It’s an ongoing puzzle: Salon, which routinely excoriates Pamela Geller and me as “bigoted” “Islamophobes,” even more frequently allows Atlantic writer Jeffrey Tayler to tell the unpopular and unwelcome truths that Salon otherwise lambastes us for telling; see, for example, here and here. One can only speculate as to the provenance of this editorial inconsistency. Do Salon’s publishers owe Tayler some huge sum of money? Did he catch them with their fingers in the till? Has Tayler tied their daughters to the railroad tracks?
I am not seriously suggesting that either Tayler or Salon is engaged in blackmail or any other illegal activities. But it is a head-scratcher: why — for several years now — does Salon allow this single writer to go against the editorial stance it manifests in every other article it publishes on these issues?
In any case, this is another thoughtful and well-reasoned piece from Tayler. One wonders if any of the Salon-reading lemmings will take heed.
“The left has Islam all wrong: Bill Maher, Pamela Geller and the reality progressives must face,” by Jeffrey Tayler, Salon, May 10, 2015:
Whatever her views on other matters are, Pamela Geller is right about one thing: last week’s Islamist assault on the “Draw Muhammad” cartoon contest she hosted in Texas proves the jihad against freedom of expression has opened a front in the United States. “There is,” she said, “a war on free speech and this violent attack is a harbinger of things to come.” Apparently undaunted, Geller promises to continue with such “freedom of speech” events. ISIS is now threatening to assassinate her. She and her cohorts came close to becoming victims, yet some in the media on the right and the center-right have essentially blamed her for the gunmen’s attack, just as far too many, last January, surreptitiously pardoned the Kouachi brothers and, with consummate perfidy to human decency, inculpated the satirical cartoonists they slaughtered, saying “Charlie Hebdo asked for it.”