Pamela Geller believes America is at war.Specialized Cycling
Not a figurative one or an ideological one, but a literal one that
calls for guns and missiles and planes and tanks and troops.Men's Tremblant Jacket
One that has and will cause the deaths of innocents, of men, women, children, and, eventually, of nations.
She believes we are in a worldwide war between good and evil itself. She believes we are losing.Castelli Cycling
She
believes, truly believes, that this evil—Islam—is upon our shores and
that the time it takes for Islam to overrun what she calls the greatest
country in the history of mankind can be measured not in decades or
years but in months. She believes the re-election of President Barack
Obama on November 6 has all but assured it.
Geller, 54, one of
the most polarizing women in the country, is but a foot soldier in this
war—a cog, but a large one that grows larger every day. When I meet
her at an upscale coffee shop blocks away from her tony midtown
apartment, she is in full combat gear.
"You're a kid!" she
cries when I reach out to shake her hand. Her Long Island accent, thick
from her childhood, is distracting from the start. I'm not a kid, but I
decide it doesn't matter, because she's absolutely giddy. Geller's
mouth is parted in a silent laugh, and she raises both of her hands
like she doesn't know whether to hug me or touch my face. I feel like a
baby Labrador. It's not a terrible feeling.
We buy coffee and take a table near the back of the shop.
There's
a reason why Pamela Geller's name is almost invariably preceded by
"The Beautiful" at her speaking events. Today, she's wearing a chic
leather jacket over a form-fitting black turtleneck, and her trademark
diamond-encrusted "Love" charm is hanging from a necklace. She's
wearing loose curls, tawny locks falling over her shoulder. It's almost
December, and even though she posts 10 to 15 times a day from home on
her wildly successful blog, atlasshrugs2000.com, her golden skin is
still sun-kissed, and her large light-brown eyes peer from behind
impossible eyelashes that rest upon her sculpted cheekbones whenever she
blinks or winks or bats her eyes at the kid 30 years her junior.
When
she speaks, she does so passionately, leaning in and lowering her
voice, then pushing back in her chair and pointing with both hands. She
never breaks eye contact, even to take a sip from her
lip-gloss-smudged coffee lid. When we agree on a point or I amuse her
with a quip or turn of phrase, she applauds. She's charming, magnetic
even. I decide I like her, and then I decide that I hope she likes me.
She's
viewed by "leftists," as she calls her critics, as a monster, the
animalistic id of the racist, paranoid right, a supremacist leader of
arguably the most extreme wing in the Tea Party, who knowingly interacts
with bigots and xenophobes. She's the face, literally, of the Southern
Poverty Law Center's national anti-Muslim hate-group page. Of the six
New York City anti-Muslim groups listed on the page, she founded three
of them herself (Stop the Islamization of America, the American Freedom
Defense Initiative, and her blog, Atlas Shrugs). Most recently, she
has drawn ire for a series of public-transit ads she has run in New
York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. Most read: "In any
war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized
man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad."
Geller fights her war on
two fronts. The first is against Islam itself, which she calls "the
most radical and extreme ideology on the face of the earth." The second
is against Barack Obama. Geller, a secular Jew, is a pro-choice,
pro-marriage-equality Manhattanite raised by liberal parents. But when
it comes to the president, Geller holds nothing back. She has devoted
the past four years of her life to fighting his re-election, because
the war is already here, and we've already lost if the most powerful
man on the planet is, as she calls him, "an Islamophiliac": a lover of
Islam.
She helped launch the birther movement before the
president was even elected. And in a 2009 blog post, she wrote that
Obama had slept with a crack whore and posted nude photos of Obama's
mother, supposedly taken in 1960 by alleged black communist Frank
Marshall Davis. They turned out to be fakes. Keith Olbermann has twice
named her Worst Person in the World. In 2010, she led protests against
the Islamic community center near Ground Zero and published a book with
her openly anti-Muslim partner in crime, Robert Spencer, calledSKY Cycling
The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration's War on
America. She stops short of calling Obama a Muslim in public, though
she tells me, "He clearly favors Islam."
Looking at her now, though, she doesn't seem like a monster. I know it's all for show,SAXO BANK Cycling
of course, her beauty and her charm. They're her main weapons in the
war, along with her website, and how she has been able to navigate and
thrive in the far-right, old-white-man-dominated world of the Tea Party
and the American anti-Islam movement. When you're a symbol,
appearances matter. And her very appearance, the fact that someone like
her—a pretty, secular, socially liberal New Yorker—would be on the
front lines of the war, adds credibility to the cause.