ISIS wants to lop the head off a Muslim-hating Upper East Side blogger—and the NYPD is taking the terror threat seriously.
“We have been in touch with Pamela Geller,” police spokesman Stephen Davis told The Daily News. “People known to be associated with ISIS have posted a direct threat to her. To whatever extent she will be in New York City, we will do a comprehensive threat assessment to determine what, if any measures, to take.”
“We have to treat it like it’s a direct threat because they named her—and we informed her,” Davis added.
Geller, a right-wing blogger who has been fanning flames since at least 2010, when she financed ads attacking a planned Islamic Community Center near the fallen World Trade Center Towers, has been the target of threats before.
Back on June 9, 2008, she filed an aggravated harassment complaint with the NYPD against a man who she claimed posted menacing videos on her website and who she believed was a threat.
A woman who appeared to be Geller was seen on Wednesday wearing heels, black stretch leggings and large sunglasses as she entered her Upper East Side apartment building. She declined to discuss how she is protecting herself, but sources said she has hired a private security team.
“This threat illustrates the savagery and barbarism of the Islamic State,” Geller said in an email to The News. “They want me dead for violating Sharia blasphemy laws.”
Geller, 55, is in the crosshairs of ISIS for sponsoring the Prophet Muhammad cartoon drawing contest in Texas, where two Islam fanatics were killed over the weekend in a shootout with a cop.
In a posting on the message board JustPasteIt, ISIS said it was sending “all our Lions to achieve her slaughter.”
“Our aim was the khanzeer (swine) Pamela Geller and to show her that we don’t care what land she hides in or what sky shields her,” it said.
“The attack by the Islamic State in America is only the beginning of our efforts to establish a wiliyah in the heart of our enemy,” the message continued, apparently misspelling the Arabic word “wilayah,” which means authority or governance.
This was the first time ISIS claimed credit for a terror attack on U.S. soil. Lawmakers, however, suspect the slain gunmen were inspired by ISIS, not taking orders from them.
Charles Johnson, who inadvertently gave Geller a megaphone in 2005 by allowing her to spew venom on his Little Green Footballs political blog, said “it’s pretty obvious she had been trying to incite this kind of violence.”
“She finally has gotten what she wanted,” Johnson said, when asked if Geller relished being an ISIS target. “She is going to be milking this for all it’s worth.”
Johnson said he doesn’t understand Geller’s “anti-Muslim animus.” He said the one time he met her in person it was the only subject she would talk about.
“I really couldn’t wait to get away from her,” he said. “So obsessive and weird about it. It was hard to talk to her. She must have had something happen to her in the past.”
Muslims were not on Geller’s radar growing up with her sisters in the Five Towns. Her father, who she idolized, was a Democrat. So was her mom.
“He liked me best,” she wrote of her dad on her blog, Atlas Shrugs.
While Geller went to Hebrew school, her parents attended services on the holidays and the subject of Israel (she is a strong defender) rarely came up at the family dinner table, according to various accounts of her early days.
Geller made her first big splash in the right-wing blogosphere in 2006 by videotaping a denunciation of Palestinian terrorists — while dressed in a bathing suit and frolicking in the surf.
But it was Geller’s strident opposition to the so-called Ground Zero mosque and her incessant — and unfounded — claims about President Obama that made her the darling of the anti-Muslim crowd.
Geller’s bid to post ads that read “Killing Jews is worship that draws us close to Allah” on city buses and trains prompted the MTA last month to ban all political advertising.’
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With Sasha Goldstein
