Pamela Geller
Since 9/11, Americans have been treated to an ongoing tutorial by the self-professed best-and brightest from America’s universities, media, Christian clergy, and national government explaining how American Muslims become radicalized into Islamist militants. These Muslims, say the country’s brains-trust, are discriminated against by other U.S. citizens; are disenfranchised by poverty; have a hard time transitioning to U.S. society from the Muslim culture they lived in abroad; hate all non-Muslims, or are brain-washed by cynical Islamist leaders and so learn to hate America and become eager to waste their lives in attacking it. These same explanations have been spewed forth by the aforementioned elites ever since the second plane hit the World Trade Center, and now fourteen years they later they are again being served up to explain to the citizenry — really, to mislead the citizenry — what radicalized the Garland, Texas, attackers.
Now each of the foregoing elements may have some peripheral impact on radicalizing young American Muslims, but they would all amount to nothing if the main motivational force — U.S. government policies and actions in the Islamic world — was absent. The attack in Garland, Texas, did not occur because two Muslims were out for a walk and, being bored, decided to kill some non-Muslim cartoonists. The attack occurred because Ms. Geller and her violence-seeking organization announced and then staged an event meant to flamboyantly defame, denigrate, and ridicule the Prophet Muhammad. The Simpson-Soofi attack in Garland was a planned, if poorly executed, operation meant to kill those who seek to humiliate Muslims and their faith by savaging the Prophet. Cause and effect are ever at hand, and in this case the attackers were responding to an attack by Geller et al. that for them and many other Muslims was much more painful than receiving a physical beating.
