Pamela Geller is a freedom fighter who s been in this battle for 17 years. She is a columnist, an activist, a writer, a pundit, and the editor of Geller Report. She s been fighting for freedom since the early days of the Sun-News Network, when she was named Freedom Fighter of the Year.
00:13:55.020They had three different people told me three different things.
00:13:57.220But what I got from them is they could not care less.
00:14:00.980Because they make their money from makeup videos and from cute kittens videos and from music videos.
00:14:09.640And, you know, political commentary is a rounding error for them most of the time.
00:14:15.620So when you say shoot themselves in the foot or the heart, you and I think so because we think free speech is the lifeblood of the social media.
00:14:23.220But what about the alternative answer, Pamela, that you and I are outliers?
00:14:30.960Anyone watching this video is unusual because most people are just playing a video game, watching a movie, you know, having a nonpolitical life.
00:16:15.260I understand that people are fatigued.
00:16:17.280Listen, I've been doing this since 9-11.
00:16:18.840And if you told me on 9-12, 2001, that those standing in defense of freedom and those who opposed jihad slaughter would be the ones who are marginalized or the word you use was outliers or pariahs.
00:16:36.560I would have I would have had you baker acted.
00:16:39.540But it goes to show you how powerful and inside the left, the hard left is and has been for some time.
00:16:46.920Because let's be honest, in the case of Sharia and the Sharia restrictions on our society, without their partners on the left, they could never have gotten so far.0.97
00:16:57.980I do lay this all at the feet of the left.
00:17:57.240I mean, I could paraphrase it, but why don't you tell us?
00:17:59.420I mean, I think a lot of our viewers know you and love you, but remind us how you became a warrior princess, because before 9-11, you were not.
00:19:16.560And that you cannot assume your freedom.
00:19:18.660And so I set about to understand what happened because I didn't understand what happened.
00:19:22.260I didn't know who had attacked us or why.
00:19:24.900And when I found out, I didn't understand this ideology.
00:19:29.120I did not understand the jihadic doctrine.
00:19:31.060And I began reading ferociously, you know, Bache Orr and Ibn Warwick and Robert Spencer.
00:19:38.520And the media wasn't talking about this at all.
00:19:41.340And this, to me, at the time was like the 800-pound elephant in the room.
00:19:44.280And increasingly, I found myself online because that was the only place where it was being discussed in an open forum, good, bad, and indifferent.
00:19:54.780And the thing about online voices is after a while, you get to know who's who, whose sources are credible, whose stories are credible, whose sources, who doesn't source, who says crazy things.
00:20:09.200I mean, it doesn't take long, really, just basic common sense.
00:20:13.860And so that's how it really started for me.
00:20:16.460I would comment on these account to jihad sites, some that don't exist anymore.
00:20:21.860But the comment sections were more lively than the posts themselves.
00:20:41.620And everything that people know about me, whether it was the ads or the ads that I did or the fight for Rivka Barry or the Ground Zero mosque or the lawsuits or the Muhammad art exhibit, everything came from the site.
00:20:59.740I mean, I would see signs in the New York City subway, these vicious anti-Semitic, these anti-Israel signs, posters on buses and in the subway.
00:21:14.500And I never foresaw what would happen.
00:21:17.180I didn't see that they were going to reject me because it was somehow saying, in any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man, support Israel, defeat jihad.
00:21:29.220And, of course, I was cribbing from Ayn Rand on that civilized man statement that it would be rejected by New York City.
00:22:12.260Rifka Barry, again, that started with a story where I read that a girl was missing and a couple of her friends wrote me and said we're really worried about her.
00:22:20.580And I remember writing to Robert Spencer at the time.
00:22:29.880And then this thing becomes this huge story because CARE, the terrorist-type co-conspirators, unindicted co-conspirators, were trying, working with the family, to try to bring her back to this house where she had been threatened with her life.
00:22:45.620She had converted out of Islam, kept it a secret for three years.
00:22:49.280The mosque, the Noah mosque, her family's mosque, had spied on her and found out she had converted on Facebook, if I'm not mistaken, and her father threatened to kill her.
00:22:59.080And so, yeah, that became a big fight for me was to keep this girl alive.
00:23:13.520And while I may have opposed the Ground Zero mosque, it was the 40,000 people that showed up.0.93
00:23:20.040It was the people that wrote to their congressmen where it became—listen, I don't know what would happen today, but I can tell you when CNN did a poll on the Ground Zero mosque, 70 percent opposed it.
00:23:40.360Even the Pope withdrew the convent, if you remember.
00:23:44.080There was a convent being built on the grounds of a concentration camp, and it caused a great deal of consternation and pain, and they withdrew it.
00:23:55.400But you see, this hypersensitivity that we daily, we are demanded to respect, this hypersensitivity, don't offend Muhammad, don't insult Islam, don't criticize Islam.
00:24:15.700Of course, it's never pointed out, you see.
00:24:18.120You know, you made me think of other Ground Zero mosques or Victory mosques.
00:24:24.340Of course, the magnificent Hagia Sophia Church in Constantinople, once it was conquered by the Turk, it became the Hagia Sophia Mosque of Istanbul.
00:24:37.500And even in Jerusalem, on the Temple Mount of the Jewish Temple, Islam built its own mosque.0.97
00:24:46.880So there is a historic sort of territorial marking of great victories over infidels.1.00
00:24:53.220I have no doubt whatsoever that a Muslim mosque at Ground Zero would have been that.1.00
00:24:58.340If not expressly, it would have de facto been a Victory Mosque.
00:25:01.160Well, if I may add one thing to what you just said, I mean, there have been tens of thousands of Hindu temples that have been converted into mosques.
00:25:34.720And even more excruciating when it comes to the Temple Mount, which is the holiest Jewish site, is we are told by the Muslim world that we are not allowed, we, and I mean Jews, are not allowed to pray there.
00:25:47.600Again, the uneven handedness, the stark supremacism that is accepted by the world is what I find even now, even now, 18 years later, astonishing.
00:26:00.400You've raised so many things that I want to ask you about, but part of it makes me, I mean, you told me your story of how you transformed after 9-11.
00:26:09.160I feel like I was sort of woke to these issues even back then.
00:26:14.380And what I think flipped me into a free speech mode was when I was a publisher of the Western Standard magazine and in February of 2006, we published the Danish cartoons.
00:26:35.080I really, I genuinely thought that by the time our fortnightly mag came out, these would have been published everywhere else, at least in the tabloid Sun newspapers.
00:27:44.480And Compass found that 70%, 7-0% of working journalists, like they phoned up journalists, said that not only did I have the right to publish them, but that their own media ought to have published them too.
00:28:13.260Wait, I'll give you an even starker comparison.
00:28:17.2201979, Salman Rushdie, the satanic verses.
00:28:21.180You had Margaret Thatcher, who, by the way, was on politically opposing sides to Salman Rushdie.
00:28:28.220He was a, you know, a flaming liberal, as it were.
00:28:31.780You know, of course, we know what Thatcher was a strong conservative.0.96
00:28:34.320She, when she called him to tend down and she said, there's no politics here.
00:28:39.000You know, we will give you complete protection or round the clock protection.
00:28:44.120I mean, the whole world, you know, stood, stood with, with Rushdie.
00:28:48.720And now you fast forward and I'm scheduled to speak in the UK to lay a wreath at the site of the beheading of Lee Rigby.0.93
00:29:01.180And, you know, Islamic supremacists, hope, not hate, ridiculous groups that are funded by the UK government say, we don't want to hear.0.95
00:29:14.940Well, they're allowing in, the UK is allowing in the worst hate preachers, the inciters to genocide, inciters to Jew hatred, just, you know, welcoming.
00:29:26.940They speak in parliament, in the UK parliament.
00:29:30.260But myself and colleagues and subsequent colleagues like Lauren Southern, these people were banned from the UK as well.
00:29:52.900You know, not only were journalists supportive of free speech in the case of the separation of mosque and state, as I called it,
00:30:02.780but they were supportive, but even on a more basic level, they wanted to talk about it at all.
00:30:12.900Now, I actually don't know how many would support it because they won't even utter a peep about it.
00:30:19.880And if they do speak, I don't think they're actually speaking their own views.
00:30:23.340I think they're looking over their shoulder worried if they dare to support an Ezra Levan, a Pamela Gellar, a Rebel Media, a Gellar reporter, Robert Spencer, a Tommy Robinson.
00:30:34.060If they themselves even say, well, he's got a point there, then they will be marginalized and deplatformed.