Every time I see psychotic, hate-filled anti-Islamic blogger/lunatic Pamela Geller on television I just want to throw up. I find her completely hideous, intellectually vacant, dishonest, and just… fucking repulsive. Yuck. She’s so ugly that seeing her practically ruins my day.

I expect to see the likes of Pamela Geller on Sean Hannity’s program or talking with a simpleton like Mike Huckabee on Fox News, but when she turns up on CNN or the NBC Nightly News, it confers a social legitimacy and integrity on this dangerously anti-social woman who deserves neither. It’s a disgrace to see her anywhere but Fox News. A year ago, Pamela Geller would have been viewed as—and treated like—a skinhead by the legitimate media (i.e. kept at a distance; not “endorsed”) if they’d have talked to her at all. Now the woman who wrote shit like this is ready for fucking prime time? I don’ t think so!

Let’s understand this. CNN won’t touch the birth certificate issue, the Rezko/Auchi corruption, Obama’s anti-semitism, his ACORN/SEIU ties and corruption, and other legitimate stories that need investigation. But they write fiction about Palin. Daily. So why not tell the truth about Obama and his reported strange sexual predilections? My question is, it is well known that Obama allegedly was involved with a crack whore in his youth. Very seedy stuff. Why aren’t they pursuing that story? Find the ho, give her a show! Obama allegedly trafficked in some very deviant practices. Where’s the investigation?

[Geller on Obama’s college trip to Pakistan:] “Back in the early 80’s, there were only two reasons to travel to Pakistan. Jihad or drugs. I think he went for the drugs and came back with jihad.”

Why the hell would anyone with half a brain pay attention to this woman? Here’s a compendium of crazy shit she’s said (like nuking Mecca, Medina, and Tehran) and a Media Matters plea to the media to ostracize this nutball instead of treating her as a credible source.

But there is a little sunshine today, as this hateful harpie is being sued for defamation of character by an attorney named Omar Tarazi. Tarazi represented the parents of Rifqa Bary, a Muslim teenager who, in the words of Little Green Footballs’ Charles Johnson, “converted to Christianity, ran away from home, and found a new home with a radical fundamentalist Christian preacher, Blake Lorenz of the “Global Revolution Church.”

Geller called Tarazi, the lawyer for the parents, a terrorist and claimed he had ties to criminal organizations. Defamation of character suits are often very, very difficult to bring to trial, but perhaps not in this case considering all the demonstrably false and crazy things Geller said about the attorney. Certainly it can be argued that Geller’s misinformed statements of dubious “fact” have had a negative effect on Mr. Tarazi’s professional reputation, community standing and probably his income.

Defamation of character suits can cause the defendant to lose an awful lot of money. This particular flavor of torture—financial—is the entire point, so one way or the other, the party bringing the suit, provided they’ve got a case. is usually the winner, judgement or not. I’m pretty sure looking at this story, that he’s got enough to bring this to a trial and that would be a very difficult situation for Geller to be in. Fucking with a lawyer is probably a bad idea, no matter how you slice it, but in this case, I think she’s really stepped in it. What did Geller expect by putting out so much hateful energy into everyone’s lives? It’s coming back to haunt her. Pamela, baby, may you reap what you sow and—truly, I mean this, girl—get exactly what you deserve:

A Muslim attorney on one side of the Rifqa Bary dispute has filed a $10 million defamation lawsuit against Orlando attorney John Stemberger, an activist Christian attorney who worked for the other side.

The suit was filed by Omar Tarazi in federal court in Columbus, Ohio, Friday. It names John Stemberger of the conservative Florida Family Policy Council.

Also being sued is a blogger from elsewhere, Pamela Oshry, who writes under the name Pamela Geller at the website atlasshrugged2000 and penned scathing anti-Muslim posts after Rifqa ran away from home in July 2009, saying she was afraid her Muslim parents would kill her for converting to Christianity. …

In the suit, Tarazi accuses Stemberger of falsely claiming on Fox News that Tarazi was associated with a Columbus-area mosque that had ties to terrorists. It also says Stemberger defamed Tarazi by saying Rifqa’s parents fired qualified court-appointed Ohio attorneys to use only one – Tarazi – who was paid by a pro-Muslim group in Ohio, the Council on American-Islamic Relations or CAIR.

Tarazi was paid by no one, according to the suit. …

Oshry [Geller] published web posts that falsely said Tarazi had joined Hamas, a Palestinian terrorist organization, and received payments from ” ‘criminal’ organizations with ‘ties’ to terrorists,” according to the suit.

Geller’s co-defendant, Christian lawyer John Stemberger, is apparently under investigation by the Florida Bar for possible ethics violations by him for statements he made during the Rifiqa Bary case.

You piss in the wind, it comes back to hit you in the face.

Via Little Green Footballs

The director in a scene from Nice Bombs…
 
Chicago-based Iraqi director Usama Alshaibi seems to be one of the most prolific Arab filmmakers in the American independent film scene—and he’s almost certainly the most experimental. Working often in close collaboration with his wife Kristie, Alshaibi has jump-started the canon of what we might term transgressive Arab-American film.

In his over 50 short films, Alshaibi has updated the techniques of transgressors like William Burroughs and Kenneth Anger to transmit his obsessions with culture-clash, technology, religion, violence, sexuality and identity. He’s finished four features, two of which deal with porn and STDs, one with cross-cultural relationships and another with the personal reality of post-Saddam Iraq. He has three in production or post-production now, two of which—American Arab and Baghdad, Iowa—portray growing up Arab in the heartland in the in the ‘70s, ‘80s, and today, and the third, Profane, about a Muslim dominatrix in spiritual crisis.

As the news media shamelessly reduces the complex relationship between America and its Arab and Muslim communities into a dopey controversy over where to build a friggin’ cultural center or mosque, we need the perspective and imagination of Alshaibi’s work now more than ever.

Like most hard-working indie filmmakers, Alshaibi can always use financial help making his vision manifest. Click to donate to help him finish Profane or American Arab.
 

 
After the jump, check out a clip from American Arab…
 

 
If you grew up in the Bible Belt during the 70s, 80s and even well into the 90s, there is a very good chance that you have more than a passing familiarity with the hateful, frightening and just plain bizarre “Christian” comics produced by one Jack T. Chick.

Chick’s twisted message, infused with his peculiar style of fervent, the-end-is-near Fundamentalist Christian insanity, by virtue of appearing in what most parents considered to be innocuous “religious” comic books, enjoyed a long period of widespread cultural popularity. Chick tracts were distributed in Sunday schools, summer camps, motel lobbies and bus stations all across America. There have been over 750 million of them sold!

There can only be one reason such deranged literature was allowed in so many places: Adults never read them. If they had, they’d have been utterly horrified. (My own mother gave me dozens of these comics when I was a kid. I’m sure in her mind they were better for me than the Marvel of DC comics I was reading. LIttle did she know that she was actually providing me with!)

Chick’s scary, angry Fundie diatribes have given many a kid terrible nightmares. His favorite topics tend towards subject matter like “You’re going to Hell,” Halloween is evil, eternal damnation, abortion, the Vatican is evil and created Islam, demons walk amongst us, child molesters, the Antichrist will rise soon, New Age beliefs, Judaism, Mormonism and Islam are Satanic, witches are everywhere, homosexuality is an abomination (Chick’s solution? Fire-n-brimstone, baby!), Darwin’s theories are Satanic, Harry Potter is Satanic, feminists are Satanic, the Satanic plot behind rock music (The Beatles were Druids!), “You’re going to Hell,” the Commies are everywhere (Catholics are to blame for this, of course) and just about any other crazy, fucked up conspiracy theory you can think of. He’s kind of the Glenn Beck (or maybe better still Alex Jones) of paranoiac Christian comic books. Did I mention that a lot of his comics were about how YOU (that’s right you, the person reading this) are going to Hell? Chick’s God is a VENGEFUL God. The Old Testament Jehovah has got nothin’ on Chick’s version.
 

 
Not much beyond the basics are known about Chick, who is now 86-years-old. He’s an extremely private man and few photographs have been taken of him. So it’s not like anyone knows about the reclusive Jack T. Chick himself, but show almost anyone in America one of his Chick tracts and they’ll respond with an immediate recognition of the distinctively shaped and wildly deranged mini-comics. For Jack T. Chick, it’s all about saving YOUR soul from eternal damnation, not about being popular.

It wasn’t until 1998 that the first serious examination of the world’s best-read theologian (think about it) appeared and that was in the pages of The Imp a self-published journal of comics criticism from Daniel Raeburn, fashioned via the shape, design and a Daniel Clowes illustration to resemble a Chick tract. I’ve had a copy of this issue of The Imp since it came out, sitting in pride of place on my bookshelf, but it’s now long out of print. Happily Raeburn has put all four issues of his much admired publication online, also including his erudite takes on Daniel Clowes, Chris Ware, and Mexican historietas.

Says Raeburn:

“People who dismiss hate literature offhand are going to miss the point of this tribute to Chick, which is that hate literature reveals not only its own corruption but the sick society that hatched it. Examine the historical and theological forebears of little Chick and you’ll find an awful, and I do mean awful, lot of mainstream beliefs. Like the Protestant zealots who colonized and raped this country, Chick tracts and the violence in them are as American as apple pie.”

 
Above, an episode of Boing Boing TV featuring Syd Garon and Rodney Ascher’s animated take on the Chick “classic” You Goofed.. This is Jack T. Chick in a nutshell. (Reportedly he’s seen this and liked it!)
 
This might be a recent photograph of Jack T. Chick

Huge online compendium of Chick racts

Thank you Taylor Jessen of Burbank, California!

 
“Are you angry that I would make a video such as this to expose racism for what it is?” so asks a man who has just exposed himself to himself. This must be the dumbest thing I’ve seen… all afternoon.

Mind-numbing, cognition destroying, soul-sapping video from Pastor Terry Jones & his Dove World Outreach Center congregation. Depressing to watch. I can’t even get a hard on to mock them, as much as they deserve it.

Jones and his “church” are the folks making plans for “International Burn a Koran Day” on September 11, so more of the same should come as no surprise.

Via Christian Nightmares

 
I will admit to being somewhat crestfallen at the lack of loony-toons wingnuts on parade in all the reporting on the Glenn Beck event over the weekend. Somewhat crestfallen? Who am I kidding? I waited all week long to see a bunch of crazy, ignorant white people with low IQs spouting off on television about things they know nothing of and regurgitating, parrot-style, the predictable tropes and catchphrases that they’d been fed by Fox News, World Net Daily and Rush Limbaugh.

But there was so little of it. What a letdown! The reporting—and what transpired onstage with Beck, Palin, et al—was too bland to even hold my attention. I wanted to see foaming at the mouth nutcases, zany racist signs, people dressed as giant tea bags, in Confederate flag jumpsuits, etc, etc. Perhaps because signs were discouraged, the visuals were lacking, but it sure took all the fun out of the cable new coverage of the event.

But now Chase Whiteside and New Left Media have posted their take on the “Restoring Honor” event and well, it looks to me as if the job the major news channels did has been bested by the “indie” coverage of some students from Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. It’s not like you couldn’t throw a rock the distance of, oh, about 12 inches without hitting an idiot, so how did the mainstream media miss these kooks and ignoramuses?

The story that’s not being examined—but should be—is is how fucking DUMB about a quarter of this country is. It’s not Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin or Ted Nugent or any of the rest of them, who are the story, they’re merely symptoms of the greater problem: 20-25% of the American population are abject idiots. That’s the story I want to see the media tackle.
 

 
Via The Daily What

 
“Try and fail, but don’t fail to try.” That common platitude seems entirely apropos today, on the 92nd anniversary of the attempted assassination of Communist Russian leader Vladimir Lenin by young Fanya Yefimovna “Fanni” Kaplan.

The Ukranian-born Kaplan was born in 1890 to a Jewish family and joined the Socialist Revolutionaries (or Esers) early on in life. At 16, she was busted for her involvement in a terrorist bomb plot and sent to one of Tsar Nicolas II’s Siberian prison for 11 years. Kaplan’s brutal tenure there was cut short after the February Revolution led by Lenin.

But her disillusionment with the leader came hard and fast, as Lenin’s Bolsheviks sought and succeeded to dissolve the elected Constituent Assembly, a key instrument of democracy during the revolution. Lenin’s move in 1917 to put all power in the hands of the workers councils—or Soviets—convinced Kaplan to take matters into her own hands.

As portrayed in the clip below from Mikhail Romm’s 1939 propaganda film Lenin in 1918, Kaplan got three or so shots off after the leader spoke at a Moscow factory. Lenin, who was 48 years old at the time, was hit in the shoulder and jaw—he survived, but the injuries were thought to contribute to his death by stroke 6 years later.

Fanny was shot dead five days after the attempt at age 28, and within a few hours the Red Terror—a four-year program of mass arrest and execution of counterrevolutionary enemies of the state—had begun.
 

 
Why is it that no one on the Right can make a decent political documentary? Name one (serious) contender for the title “Michael Moore of the Right.” You can’t because that person doesn’t exist. Are conservatives congenitally incapable of constructing a coherent and convincing narrative in documentary form? Something that might actually sway some people their way? Or is their philosophy just so bankrupt that it falls apart onscreen and screams false to our bullshit detectors? Or is their stuff just boring? The main reason that Hollywood is dominated by Liberals is because conservatives tend to be not very entertaining. (Hollywood even tolerated Mel Gibson up to a point because he made money. He’s one of the few conservatives to do so in recent memory).

Ask almost anyone and you’ll hear, “Communism is dead! The Berlin Wall came down.” And though the word communism isn’t used anymore, this film will show the ideas behind it are alive and well. 
Join Bowers for a fascinating look at the people and groups that have successfully targeted America’s morality and freedom in their effort to grind America down. It’s not just another conspiracy theory. It’s a well documented agenda. 



I’m Curtis Bowers and I made this film because I hoped that once you saw the facts you would realize what I did after researching this topic… what has happened to America hasn’t been an accident. Now is the time to get involved before the “Left” accomplishes their goal of destroying the greatest country in ALL world history!

Remind of why the Left is out to destroy America, again?

This filmmaker behind AGENDA: Grinding America Down, Idaho legislator Curtis Bowers, comes off as an earnest, but extremely unhip, Republican weenie beating the same old dead horse John Birch Society conspiracy theories that no one takes seriously anymore. I mean, how could anyone really expect a person under the age of 50 to know who Alger Hiss was or care what anyone has to say about him, or Joseph McCarthy, for that matter. in 2010? Phyllis Schlafly might care (she’s interviewed in AGENDA: Grinding America Down) but she’s nearly ninety. And a crackpot.

This trailer is almost not insane for the first five minutes and then all of a sudden it weirds out until the end like a demented action flick. Without any action. Or point.

 

 
A man photographed at Glenn Beckstock. Via Little Green Footballs
 

 
And here’s another “patriot,” this one via Gawker.

 
Brick Stone rules! This is hilarious!

 
Warning: this ad is toxic.

Created by the German advertising agency Zeitsprung, this extremely nasty public service announcement depicts HIV in the form of a body modification artist. Yeah, guys with tattoos and earrings and bumps on their heads should be avoided at all costs when it comes to hugs. They might be HIV positive. But big white cuddly bears are okay. You already knew that, right?

Since when has HIV been transmitted through hugging?

The ad is worthless, or at best confusing, as information and propagates an ugly stereotype about people who look different than the average guy on the street.

The message to wear condoms gets lost in the ad’s horror movie shock effect.