Over at Atlas Shrugs, Pamela Geller has posted a response to the latest "Muslim patrol" video to appear on YouTube. "For years now," Geller pontificates, "Leftists and assorted 'anti-racists' have been denying the existence of these Sharia patrols...." It is of course true that we deny their existence, but that is for the simple reason that they don't really exist.

You'll see that the new video contains no actual patrolling at all. In contrast to the two previous videos the two-man, self-appointed "Muslim patrol" doesn't even approach anyone on the street, still less harass them. The video just features a lot of loud-mouthed ranting to camera, with a middle section showing an apparently drunken man nodding off on a bench, accompanied by a disapproving commentary.

As existential threats to western civilisation go, you'd have to say this one isn't particularly scary.

More significant, however, is that Geller crossposts, with evident approval, an article from another Islamophobic blog called The Muslim Issue commenting on the video. It reads in part:

If a government wants to learn how to manage growing Islamic problems, take some advice from Ottoman army officer Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Atatürk abolished Islam by putting a complete ban on Islamic materials, demolishing mosques, and removing any traces of Islam in his country to get rid of the evil. Those who tried to revolt were put in their place, or basically killed....

It is time for the UK to stop wasting their military abroad, but bring them to patrol their own streets and begin to remove Muslims. And it is vital time to plan and arrange deportation programs – and even arrange new deportation programs for practicing Muslims born in England to be deported to their parent's country of origin.

This goes way beyond anything that even the English Defence League or the British National Party would officially support. They are the sort of policies advocated by the most extreme neo-Nazi elements of the far right in the UK. Are US Republican Party organisations and mainstream media outlets going to continue providing a platform for a woman who posts material like this on her blog?

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Last weekend, the Dutch Islamphobic politician Geert Wilders spoke to a conservative conference hosted by a Christian university in Colorado. The anti-Muslim firebrand served up his usual fare: Islam is not a religion but a "totalitarian ideology," multiculturalism must be stopped, U.S. courts must end immigration from Muslim countries and mosque construction must be banned.

According to a report on the event in the Colorado Statesman, conservatives at the conference took Wilders's words to heart, as well as those of fellow anti-Muslim conspiracy theorist Frank Gaffney.

Former Republican State Senate president John Andrews, who heads up an institute at the university that held the event, told the crowd, "After you hear from Frank Gaffney and our friend from across the Atlantic, Geert Wilders, you'll know why I just say 'the threat of Islam'" – as opposed to "radical Islam" or "extremism."

Current Republican State Senator Kevin Grantham took on Wilders's message that the West "should forbid the construction of new mosques." Asked about the proposed ban, Grantham told the Statesman he was for considering it:

You know, we'd have to hear more on that, because, as he said, mosques are not churches like we would think of churches. They think of mosques more as a foothold into a society, as a foothold into a community, more in the cultural and in the nationalistic sense. Our churches – we don't feel that way, they're places of worship, and mosques are simply not that, and we need to take that into account when approving construction of those.

Think Progress, 6 July 2012

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