Je Suis Pam Geller

We won a battle against Radical Islam Sunday night, thanks to prompt action by Garland, Texas police, but I’m afraid we’re losing the war. Pam Geller has been fighting it for years here in the United States and elsewhere. President Obama, our commander-in-chief, acts as though he doesn’t even know who we’re fighting.

Dead jihadis in Plano

I had another piece ready for my Monday morning deadline at one of the newspapers carrying this column, but then I saw the first reports about what happened at Pam Geller’s Free Speech Conference Sunday night. Two Islamic gunmen showed up armed with AK-47s ready to kill as many people as they could. However, some very tough-looking Garland, Texas policemen shot them dead before they could. They were only able to shoot an unarmed school security guard in the ankle before they were killed. Now they’re both knock-knock-knocking on heaven’s door looking for their 72 virgins.

Robert Spencer, me, Pam Geller

I first met Pam at the 2007 National Review “Conservative Summit” in Washington DC. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich gave a speech there about Radical Islam and I went up to the microphone to ask him a question. I asked why our government was working against teachers like me who were trying to inform our students about who America was fighting. I told him I was having a hard time because the Bush Administration was removing references to Islam from official literature about who our enemy was. Gingrich answered telling me to continue what I was doing and the government would eventually catch up. As soon as I sat down, Pam Geller came over to interview me for her web site “Atlas Shrugs.”

Wilders with armed guards at Geller reception

Every year at CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) in Washington, I’d visit with her and Robert Spencer, her constant companion. In 2009, she invited Geert Wilders, a Member of Parliament in Holland, founder and leader of Holland’s “Party For Freedom,” the third-largest party in the Dutch Parliament with twenty-four seats. Radical Islam put a fatwa on Wilders when he produced “Fitna,” a film showing Quran verses alongside images of Islamic terrorist attacks. Ever since, Wilders has armed guards with him 24-7. CPAC 2009 lacked the courage to sponsor Wilders, so Pam had to rent space in the Omni Shoreham hotel for his reception. I attended with friends. Wilders also spoke in Garland Sunday night.

Wilders and me at Pam's reception. He's tall.

Pam organized her Garland, Texas conference back in January, right after other Islamic gunmen attacked the Paris, France offices of Charlie Hebdo, a left-wing magazine that published cartoons of Muhammed, who Muslims consider their prophet. Radical Muslims shot twenty-two people, killing eleven. Pam selected the Curtis Culwell Center in Plano because Muslims from Dallas held the “Stand With The Prophet Conference” to combat “Islamophobia” there just days after the mass murder in Paris.

The winning entry at Pam's conference

According to the Washington Free Beacon last January: “[S]cheduled to attend the [Stand With The Prophet Conference] is controversial New York-based Imam Siraj Wahhaj, who was an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombings trial. Wahhaj has called the FBI and CIA the ‘real terrorists’ and expressed a desire for all Americans to become Muslim, according to the New York Post.”

Another. You won't see these in Mainstream Media

One of the dead terrorists, Elton Simpson, is reported to be a Muslim convert. As of this writing, the other one was his roommate, but hasn’t been identified. We can expect the Mainstream Media to blame Pam for inciting violence by sponsoring her $10,000 contest to draw a cartoon of Muhammed, one of the free speech themes of her conference officially called: “American Freedom Defense Initiative.” The building she used is owned by the Plano school department and she had to pay $10,000 to the Garland Police for extra officers. Good thing she did. She said on Fox News Monday morning she paid $50,000 all together for security. “Intentionally incendiary and provocative” are the words CNN’s Alisyn Camerota used in her interview with Pam early Monday. There will be more of that by the time you’re reading this in the newspaper Thursday. Much more.

The president hasn’t spoken about it yet, but we can expect he’ll blame Pam too. The UK Daily Mail blacked out the cartoons displayed at the conference. So did NBC’s Today Show, which I watched this morning. They’re cowards, all of them. If you’re reading this on my web site, you’re seeing the cartoons. I published the Muhammed cartoons from Charlie Hebdo the day eleven of its staff were murdered too. If all media published them, Radical Muslims would have failed in their efforts to intimidate us all. But that would require courage, something conspicuously lacking in our elite media.

Having My Baby

Shannon Maureen Conley
Aspiring bride of ISIS
From World Net Daily

They want to go to Syria and have babies for ISIS. Young American and European women are sneaking off to terrorist-controlled Syria and the rest of us are baffled. “Why do they do it?” people ask. Why would they join ISIS? I don’t know for sure myself, but I have suspicions.

ISIS recruiters use social media and promise money for babies, but it can’t be the money. Why not just become a surrogate mother for an American woman who either cannot or doesn’t want to bear children? It’s got to be something else.

Samra Kesinovic, 16, left, and Sabina Selimovic, 15
pregnant with ISIS babies in Syria
From World Net Daily

The women are promised a jihadi husband, but it’s hard to see the draw in that either. These guys are evil. They cut heads off children, Christians, and other innocents. They use women as sex slaves. Their new husbands may at any time become “martyrs” in the holy war against us infidels, but that seems to be an attraction. A British woman tweeted “Allahu Akbar, there’s no way to describe the feeling of sitting with the Akhawat [sisters] waiting on news of whose husband has attained Shahadah [martyrdom].” There’s always another jihadi willing to marry and impregnate them, I guess.

Austrian teens Samra Kesinovic and Sabina Selimovic in a photo they posted online (World Net Daily)

Looks like they’re attracted to men who would offer themselves in violent death for a cause they believe to be greater than themselves. Is that a contrast to the European and American men they know over here? It would seem so. I remember quoting Martin Luther King to my public-school students on his holiday in January: “If a man has nothing he would die for,” King said, “he isn’t fit to live.” Then I asked students if there was something for which they would be willing to die. Most said, “No.” Only a few said, “Yes - for my family,” or “Yes - for my country.” That surprised and dismayed me at the time. It doesn’t surprise me now, though I’m still disillusioned. America has changed. What would MLK think of our young people today?

“They are selling them [US women] this mystical sisterhood of going to the caliphate and being able to be a Muslim in this idealized, utopian society,” warned Mia Bloom, a professor at the center for terrorism and security studies at the University of Massachusetts. “They are targeting these young girls in a very predatory way – the way child sex abusers target young children.”

What does it mean to be a woman in America when there’s no such thing as American exceptionalism anymore? During President Obama’s first year as president, he was asked about it at the NATO Summit. His answer? “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” In other words, there’s no such thing. If everyone’s exceptional, no one’s exceptional. Multiculturalism has been pounded into these young women all their lives. All cultures are equal. Europe and America with their Judeo-Christian roots are no better than the Middle East with its Islamic roots.

Do these women crave a solid culture, or meaning? Are they unable to find them in the west today? If they ask, do they hear some nihilist explanation like: “What’s meaningful for you may not be meaningful for someone else”? They might be told to question whether they’re even women. Western progressives who dominate academia claim there are more than two sexes now. It’s not just male and female anymore.

Progressives push the idea of a “gender spectrum” onto children beginning in kindergarten. There are more than two sexes. You may think you’re a male or a female, but you can change. You can choose your sex, they claim and Obamacare will pay for surgery and hormone treatments if you want to be something else. Homosexuality it immutable, but male or female is optional, they claim.

Shannon Maureen Conley (circled)

American and European men have been joining al Qaeda and ISIS for many years. More than a hundred Americans are fighting there now and more than 2000 Europeans. Some of the Americans have been allowed to return here and the FBI says they’re “under surveillance.” After the Tsarnaev brothers experience at the Boston Marathon, that somehow fails to inspire confidence. Photographs of ISIS in Washington, DC have been shown online. When CNN’s Jake Tapper was reporting from Ferguson, Missouri on the Michael Brown shooting, someone flashed an ISIS sign behind him.

Salma Halane, right, and her sister Zahra
From Minnesota, believed to be in Syria now

The first American women to join ISIS were Somali immigrants from St. Paul, Minnesota. That was disconcerting, but might be understood in the sense that they were already Muslim, had not assimilated, and had been radicalized. But when Shannon Maureen Conley, a registered nurse from Denver, was arrested at the airport on her way to ISIS-controlled Syria to become a “slave of Allah,” Americans were shocked. Austrians were too, when Samra Kesinovic, 15, and her sister Sabrina, 16, went to Syria and devoted their lives to ISIS. They’ve since called their parents back in Europe to report they’re both pregnant and neither will be going back.