Pamela Geller’s group, the American Freedom Defense Initiative, sponsored the contest and billed it as an exercise in free speech, which it said is under attack by radical Islamists like those who attacked French magazine Charlie Hebdo in January.
“Geller has promulgated some of the most bizarre conspiracy theories found on the extreme right, including claims that President Obama is the love child of Malcolm X, that Obama was once involved with a ‘crack whore,’ that his birth certificate is a forgery, that his late mother posed nude for pornographic photos, and that he was a Muslim in his youth who never renounced Islam,” the center says in a profile of Geller on its website.
Such rhetoric has landed the Initiative on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of hate groups as an active anti-Muslim group.
