The Nation Dehumanizes Pamela Geller For Standing Up for Muslim Women

The Nation has adopted the methods that the Nazis employed in dehumanizing the Jews in the run up to World War II. Like the German socialists, the American left vilifies, mocks, and libels those who stand in the way of their oppressive and anti-freedom agenda.

Here again we see the vicious hatred of the left — the hatred of the good for being good. They will stop at nothing to destroy, defame and ridicule those who stand for human rights. The author of this hit piece on Ann Coulter, Kellyanne Conway and me is enraged that we have stood up for the rights of Muslim women.

The author is a Muslim who, ten years later, is still losing sleep over speaking to a group at the Indiana General Assembly that included Republicans — people who were concerned about women under the sharia, threatened by honor killings, female genital mutilation, etc.

Rafia Zakaria is embarrassed by the resolution they helped her pass, because the motives were wrong — as if she knows what was in their hearts and souls.

For Rafia Zakaria, their concern — and mine — for Muslim women is illegitimate. Zakaria hates me because I dare to point out that the mistreatment of Muslim women is rooted in Islam. For Zakaria, The Nation, and the left in general, Islam trumps everything, even concern for women who are victimized.

The laughably vicious cartoon accompanying the article shows who The Nation’s real enemies are — not those who brutalize Muslim women, but we who call attention to this brutal treatment.

“Why Donald Trump Needs Muslim Women,” by Rafia Zakaria, The Nation, August 11, 2017:

On an April morning 10 years ago, I set out to speak at the Indiana General Assembly. I was a graduate student then, green and greedy for any sort of opportunity that would lift me above all of the other sharp and competitive students in the political-science department at Indiana University. The invitation fit that bill grandly, even though I’d been given only some vague guidelines regarding the topic of my speech. I learned soon enough when I was greeted warmly by the very nice state representative who had asked me to come. “Just speak for a few minutes about your work on honor killings,” she whispered with a smile. The venue was not the Assembly itself, but a luncheon for the Women’s Caucus of the Indiana House of Representatives.

I did speak about honor killings that afternoon, after I received a tour of the Statehouse, stood beneath the hushed and high rotunda, and had my picture taken with my host, the two of us standing by the flag behind the podium. I spoke about the work my small organization of expat Pakistani-American women was doing on the issue, of the cruelty of the crime and the helplessness of the victims. It was the first time I had spoken on the issue for a mainly white and exclusively American audience—and a largely conservative one. There was raucous applause when I was done. A resolution officially commending my work on honor killings in South Asia was passed. I received it in the mail and had it framed.

Ten years later, I can barely look at it. A miserable mix of remorse, guilt, and shame follows when I force myself to do so or to recount the moment it commemorates. I realize now that the resolution had very little to do with me. Instead, my presence as a Pakistani woman served to confirm a group of other women—predominantly white women—in their role as saviors of brown women and, by extension, harsh critics of that supposedly woman-hating religion, Islam….

…Similarly, a cabal of conservative white women—rage-filled Trumpistas—have forged a sort of right-wing feminism that claims to protect American women by preventing immigration. In order for this Fox News feminism to function, it needs stories of bad Muslim men. Among its leading lights is Pamela Geller, whose personal website the Geller Report issues an almost daily mega-dose of anti-Muslim vitriol, including frequent stories about honor killings and female genital mutilation. “The Phenomenon of Honor Killings Rooted in the Culture of Islam,” screams one post, its contents a mash-up of selective statistics, fake reports, and ludicrous claims. Nationalist media maven Ann Coulter is Geller’s sister in hate, eagerly constructing an image of the empowered but conservative American woman as one archly opposed to the admission of brown men into the polity. In one appearance on Fox News following the signing of Trump’s second travel ban, Coulter declared that immigrants from the Middle East were “terrifying” and “having a very difficult time not to rape women.”…

The story, however, is not simply a tale of enterprising native informers posing as reformers and cashing in on American feminist confusions and the seductions of a fake solidarity built on saviordom. What led The New York Times (which has otherwise positioned itself as a journalistic vanguard against the Trump administration) to give a platform to women whose views line up with Geller’s and Coulter’s is reflective of a wider liberal-feminist ambivalence about identity politics in general, and of its own proclivities for savior feminism in particular….