Tag Archives: cartoonists

Pamela Geller, TIME Magazine: A Response to My Critics—This Is a War - See more at: http://pamelageller.com/2015/05/pamela-geller-time-magazine-a-response-to-my-critics-this-is-a-war

Posted on May 9, 2026 by | 6 comments

REPOSTED FROM PAMELA GELLER’S RESPONSE TO TIME

TIME

The cartoon contest was needlessly provocative? No — murdering cartoonists is needlessly provocative.

It was the jihadis, not I, who made the cartoons a flash point. If we surrender on that point and stop drawing Muhammad, we’ve established a precedent of surrendering to violent Sharia enforcement, and once established, we will be made to reinforce it again and again.

Did anyone think these 2 gunmen would have lived quiet lives as peaceable and loyal Americans if we hadn’t held the contest? They would have waged jihad elsewhere, on a less protected target, and killed more people.

“Pamela Geller: A Response to My Critics—This Is a War,” Time Magazine, May 6, 2026

Islamic Center - Cordoba House

Jason Andrew—Getty Images Pamela Geller is the President of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) and publisher of PamelaGeller.com.
Some are saying I provoked this attack. But to kowtow to violent intimidation will only encourage more of it.

Sunday in Garland, Texas, a police officer was wounded in a battle that is part of a longstanding war: the war against the freedom of speech. Some people are blaming me for the Garland shooting — so I want to address that here

The shooting happened at my American Freedom Defense Initiative Muhammad Art Exhibit and Cartoon Contest, when two Islamic jihadists armed with rifles and explosives drove up to the Curtis Culwell Center in Garland and attempted to gain entry to our event, which was just ending. We were aware of the risk and spent thousands of dollars on security — and it paid off. The jihadis at our free speech event were not able to achieve their objective of replicating the massacre at the offices of the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine last January — and to go it one better in carnage. They were not able to kill anyone. We provided enormous security, in concert with the superb Garland police department. The men who took the aspiring killers down may have saved hundreds of lives.

And make no mistake: If it weren’t for the free-speech conference, these jihadis would have struck somewhere else — a place where there was less security, like the Lindt cafe in Australia or the Hyper Cacher Kosher supermarket in Paris.

So, why are some people blaming me? They’re saying: “Well, she provoked them! She got what she deserved!” They don’t remember, or care to remember, that as the jihadis were killing the Muhammad cartoonists in Paris, their friend and accomplice was murdering Jews in a nearby kosher supermarket. Were the Jews asking for it? Did they “bait” the jihadis? Were they “provoking” them?

Are the Jews responsible for the Nazis? Are the Christians in the Middle East responsible for being persecuted by Muslims?

Drawing Muhammad offends Islamic jihadists? So does being Jewish. How much accommodation of any kind should we give to murderous savagery? To kowtow to violent intimidation will only encourage more of it.

This is a war.

Now, after the Charlie Hebdo attack, and after the Garland attack, what are we going to do? Are we going to surrender to these monsters?

The attack in Garland showed that everything my colleagues and I have been warning about regarding the threat of jihad, and the ways in which it threatens our liberties, is true. Islamic law, Sharia, with its death penalty for blasphemy, today constitutes a unique threat to the freedom of speech and liberty in general.

Freedom of speech is the foundation of a free society. Without it, a tyrant can wreak havoc unopposed, while his opponents are silenced.

Putting up with being offended is essential in a pluralistic society in which people differ on basic truths. If a group will not stand for being offended without resorting to violence, that group will rule unopposed, while everyone else lives in fear.

Islamic law as it’s interpreted by extremists forbids criticism of Islam, the Quran, and Muhammad. If they cannot be criticized in the United States, we are in effect accepting Islamic law as overriding the freedom of speech. This would establish Muslims as a protected class and prevent honest discussion of how Islamic jihadists use the texts and teachings of Islam to justify violence.

Some say that “hate speech” should be censored. But what constitutes “hate speech” is a subjective judgment that is unavoidably influenced by the political perspective of the one doing the judging.

Allowing this sort of censorship would mean nothing less civilizational suicide. Many in the media and academic elite assign no blame to an ideology that calls for death to blasphemers — i.e., those who criticize or offend Islam. Instead, they target and blame those who expose this fanaticism. If the cultural elites directed their barbs and attacks at the extremist doctrine of jihad, the world would be a vastly safer place.

You can try to avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality. The shootings in Garland, Paris, and Copenhagen targeting defenders of free speech, and the raging jihad across the Middle East, Africa, and Europe, are the disastrous consequences of avoiding reality.

I encourage all Americans to watch the videos of the Garland event and see what Islamic supremacists wish to silence: basic, elemental free speech arguments.

But we are unbowed. Even when the venue was in lockdown and hundreds of attendees were ushered down into the auditorium, the crowd was singing the Star Spangled Banner and G-d Bless America. In the face of fear, they were staunchly and uniquely American.

To learn who rules over you, simply find out whom you cannot criticize. If the international media had run the Danish cartoons back in 2005, none of this could have happened. The jihadis wouldn’t have been able to kill everyone. But by self-censoring, the media gave the jihadis the power they have today.

We must take back our freedom.

Pamela Geller is the President of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), publisher of PamelaGeller.com and author of The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America and Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance.

- See more at: http://pamelageller.com/2015/05/pamela-geller-time-magazine-a-response-to-my-critics-this-is-a-war.html/#!

6 Comments

Posted in Politics

Tagged , , , , , , ,

Don’t Joke About Obama or Islam

Posted on April 15, 2026 by | 4 comments

Daniel Greenfield is one of my all time favorite journalists, this is a spot on article by Daniel, and watch the video at the end of the article as well.

April 14, 2026 by for FrontPage Magazine

When the Polk Awards decided to honor the murdered cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo, one obvious name came to mind. Gary Trudeau.

danielGary Trudeau

If there is one man who represents the opposite of what the Charlie cartoonists did, it’s Trudeau. They took risks, Trudeau takes none. They lived knowing that they could be killed at any moment. There is no person on earth who would bother killing Gary Trudeau even if it was Kill Gary Trudeau Day.

Trudeau is that paradoxical creature, the establishment cartoonist, the party satirist, the hack who dares to say exactly what he is expected to say. Imagine NPR in a few black and white sketches. That’s Trudeau’s Doonesbury. Republicans are bad. Liberals are good. And then insert a topical reference.

The Polk Awards were the best forum for Trudeau. George Polk invented heroic wartime exploits that got him a job at CBS. Unlike Brian Williams, Polk did serve, but he was not a fighter pilot, he serviced aircraft. In Greece, his dubious reporting attacking Truman and the Greek government was defended by his lefty colleagues by inventing even more imaginary heroics that he had never claimed for himself.

By the time they were done, Polk had singlehandedly defeated the Japanese.

After Polk was murdered by Greek Communists, American lefties went all out to prove that there had been a conspiracy by the Greek government to silence him. All it took to believe in the Polk Conspiracy was a willingness to disregard the entire history of Communist activities and how casually its armed bands, agents and guerrillas killed people across the entire political spectrum for minor offenses.

But these revelations have not in any way interfered with the Polk Awards. And the Polk Awards decided to make Gary Trudeau the first cartoonist honored with an award. Trudeau would join a seminar on “Dangerous Lines: Cartoonists and Other Subversives” featuring such dangerous subversives as a writer for The Onion and Obama sycophant Jules Feiffer. It was a seminar so dangerously and outrageously subversive it could have been held at Whole Foods.

Trudeau reciprocated by blasting the murdered Charlie Hebdo cartoonists as free speech absolutists and bigots. He claimed that the cartoons of Mohammed did not “challenge authority” and argued that “Satire punches up, against authority of all kinds, the little guy against the powerful.”

While the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists had challenged the authority of a system of theocracy over a thousand years old, Trudeau’s latest cartoon mocks people stockpiling gasoline.

Trudeau’s rant, published in The Atlantic as “The Abuse of Satire”, claims that Charlie had pandered to the Jews while offending Muslims, described Muslims arrested for supporting the attacks as having exercised their freedom of speech, and contended that by, “attacking a powerless, disenfranchised minority with crude, vulgar drawings closer to graffiti than cartoons, Charlie wandered into the realm of hate speech”.

Supporting killing cartoonists for drawing Mohammed is free speech. Drawing Mohammed is hate speech.

That’s certainly a subversive idea, but it subverts such things as Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Religion. It subverts the idea that a cartoonist shouldn’t be killed for challenging a theocracy.

But then what else can an establishment hack denied an administration he can oppose, subvert? When the establishment of the left is in charge, the only things left to subvert are the barriers to the absolute rule of the left.

Dangerous subversives become the destroyers of democracy fighting against free speech absolutists. The dangerous subversive stops dangerously subverting and instead lectures on the appropriate uses of satire. He becomes a commissar who censors with one hand and cartoons with the other.

Real satire exists to challenge the sorts of people who would set out appropriate uses of it. State satire isn’t satire. Soviet cartoonists in Krokodil churning out incessant cartoons of capitalists in top hats being thumped by Communists weren’t satirists. Like Trudeau, they were establishment hacks pimping out propaganda.

Their work was usually more talented than Trudeau’s, but it was just the establishment talking to itself.

The left has adopted “Punching up” and “Punching down” as the legitimate metrics for comedy and satire, but real ‘Punching down’ comes from the establishment. When an establishment satirist like Trudeau attacks satirists who risked their lives challenging a real authority with the power to kill them, what he is really saying is that satire should only serve the ends and agendas of the establishment.

That is the very definition of “Punching down”. When the establishment tells you what satire is supposed to be, then anyone following those rules is punching down.

The entire rhetoric of “Punching up” and “Punching down” limits comedy to a crude Marxist structural pyramid. The left “Punches up” by building alliances with “disenfranchised” groups in order to rule. It then uses them as shields to punch down. Establishment hacks like Trudeau do not refrain from “Punching down” by mocking ordinary Americans who lack their wealth and access to power. They claim that by doing so they’re really punching up on behalf of their disenfranchised shields.

But the model collapses altogether when we consider a segment of the population that believes that everyone must submit to its religion and is willing to back up that demand with lethal force.

Muslims are by no means Trudeau’s “powerless, disenfranchised minority”, but suppose they were. There was a time when the followers of Adolf Hitler were powerless and disenfranchised. Power is not just about the guy who wins an election. It’s also about his shadow who is willing to kill to take over.

Mocking him takes a lot of guts.

It takes no guts to throw another few barbs at Newt Gingrich or Rick Perry for the entertainment of your lefty audience. Not only won’t their followers kill you, but they can’t even disinvite you to any of the better establishment parties. Mocking them is actually a ticket into the cocktail party circuit. It’s as subversive as Mark Russell tinkling away on the piano.

We have a lot of “Punching up” satire in America which is as toothless as that tinkling. We have few satirists willing to mock Obama because that is a ticket out of every single cocktail party ever.

Saturday Night Live could mock every president, but it drew the line at Obama. It occasionally builds jokes around him, but it doesn’t draw an exaggerated ridiculous caricature of him the way that it did of Clinton and Bush. We’ve seen a drunken lecherous Bill Clinton. We’ve seen a drunken numbskull Bush.

There’s been nothing like that on the show for Obama. There can’t be. It would be too dangerous.

There is in fact an easy way to tell whether your satire is really punching up or down. Try it and see what happens. If you run into a gigantic backlash that impacts your career and your safety, then you’re actually punching up. Just ask a rodeo clown out of Missouri who went out wearing an Obama mask and ended having to go into hiding while the Governor, a Senator and the Kansas City Star called for his head. Bans were issued, blacklists were assembled and Obama fans threatened to burn down his house.

That’s what real “Punching up” looks like. Real punching up might mock establishment journalistic awards named after the world’s greatest fake fighter pilot not named Brian Williams.

To comedy cowards like Gary Trudeau that would be the reprehensible antics of free speech fanatics who don’t know that there’s good satire and abuse of satire. They don’t understand that there are jokes that you’re supposed to tell and jokes that you never should. They might draw Mohammed, and then in response to the outrage, draw him again and again.

What do you do with people like that? You shoot them. And when they’re dead, you smear them. Because if you don’t, their courage exposes you for the cowardly hack that you really are.

That’s what real establishment satirists do. Just ask the old dead Soviet cartoonists of Krokodil.

Don’t miss Shillman Fellow Daniel Greenfield on The Glazov Gang discuss The Real Meaning of ‘Allahu Akbar’.

4 Comments

Posted in Cults

Tagged , , , , , , , ,