Days before Pam Geller came under fire for "attacking the victims" of the recent Oslo attacks, radio host Dana Loesch championed Geller's “good fight” against “the jihadi mindset.”
Geller, the Atlas Shrugs blogger and frequent Fox News guest, has been under the microscope since the attacks, as commenters noted that accused killer Anders Behring Breivik frequently cited fringe Islamophobic bloggers, including Geller, in his manifesto.
Geller now faces widespread condemnation after a weekend blog post in which she called the Norwegian youth camp where dozens of young people were massacred an “anti-Semitic indoctrination training center” and posted a picture of the targeted children with the caption:
Note the faces which are more Middle Eastern or mixed than pure Norwegian.
Geller has subsequently scrubbed the caption from her blog post.
Salon's Glenn Greenwald has rightly called on media to stop giving Geller a platform to spew her Islamophobic hate speech in light of her most recent comments.
Indeed, despite a long history of outrageous, Islamophobic comments, Geller has long benefited from media exposure that soft-pedals or defends her hate speech - which was on full display throughout the summer of 2010 as Geller helped gin up outrage over the Park51 Islamic Community Center.
Just last week, in fact, Geller called into The Dana Show, where host Dana Loesch defended Geller, saying criticism of her hate speech and was nothing more than “extreme, baseless, bigoted, partisan attacks.” Geller, Loesch claimed, was under attack and being “defamed” because she “posed such a threat to people who have supported the jihadi mindset.”
Loesch insisted that Geller's rhetoric did not constitute hate speech, encouraged Geller to “keep fighting the good fight,” and assured her that “you've got a lot of people standing behind you.”
Loesch's embrace of Geller's tactics and mission unquestionably predated Geller's most recent comments.
But that “good fight” that Loesch - a CNN contributor - celebrated so publicly has included Geller's claim that President Obama “is advancing jihad,” her claim that Obama had gone “full on Nazi,” her effort to compare an Islamic Community Center in lower Manhattan to a Ku Klux Klan “shrine,” her statement that Arabic is a “spearhead of an ideological project that is deeply opposed to the United States of America,” and her claim that the developers of the community center “want to stab Americans in the eye.”
All of which leads one to ask, just what would Geller have to say to lose Dana Loesch's endorsement?