“… this rally, on this very tragic day for Americans, but most tragic for those who lost their families, to use it and abuse it as a platform for bigotry, is not only tragic, it’s un-American”.

In an interview with Adam Serwer at The Plum Line blog, Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League condemns the SIOA’s “Ground Zero mosque” demonstration on 11 September. Foxman is particularly angry that Geert Wilders will be speaking at the rally and says of Pamela Geller that “part of her agenda is to help garner support for Wilders, who is a bigot, who has a long record of anti-Muslim bigotry”.

Foxman notes that the SIOA protest is part of “a campaign which is in many places directed against building mosques” and which he says exemplifies “the anti-Muslim bigotry that exists in this country”. Foxman observes that this is nothing new:

“Part of the landscape, unfortunately, of America is that we’re not immune to bigotry, to racism, to anti-Semitism. And part of what’s out there is a bigotry to immigrants. Jews experienced it, Irish experienced it. Part of our history is there was opposition to building Catholic churches and Jewish synagogues. Now there’s opposition to build mosques.”

In response, Geller denounces Foxman – director of one of the leading Jewish organisations in the US – as a “groveling, simpering lapdog panting to jihadists”.

But this is par for the course with Geller. In an interview with Jamie Glazov of FrontPage Magazine last December, after the Community Security Trust warned the Jewish community against supporting a Stop Islamisation of Europe protest against a new mosque in Harrow, she accused the CST of “aiding and abetting Islamic jihad and Islamic anti-Semitism”.