The anti-fascist campaign group Hope Not Hate (HNH) has started a petition to prevent two American bloggers from being given permission to enter the UK.
The anti-fascist campaign group Hope Not Hate (HNH) has written to the home secretary Theresa May urging her to stop Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer from entering the UK to speak at an English Defence League rally on Saturday 29 June.
Largely unknown in Britain, Geller and Spencer have carved out a reputation in the US as vehement anti-Muslim campaigners. They head up an organisation called Stop the Islamization of America, best known for its opposition to a proposed mosque near Ground Zero.
They are not, however, in the sense of Richard Dawkins or the late Christopher Hitchens, anti-religion – they are anti-Muslim. To cite just one example of their prejudice, Spencer does not believe a distinction should be drawn between violent jihadists and the majority of peaceful Muslims:
“There is no distinction in the American Muslim community between peaceful Muslims and jihadists. While Americans prefer to imagine that the vast majority of American Muslims are civic-minded patriots who accept wholeheartedly the parameters of American pluralism, this proposition has actually never been proven.”
As for Geller, she has claimed that Barack Obama secretly revealed to the Egyptian foreign minister that he is a Muslim. In the same article, Geller remarked that:
“This is devastating news, and yet no media is covering it (emphasis original). A stealth jihad on the White House’, adding that ‘This is akin to an SS officer getting elected president during WW II” [sic].
Geller is also a prominent genocide denier. As One Law for All put it in their brilliant report on the far-right, Enemies not Allies:
“Geller has defended Radovan Karadzic, and likened his war crimes trial at The Hague to a ‘Sharia court’. She has also asserted that Bosnian Muslims killed themselves during the conflict in question in order to ‘manipulate media coverage’. Further, Geller has published and endorsed articles by Julia Gorin, which in their criticism of Karadzic’s trial refer to the ‘8000’ Muslims supposedly executed by Serbian forces’ [sic], and place scare quotes around the word ‘genocide’ when discussing Srebrenica.”
You perhaps have an idea, then, of why the English Defence League might like them.
Banning them from entering Britain, however, would be counterproductive. These people already self-pityingly style themselves as a silent majority whose opinions are repressed by the state. Every time one of their number talks you can set your watch because it is a certainty that at some point they will claim they are “not allowed to talk about Islam/Muslims/immigrations etc”.
Do we really want to provide them with such easy ammunition to throw back at us?
No, Britain is a sufficiently mature nation to reject the extremism of people like Geller and Spencer. There has been no ‘wave’ of anti-Muslim bigotry on the back of the Woolwich killing of Drummer Rigby. Those incidents that have occurred appear mostly to have involved those, like the EDL, who were simply waiting for an excuse to legitimise their bigotry.
In the age of the internet preventing people like Geller and Spencer from speaking at a rally is also fairly inconsequential, anyway. Their videos can be found all over youtube if that’s your thing.
To put it in free speech terms, other people should also be free to hear what Spencer and Geller have to say just as those of us reading this article are – and free to reject their twisted reasoning, if you can call it that.
Banning them for what they might say is also dangerous territory. Free speech within the law should be paramount. If they break British law then they should be asked to leave.
The worst thing to do would be to allow them to portray themselves as free speech martyrs. As Nick Cohen recently phrased it, if you can’t defeat idiots like this with rational argument move out of the way and let people who can.
43 Responses to “Don’t turn Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer into free speech martyrs”
Philip
Evidence please.
Tec15
I see the comments here are as measured, non-bigoted and intelligent as ever. Of course the same pious sentiments were not uttered by this blog in the case of Raed Saleh, whose illegal deportation was cheered instead. Now that it’s the case of white Islamophobes like Geller and Spencer, It’s all “FREE SPEECH IS UNDER ATTACK”. Whereas in the case of Saleh and others it was “Left gives succor to Extremists”, the blogs favourite narrative. Not that I expected anything different from this band of Israel firsters.
Danusha Diane Goska
In all of this ruckus from England, today i remembered something about my late mother that I had previously forgotten. She taught me to hate Neville Chamberlain. My mother was born in Czechoslovakia. I was probably the only little kid in my American suburb who was taught to hate Neville Chamberlain.
Some of you Brits do cowardly appeasement of killers very well.
and some of you are actually quite brave. I recently saw a youtube video of a skinny, young, gay English lad in a hoodie and large sunglasses. He was speaking at an EDL rally about the left’s appeasement of the murderers of homosexuals.
it’s good to know there are still some brave, honest Brits left.
Sandy
There’s an awful lot of misinformation and downright lies on the internet, which is why it behoves us all to check our sources before repeating stuff that we pick up in cyberspace. The author of this article seems not to have done any checking as far as his reporting on Robert Spencer’s concerned. I know nothing about Pamella Geller, so I can’t comment on her, but I’m very familiar with Robert Spencer’s work and can assure you that he’s always very careful to distinguish between Islamists and ordinary muslims. I have never read or heard him utter any hate speech directed at muslims. His criticisms are directed solely at islamofascists and at the passages in Islamic scriptural texts that inspire and ‘justify’ jihadists.
I’ve always had a great deal of admiration for One Law For All, so I’m saddened to see that they, too, have helped to spread this false image of Robert Spencer. The passage in their publication that claims to quote him saying that there’s ‘no distinction’ between American muslims and jihadists doesn’t cite its source, which seems to be a cyberspace meme without any clear origin (it probably originated as a deliberate smear campaign against Spencer).
sasboy
Thank you, United Kingdom. A completely sensible decision, in my view.