buckley and Geller made perfect bookends for the cherished cause of American freedom.
While the grieving father evoked tears but also resolve to help him work toward American-style justice for his son, the warrior woman inspired our conviction to be vigilant about the assaults of Sharia “law” in our daily lives as well as the need to be actively engaged in the political process, be it starting a movement to licking a stamp!
In keeping with her activist philosophy, Geller followed her speech at the Chabad with literally hundreds of her advocates descending on the Nassau County Human Rights Commission building in Mineola at a free-speech rally that called for the resignation of Habeeb Ahmed for so cravenly using – actually abusing – his office to agitate against free speech!
All in all, it was a great day for America!
Joan Swirsky
Great Neck
