I do not care what Pamela Geller thinks about Islam, or about anything else. I do not care whether Geller is a bigot or a freedom fighter. I do not care whether she is right or wrong. I do not care whether she shares or loathes my politics, whether she is theologically ignorant or religiously sound, whether she is a cynical self-promoter or an earnest team player. I do not care whether she is rude or merely blunt. I do not care whether she is selfish or kind. I do not care what is in the deepest recesses of her heart. I care only that, on a Sunday evening in May, in Garland, Texas, two extraordinarily illiberal people hoped to fire bullets into her body until she was dead, and that they intended to do this as a punishment for her blasphemy. Everything besides this fact is irrelevant to me. What matters is that she was shot at for speaking, and that this is a bloody disgrace.
Up until now, I have included in all of my defenses of free speech a preamble in which I have explained what I personally thought of the person I was defending. But having watched the manner in which such qualifications have been used during l’affaire Geller, I shall henceforth do no such thing. Instead, I shall briefly establish that my personal views about a person’s character or cause cannot possibly matter one whit in such a case, and then I shall move on to the only important question at hand — which is whether we are to live as free men, at liberty to speak as we wish, or whether we are to self-censor in the hope that the crocodiles will spare us.
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