Details are still coming in on the reported shooting at a Muhammed cartoon contest being held in suburban Dallas by Pamela Geller’s anti-Islam group American Freedom Defense Initiative.
The Dallas Morning News is reporting that two gunmen were killed by police:
Two gunmen opened fire Sunday evening outside a contest for cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad at Garland ISD’s Curtis Culwell Center, police said.
The two men pulled up in a vehicle and shot a Garland ISD officer. The men were fatally shot by Garland police, and their bodies remain on the street outside the events center.
The security officer’s wounds were not believed to be life-threatening, but he had been hospitalized.
Many TPM readers first encountered Geller in the mid-2000s at her blog Atlas Shrugs, which combined uber-conservatism with cheesecake photos of herself. She has veered in recent years into an evermore virulent form of anti-Islamic activism. She was a leading rabble-rouser in the Ground Zero mosque controversy, and her group had plastered some big city subways with a posters that read: “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad.” She and Robert Spencer, who co-founded American Freedom Defense Initiative with her, were denied entry to the United Kingdom in 2013 because of their extremism.
The American Freedom Defense Initiative was apparently co-sponsoring the provocative Muhammed cartoon contest with Spencer’s Jihad Watch. Spencer wrote that the purpose of the sold-out event was “to stand for the freedom of speech and free society against violent intimidation.”
It’s not clear whether Geller was in attendance at the contest, but writing on her website after the shooting, she said: “This is a war. This is war on free speech. What are we going to do? Are we going to surrender to these monsters? … The war is here.”
