Watchdog lists anti-Islamic blogger's organization as hate group

Blogger Pamela Geller was at the center of a long-running controversy last summer when she helped ignite a firestorm of protest against the establishment of an Islamic cultural center a few blocks away from the former site of the World Trade Center.

Now her Stop the Islamicization of America has been listed as an anti-Muslim hate group in the Southern Poverty Law Center's annual roundup of extremist organizations, alongside Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan.

As described at the website of another one of her projects, Freedom Defense Initiative, Geller "is the founder and publisher of the acclaimed news and commentary blog AtlasShrugs.com. She is also a regular columnist for Andrew Breitbart's Big Government and Big Journalism, as well as for Newsmax. Geller is the author (with Robert Spencer) of the soon-to-be-released book, The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration's War on America (foreword by Ambassador John Bolton).

But one blogger's roundup of Geller's greatest hits is not so flattering. "What do you get when you combine the most outlandish gaffes of Anne Coulter, the most awkward monologues of Sarah Palin, the senility of the crazy McCain Lady, filter any remaining logic out of it and give it a keyboard in the Bronx?" Loonwatch asked. "The answer is the looniest blogger ever: Pamela Geller ... Pam has the distinction of being the originator and pusher of some of the most vile and obscene conspiracy theories on the internet."

Among her other conspiracy theories, Geller promoted the claim that Barack Obama went to Pakistan in the 1980's to buy drugs but came back as a committed jihadist and that he is the illegitimate son of Malcolm X.

Geller responded to her designation as a hate group by insisting that her organization is actually "a human rights group" and charging that the "uber left" SPLC has "failed to address the greatest threat to our national security."

"And these people are taken seriously?" Geller asked "This is the morally inverted state of the world."