Soon after an event she hosted in Texas was targeted by Islamic extremists, anti-Muslim activist Pamela Geller compared herself to Rosa Parks. Now, some of her allies are comparing her to Martin Luther King, Jr., including, reportedly, one Tea Party activist who previously made headlines for suggesting that he didn’t want black people to vote.
In an interview with Indianapolis talk radio host Greg Garrison yesterday, the Center for Security Policy’s Frank Gaffney recalled attending a Tea Party event in Dallas the night before where Ken Emanuelson, a Tea Party activist who is an advisor to Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, compared the attack on Geller’s event to the civil rights march that King led in Selma.
Greg, I was in a Tea Party meeting in Dallas last night, and a guy who was in the room in Garland, Texas, gave a rather chilling account of what happened. And he made an observation at the end of it that I think is directly relevant to how we all should be thinking about this.
You know, there’s been much made of late, particularly thanks to a bestselling movie on the subject of Martin Luther King’s experiences and leadership in Selma, Alabama. And this fellow, Ken Emanuelson, said, ‘You know, this is our Selma. This is a moment when people are telling us we can’t do the right thing, and we have to go right at it and do it, do exactly the right thing. Because if we allow our freedom of speech to be taken away from us, that isn’t the end of it, that’s the beginning.’
This is an interesting comparison coming from Emanuelson, who made headlines a couple of years ago for telling a Texas GOP gathering that “the Republican Party doesn’t want black people to vote if they are going to vote 9-to-1 for Democrats.”
Later in the interview, Gaffney told Garrison that any attempts at “multiculturalism or diversity sensitivity” will just invite “jihad, and the violent kind at that”:
We shouldn’t be under any illusion, that whatever we call this conduct of ours, we follow whatever the smart people are telling us, we engage in political correctness or multiculturalism or diversity sensitivity. The enemy has another name for it. They call it ‘submission.’ And under their doctrine, the Sharia program, the Koran and so on, they are hardwired to respond to submissive behavior on the part of infidels with what? With violence, with more violence. You must make them feel subdued, the Koran says.
So far from making this go away or letting us all be friends or kumbaya or whatever you want to call it, this actually is an exhortation — that’s not how we think of it, but that’s how they see it — an exhortation to redouble the jihad, and the violent kind at that.
