May 5, 2015 3 min read

In some news stories, the good guys and bad guys are pretty clear-cut. It’s hard to muster much sympathy for, say, the barbarians in ISIS laying waste to parts of Syria or Iraq, and it’s natural to feel for people whose lives were upended because of a natural disaster and the samaritans who are swooping in to provide aid and comfort.

But the shooting that happened Sunday night in Garland, Texas, outside an event sponsored by a virulently anti-Muslim organization where folks were asked to draw cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad – and, one presumes, render him in less than flattering ways – is one of those stories where it’s hard to find anyone deserving of much sympathy at all. When it comes down to it, this was a couple of detestable extremists feeding off another group of extremists, who are no slouches themselves when it comes to being unsavory, and the whole thing ended in gunfire and death.

To recap, a group fronted by Pamela Geller, a onetime Long Island housewife who, over the last decade, made a name for herself by spewing vicious hatred of all things having to do with Islam, put together a “contest” at a conference center Sunday night for people to create “art” depicting Muhammad. In Islam, making any kind of image of Muhammad is considered blasphemous, and the group’s “contest” was meant to be provocative.

However, rather than ignoring Geller and her merry band of bigots, as mainstream Muslim groups urged their members to do, a couple of young men from Phoenix, Ariz., who are thought to have had sympathies with jihadist groups, took the bait. They made their way to the extravaganza with guns and wounded a security guard before police arrived and killed them.

It was certainly within the free-speech rights of Geller and those who follow her to hold their event, just as it’s lawful for a handful of ragtag members of the Ku Klux Klan to come out from under the rocks they inhabit and hold rallies on courthouse steps. But the shooting Sunday night should not provide oxygen for the likes of Geller and others who seek to gin up hatred of Muslims based on distortions and exaggerations. It should be pointed out Geller’s organization has been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which notes she “mingled comfortably with European racists and fascists, spoken favorably of South African racists, defended Serbian war criminal Radovan Karadzic, and denied the existence of Serbian concentration camps.”

Josh Marshall of the Talking Points Memo website put it well when he said “political violence is the greatest corrosive of free and ordered societies,” while, at the same time, “Pam Geller is a cancerous presence in the U.S. political conversation” and her organization is still a hate group.

The notion Islam in its totality is violent and driven to put us all under the yoke of Sharia law is refuted daily by the overwhelming majority of Muslims across the globe who do their jobs, raise their families and practice their faith quietly, just as the majority of Christians, Jews and practitioners of other faiths do.

Alas, Geller and her fellow Islamophobes will continue to flail away and try to convince people otherwise. The next time they host one of these “contests,” we hope they are allowed to peacefully marinate in their own hate and are ignored by everyone else.

Nothing would bother them more.