In this blog I seem to have covered many speeches recently by ballsy American females. Can I help it if I like ballsy speakers? – and if they happen to be female so what? America seems to supply plenty. My only caveat is when they become shrill. Today’s speaker is not in the least shrill.

On 19 October, 2011, Pamela Geller spoke to the Sugar Land Tea Party in Sugar Land, Texas. The speech was intended to be at the Hyatt Place; but apparently a single email threatening to hold a protest caused the Hyatt Place to clutch its pearls, pick up its petticoats, and run screaming for cover, forcing the organisers to move to the Sugar Land Community Centre. What was so inflammatory that Geller was intending to voice?  Shall we find out?

You see why I like ballsy speaking? From the moment Geller begins you know that she means what she says: honestly and sincerely she means it. You can disagree with everything she says but you cannot accuse her of falsely representing her views. This is why I keep saying to my trainees that by learning to speak without script or notes, you elevate your credibility beyond measure. By daring to be yourself, warts and all, you are going to be believed more readily than some sort of talking-head avatar, however highly polished might be his oratory. Geller sometimes stumbles over words, sometimes scrambles her syntax in her eagerness to convey her message. So what? I bet you hardly noticed, if at all. That’s what a speaker’s transparent passion does – disguises any slips.

Even if you disagree with her you cannot deny that she shows her workings; therefore to repudiate her you are going to have to come up with some counter-evidence. I have searched a huge amount of online material condemning her, but it is nearly all ad hominem. They play the man not the ball. Why? Could it be that the ball is unplayable?

I could have looked at a later speech of Geller’s, but I chose for this posting to go back nearly five years, so that we may reflect on what has happened since and what has changed in the official line that we hear after each successive Islamist outrage. Here is a Wikipedia page that lists Jihad attacks worldwide since 1983. They make sober reading. Just the list since this speech in October 2011 is very long, and it doesn’t end with the appalling massacre in Orlando a few days ago. Today, 14 June 2016,  there was a double stabbing in France by a man who apparently swore allegiance to Isis.

If the media even bother to cover most of these obscene acts at all they do so in a way that paints the perpetrators as victims.  Who is to blame them as they take their lead from officialdom?

Is President Obama pathologically incapable of allowing the words “Jihad” or “Islamist” to pass his lips? Orlando was blamed on extremism – oh yes, and the availability of guns. Was today’s stabbing in France blamed on the availability of knives?

As Maajid Nawaz of Quilliam said in a debate I covered here some months ago, it’s like Voldemort being a name you may not mention.

We don’t stand a chance against this revolting movement till we are prepared to call a spade a spade. But certain very powerful movements in the west effectively shut down any attempt at free speech on the matter. In the light of the ongoing atrocities, we are compelled to question their motives. These powerful movements need to be held to account.

The truth is become hate speech, and it seems that Pamela Geller speaks it.