Readers Write: Newspaper distorts me, my supporters

The Island Now

“We don’t often reply to letters from readers in this space,” says The Island Now in an unsigned editorial. But when it came to smearing me, they just couldn’t help themselves.

The editorial is a tissue of falsehood and half-truths. “Geller,” it tells us, “once posted a drawing on her blog of Muhammad with the head of pig superimposed over his own.”

The Muhammad pig cartoon the editors are referring to is one that an Danish imam added to the infamous Muhammad cartoons printed by the Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten, in an attempt to gin up anger among Muslims against the Danes. The imam presented the Muhammad-as-pig cartoon as if it were one of the original Danish cartoons, which it wasn’t, and now The Island Now is presenting it as something I created, which isn’t true, either. 

The original post at my website AtlasShrugs.com is here. The caption on the Muhammad-as-pig photo is: “Supposed to be Muhammad as half pig, but actually an altered photograph of a guy at a French pig-squealing contest.” So they take a photo that I showed was clearly marked as not Muhammad at all, and present it as if I were depicting Muhammad as a pig.

The editorial goes on: “She also said that Muslims have sex with goats.” I have never actually said that at all, and the editors compound this smear by then quoting me as saying, “I don’t know where it is in America that you can’t make jokes or make fun,” which I said in response to something entirely different. This is dishonest, gutter journalism at its very best.

And there is plenty more of it. “On her blog, Atlas Shrugs, she posted a mock photograph of Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan in a Nazi uniform and a doctored photograph showing President Obama urinating on an American flag and said the president had been involved as a youth with a ‘crack whore.’”

The Kagan image was a single satirical photoshop, posted after it was revealed that Kagan had cited in her thesis a German Marxist who became a Nazi when Hitler took power. And in the post about Obama and the “crack whore” I was making a point about journalistic bias, noting that liberal journalists do not hunt down unsubstantiated rumors about liberal candidates such as Obama with anything approaching the zeal they bring to investigations of rumors about conservatives. 

That bias is obviously present among the editors of The Island Now.

Later on, The Island Now complains that Joan Swirsky, whose letter defending me they are “rebutting,” “calls us ‘leftists’ and compares us to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. We’re proud to be in the company of that great American hero. She claims that FDR, [sic] ‘abandoned the Jews to Hitler’s annihilation.’” To this, the editors respond triumphantly that “she is as ignorant of history as she is about the free press. In a review of the book, ‘Roosevelt & Hitler: Prelude to War,’ Robert Clive, writes that  the author of this book ‘seeks to set the record straight by detailing how FDR worked relentlessly to involve the U.S. in a war against Hitler that the American people as a whole had no genuine interest in.’”

It is well known that Roosevelt worked hard to get us into World War II. That is not at issue. Joan Swirsky was talking about saving Jews. It is also a matter of record that FDR rejected proposals to bomb Auschwitz and to take numerous other measures that would have saved untold numbers of Jews from Nazi murderers. 

That they don’t know this is just one indication of how they play fast and loose with the facts. And what’s even worse is that as unfair and uninterested in the truth as they are, they aren’t even close to being the worst of today’s leftist “journalists.”

 

Pamela Geller 

President of the American Freedom Defense Initiative

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