[A]nti-Muslim blogger Pamela Geller posted a report from the website “SuperStation95” about a group of armed Muslim campers “shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’” and “open[ing] fire on hikers,” lamenting that “of course there has been no reporting from the enemedia on this.”…. Geller’s fans at WorldNetDaily and BareNakedIslam also ran with the story, as did radio host Michael Savage, who told his listeners that the media is refusing to report on the “twenty Mooslims with guns in the hills above San Bernardino in one of California’s forests who were doing a little target practice while chanting ‘Allahu Akbar.’” Savage claimed that the campers were only released by law enforcement agents “because they hadn’t yet killed Jewish children.”…. However, as the myth-busting website Snopes pointed out, there is no evidence that the campers were firing at anybody or shouting “Allahu Akbar,” noting that the “sources” for these conservative pundits were nothing but fringe conspiracy outlets.
Normally, I couldn’t care less what Pamela Geller and Michael Savage think or have to say about anything. I generally file these two ugly, hate-addled personalities under “People you wouldn’t piss on if they were en fuego” and forget about them. Neither are worth wasting my beautiful mind on (apologies to Barbara Bush), and I seldom see any reason to acknowledge their virulent Islamophobia and hatred towards anything and everything not like them and/or anyone who doesn’t think like them. Both are to human kindness what Timothy McVeigh was to nonviolent conflict resolution.
What amuses me about this story is that both Geller and Savage are so in thrall to their all-consuming hatred of all things Muslim that they’d fall for an apparently invented story without doing even the barest minimum of fact-checking. Then again, neither troll deals in the realm facts or truth. Why should they when their career arcs are dependent upon stoking the unchecked passion, prejudice, and rage of stupid low-information Americans inclined to believe the worst whenever the code words “Muslim” or “Islam” are invoked?
After all, as ANY good, God-fearing, Conservative, White, Christian American patriot KNOWS, ALL Muslims are terrorists dedicated to waging jihad and merely awaiting instructions to go forth and kill innocent, peace-loving Americans…amiright???
“[T]wenty Mooslims with guns in the hills above San Bernardino in one of California’s forests who were doing a little target practice while chanting ‘Allahu Akbar.’” Sounds ominous, right? Terrorists (Of course…THEY’RE MUSLIM!!!) shooting off guns like good ol’ boys? Of course someone called the police…what freedom-loving patriot wouldn’t…which means there’s a police report that Gellar and Savage could have checked. If they’d done that, they would have discovered that the 20 “terrorists in training” weren’t any more than 20 guys with guns.
As the official incident report stated, no one in the area questioned by police said they had witnessed guns being fired nor reported having been fired upon. Police found and interviewed the group of men in question and discovered that their possession of firearms was in compliance with the law and that none of them had any outstanding warrants or criminal histories. While the caller who reported the men to police claimed five to seven of the men wore turbans and fired assault rifles, police didn’t mention turbans or other headwear, and they noted that the men were in possession of “handguns, a rifle, and a shotgun” (but no “assault rifles”). No credible news reports made any mention of the “Allahu Akbar” claim, and no witnesses stated they had been “shot at” by the men while hiking or camping. Also, the police report described the men only as “males,” not “Middle Eastern males” or “Muslim males.”
I can think of nothing that could better illustrate the astonishing degree of moral bankruptcy Gellar and Savage have in common than this sorry saga. Instead of doing even the barest minimum of due diligence to verify the veracity (or lack of same) of this story, they ran with the “facts” that support their penchant for calumny and demonization. Turns out it wasn’t true at all, at least so far as the police could determine…not that “the truth” matters at all to inveterate demagagoues like Gellar and Savage. Why would anyone so heavily invested in hatred and Islamophobia as Gellar and Savage let the truth get in the way of a perfectly good Two-Minute Hate?
It might be easier to take these two oversized balls of hate seriously if they could be bothered to be certain they have the facts on their side before departing from reality. Instead, they exist in a fantasy world where all Muslims are freedom-hating zealots lying in wait for the order to kill good, God-fearing, Christian American patriots.
If you can’t be bothered to traffic in truth and fact, you can’t credibly claim to be surprised when reasonable, rational people laugh you off as some sort of half-baked, hate-addled crackpot with no heart or soul and even less capacity for human kindness.
