What makes Geller’s ads so troubling is not simply that they are juvenile and intellectually dishonest but that they dehumanize Muslims. In fact, they could even incite bigots to lash out against our fellow Americans.
In a column this morning over at the New York Daily News, Rajdeep Singh addresses Pamela Geller’s latest desperate attempt to stoke fear and smear Muslims in America. In this moving post, Singh writes as a Sikh man who says his “family owes its very survival to the tolerance of Muslims.”
He says: “What makes Geller’s ads so troubling is not simply that they are juvenile and intellectually dishonest but that they dehumanize Muslims. In fact, they could even incite bigots to lash out against our fellow Americans.”
He goes on to list recent incidents hate-fueled incidents in his city, including a violent threat earlier this month to a prominent Arab-American civil rights activist who wears a headscarf, physical assaults on three turbaned Sikh men in the last year and the 2012 killing of a Hindu man by an attacker who declared she hated Muslims and Hindus.
He writes: “The First Amendment protects Geller’s right to be obnoxious, but she should be shamed for trying to combat anti-American extremists by publicly stereotyping entire groups of people and creating a climate of fear that could endanger the lives of innocent people.”
Read the full article here at the New York Daily News.
Rajdeep Singh is director of law and policy at the Sikh Coalition.