On Sunday we drove down to a synagogue in Edison, NJ to hear a talk by Pamela Geller, a controversial anti-Jihad activist. I counted four police cars outside because the Rabbi had received death threats and someone shot pellets at his garage door. He has been attacked previously. Geller had been scheduled to speak at a synagogue in Great Neck, Long Island but was disinvited, according to the Great Neck synagogue, because of “legal liability and potential security exposure of our institution and its member families. In an era of heightened security concerns it is irresponsible to jeopardize the safety of those who call Great Neck Synagogue home, especially our children, . . . “
That is pathetic. The synagogue caved in to the forces of political correctness to prevent its members from hearing Geller’s views on Sharia law. There are two possibilities. Either the leadership of the Great Neck synagogue was lying, and there was not really any “potential security exposure”—it just didn’t want to take the heat of sponsoring a controversial speaker—or, on the other hand, there was indeed a security risk, in which case Geller’s warnings about the “Islamification of America” are correct. Neither possibility is acceptable.
Like a well trained poodle, the mainstream media – CBS, the Star Ledger, News 12, etc. — unthinkingly side with the apostles of political correctness. They ignore the simple, crucial distinction that Geller makes between coercive, violent Jihad—the ideology that brought down the twin towers, bombed subways in London and Madrid, led to a massacre in Fort Hood, planted a bomb in Times Square, etc. – and the religion of Islam, most of whose adherents are nonviolent. Reporters gravely note that the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center have branded Geller’s organization a “hate group,” which is like reporting that Starbucks thinks two cups of coffee in the morning are better than one. The ADL and SPLC are in the hate group business; the more the merrier. No need to grapple with complicating complexities, such as the fact that the jihadists Geller criticizes systematically oppress women and gays, Jews and Christians. (If they had been around in the 1830s, ADL and SPLC might have branded William Lloyd Garrison’s American Anti-Slavery Society as a “hate group” that vilified southern whites.)
A Great American and His Dead Son
The first speaker on Sunday was Gregory Buckley Senior, whose son, Marine Lance Corporal Gregory Buckley Junior, was murdered in Afghanistan last year. In a moving and courageous speech Mr. Buckley made a very convincing case that the U.S. should withdraw all troops from that country as soon as possible, if not sooner. Our troops there are treated as second class citizens who are not permitted to possess their weapons when they sleep and at other times of the day. Greg Jr. wrote his father several prescient letters predicting his own murder, which was carried out by a sixteen-year-old while Greg and his buddies were lifting weights (weaponless) in a gym. It has been obvious for at least a couple of years that U.S. troops can achieve nothing positive in Afghanistan and should be brought home. Back in the autumn of 2010 I heard that point persuasively made by Bing West in a lecture, complete with video of fire fights he had been in a couple of months previous. Neo-cons like Bill Kristol who talk about victory in Afghanistan are misguided. Greg Buckley Sr. states that, because he has spoken out against our pointless presence there, the Pentagon has failed to provide a full report of his son’s murder in a timely manner.
