Document text
Few are as capable of such venomous anti-Muslim sentiment as John Joseph Jay, a comrade in arms with Pamela Geller and a board member of the anti-Muslim group Stop the Islamization of America (SIOA). Where others stop short of calling for violence, Jay bounds ever forward.
That was the case last week as Jay, who does not use capital letters or common punctuation in his writings, used his blog “summer patriot, winter soldier” to post a miniature manifesto ominously titled “start the revolution.” In stark and bombastic terms, Jay assailed the left for its multicultural tolerance of Muslims and proposed a host of violent solutions.
He called for the burning of every mosque in America and “tak[ing] out incumbent leadership of both parties in the congress.” He also endorsed immediately deporting every Muslim in America and burning the New York Times , the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post .
“First things first,” he wrote at the beginning of his four-point plan:
When not running his website, Jay is an SIOA board member and one of the founding members of the American Freedom Defense Initiative, an SIO sister organization. Geller and Jay were both profiled in the Summer 2011 issue of the Intelligence Report as two of the country’s leading purveyors of anti-Muslim sentiment.
In recent months, Jay’s writings have largely focused on defending Geller from attacks. In the days after posting his manifesto, for example, Jay accused those who have tried to “tar pamela geller [sic] by her association with me” as being “utterly transparent.” Geller, he wrote, “speaks and writes the truth, and she advocate [sic] it without apology or concession (to this sort of hysterical pap), and advocates to benefit those who do good in this evil old world.”
Such worries about how some might see Geller are understandable. Geller was among the American Islamophobes admired by the terrorist Anders Breivik, who on July 22 killed 77 people, mostly teens, during a violent rampage in Norway. In his 1,500-page manifesto, titled “2083: A European Declaration of independence,” Breivik cited the writings of Geller and Robert Spencer, who runs SOIA with her, dozens of times.
Instead of distancing himself from such associations, Jay seems to have embraced the violence in his own rhetoric. “the secret is out. this is what this blog has always been about,” he wrote just days after his Sept. 26 post. “my efforts have been to establish a coherent theory in support of the individual’s right to exercise self defense against the aggressions and attacks of islam.”
Self-defense? As a post-script to his original manifesto, Jay called for a brutal end to many, many more:
“burn the editors and contributors to ‘the daily kos’ at the stake. i'll think of something suitable for hilary [sic] clinton,” he wrote. “and, throw all the living governors of new york, california, ohio, illinois, washington, florida and massachusetts into the fiery pits, from which there is no escape.”
Hyperbole? Maybe. But after this summer’s bloodbath in Norway, the most rabid Islamophobes should be careful about suggestions of violence.