When two jihadis attacked a free-speech event in Texas earlier this month, wounding a security guard before they were killed by police, the Washington Post called Pamela Geller, one of the sponsors of the event, the "incendiary organizer."
The paper described Geller's actions as legitimately within the First Amendment but still "cruel and unfair."
Billionaire Donald Trump slammed her for "taunting" radical Muslims by holding a competition to draw a cartoon of Islam's founder.
And Katie Pavlich at Townhall reported that radical imam Anjem Choudary justified a call for Geller's death.
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"This woman wants to draw cartoons, or have people draw cartoons, knowing full well this carries the death penalty in Islam so definitely she's asking for an attack. The fact is you insulted the prophet Muhammad … and you knew the consequences," Choudary said.
The New York Times editorial page even denied her event was done on behalf of freedom of speech.
But longtime country music icon and frequent political commentator Charlie Daniels said such criticisms were missing the point.
"Is America to walk on egg shells in practicing our constitutional rights from now on, observing strict rules of political correctness in a fruitless effort to placate the sensibilities of people who hack the heads off Christians and kidnap children for sex slaves?" he wrote in a commentary on his band's website.
"No other group in the history of America has been granted immunity from criticism or even ridicule for that matter, and one has to look no farther than the TV shows and art exhibits to find mocking of God and belittling of those who follow Him.
"Yet, if followers of Christ went and shot up Bill Maher's show or bombed the exhibition of a photo of a crucifix in a jar of the artist's urine, I wonder if the critics would be so quick to condemn TV and museums for being the catalyst," he said.
"The point being that these radicals don't have to be provoked by some special event or what they perceive as being an insult to their faith to kill innocent American citizens," he said. "People, let's face some cold, hard facts here. Radical Islam hates anybody who disagrees with them and their ultimate goal is to destroy every human who breathes, who will not convert to Islam and it doesn't take a derogatory cartoon or a negative word about their faith to provoke them.
"They live in a perpetual state of provocation and it's not incident but opportunity that sets them off and the more solace they can get from the 'kill the messenger' crowd and a president who can't even bring himself to call them radical Islamic terrorists the bolder they will become and if every federal agency, local law enforcement, intelligence agency and every other entity charged with protecting America is not focused and fine tuned to root out and destroy the terrorist networks in America, we are in for a mass blood letting on the streets of our nation."
WND columnist Dennis Prager noted earlier that criticism of Geller's Muhammad cartoon event derives from several factors.
"The left hates those who confront evil," he wrote. "This is a defining characteristic of the American left. That is why the left loathed President Ronald Reagan for labeling the Soviet Union an 'evil empire': He judged and confronted communism, the greatest evil in the world after World War II.
"Today, the world's greatest evil is Islamism (the movement to impose Islam and its Shariah on society). Just as the left loathed anti-Communists, it loathes anti-Islamists, chief among whom is [Benjamin] Netanyahu, the prime minister of the country that the Islamists most hate, the country that most confronts violent Islam – and not coincidentally the country the international left most hates."
He also cited moral confusion.
"Geller and her group are widely labeled as 'haters' and 'Islamophobes' for caricaturing Muhammad. But the highly successful producers of the hit Broadway show that mocks Mormonism, 'The Book of Mormon,' are not labeled 'haters,' let alone 'Mormonphobes.' Similarly, the 'artist' who created 'Pi– Christ,' the infamous photograph of a crucifix in a jar of his urine, is also not labeled a hater or a 'Christianophobe.'
"Why is that? Because neither Christianity nor Mormonism produces evil that needs to be fought. The Muslim world, however, is producing tens of thousands of murderers and millions more sympathizers; and those who criticize Islam and confront Islamism are hated because those who don't fight evil hate those who do."
Another WND columnist, Mychal Massie, said Geller "should be applauded for what her Muhammad cartoon contest accomplished."
"She was singularly responsible for drawing Muslim cockroaches out of the shadows where they multiply and eventually overrun a property based on their reproductive rates and difficulty to eradicate. Her cartoon contest turned out to be the exact pie crumbs needed to draw them from their hiding place in the shadows for purposes of extermination," he wrote.
"Furthermore, Pam Geller proved unequivocally that the Obama administration is made up of pernicious liars led by the chief of liars – Obama himself. We were told there was no need to fear ISIS. We were told Obama had everything under control and that there was nothing ISIS could do that he and his Muslim-stacked administration could not protect us from. Obama and his bureau of agitprop, i.e., the mainstream media, also assured us it was only the radical Muslims who were guilty of this type of murderous behavior."
He winner of the Garland contest, Bosch Fawstin, told WND the attack won't deter his work as a graphic novelist and artist to expose Islam as an "evil" political and ideological movement.
It was his work and others that apparently drew the attention of the infamously brutal, self-proclaimed Islamic State, or ISIS, which has seized large portions of Syria and Iraq in the centuries-old cause of bringing the entire world under the submission of Islam. Responding to a call to "avenge the prophet," Phoenix residents Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi of Phoenix traveled to Garland, where they were shot and killed by police after opening fire with assault rifles in an apparent attempt to get into the building.
The event was hosted by the American Freedom Defense Initiative, co-founded by Geller and Robert Spencer. Geller said she now must travel with security, with ISIS naming her in a threat posted on one of its affiliated websites.