Note to Megyn Kelly: You’re off base, off key, off your rocker – not to mention off your game – and simply out of your mind if your definition of “hateful person” is Pamela Geller.
Your words, on NPR: “Pam [sic] Geller, who there’s no question is a hateful person, who held this Draw Muhammad contest down in Texas …”
Quick sidenote: Geller prefers Pamela, not Pam – something you would know if you ever spent half a minute actually speaking with her. But back to the backstab, masked in discussion of the First Amendment’s freedom of speech. You said: “Now she’s a provocateur and she’s not a fan of anyone who’s Muslim from the sound of what she says, but this is America and she has the right to say those things. And she has the right to have a contest like that.”
But let’s back up a bit and look at the reasons for the Garland, Texas, event – whihc was to showcase in a blunt manner the absolute conflict of Sharia with the Constitution and the utter inability of certain Islamic beliefs to coexist with America’s concepts of individual freedoms and rights.
In America, rights come from God. In Sharia, rights come from the interpretation of religious fanatics – the same who would, for example, stick a burqa on you, Kelly, and put you back in the home to serve as your husband demanded.
Holding a “Draw Muhammad” contest was not only a brilliant and bold means of showing a stubborn and politically correct world just how incompatible Sharia is with freedom. But it was also a show of solidarity with those cartoonists who had just been brutally murdered by jihadists in Paris for the supposed crime of drawing Islam’s prophet.
So here’s the question for Kelly: Why do you expect America to bow to Sharia?
The cowardly in the media fail to see this point: that displaying respect and tolerance for one’s religious beliefs is not the same as adjusting one’s whole lifestyle, values and personal religious beliefs in accommodation – or those of an entire country.
When the “Piss Christ” painting shocked the country, did Christians pick up machete to chop heads or firearms to attack and murder? No.
And yet our nation is supposed to accept an ideology like Sharia that not only embraces such reaction for the simple depiction of its declared prophet, but actually enourages it?
That’s ridiculous. And those who say yes by framing their arguments as respect and tolerance are equally ridiculous. This is America, land of the free. If you want Sharia, and want a country filled with like-minded followers of Sharia, go to a country run by Sharia.
Geller shouldn’t feel anything but proud of her Garland event because it was conducted in the spirit of freedom – the same principles that Founding Fathers demanded and that Kelly, no doubt, would have similarly fought against had she been part of America’s start-up history, shrinking in the corner and bemoaning the impertinence and disrespect of a bold Declaration of Independence from the king of England.
You can’t have it both ways, Kelly. You can’t rise to power and prominence on the wings of the First Amendment, and then turn around and slice through the same constitutional provision, picking and choosing which players are afforded that freedom of speech clause and which are just too dang offensive to tolerate.
You should be thanking Pamela Geller, not attacking her. It’s her strength of character and steadfast stand on the wall that’s called Freedom that’s buoying your own media career.
But perhaps you’d have an inkling of Geller’s love for America, not “provocateur” and “hateful” views, as you call them, if you bothered to even do the normal media due diligence, and speak with her personally. “No question” Geller’s “a hateful person?” What a lofty and long-distance pronouncement to make. Next time, try some real reporting – not to mention tact, class and concern for truth.
