Via the Right Scoop and The Blaze, skip to 4:00. If, God forbid, some nut like that degenerate up in Boston ever gets to Geller, I’m convinced most of the media grief afterward will be over the notion that she “won,” not that she’s dead. She told us censorship from jihad was a serious threat in America, they’ll say, and by gum, they proved her right. The wingnut probably died with a smile on her lips.

Implicit in this question is the idea that Geller isn’t all that different from the people she criticizes. (Burnett even prefaces it by noting that the SPLC calls Geller’s organization a hate group.) Provoking the enemy in hopes of generating an overreaction to galvanize support from your own side is a staple of jihadi strategy. A classic example was Al Qaeda in Iraq blowing up the Golden Shrine in Samarra, a site sacred to Shiites, in 2006, in the hope/expectation that Shiite militias would react by going on a rampage against Iraq’s Sunnis and then Sunnis would in turn rally behind AQI for revenge. That appears to be the same lens that parts of the media view Geller through: She wants jihadis to blow something up in response to one of her cartoon contests, even if that something is her, because that’ll bring more Americans around to her perspective. Do any liberal activists ever have their motives similarly questioned? How often did CNN wonder if protesters in Ferguson were hoping to get their heads cracked open by police batons in hopes of generating sympathy for their cause? When lefties agitate against police violence, they’re speaking truth to power; if violence results, it only proves how right they were. When Geller agitates against jihadi violence, she’s a cynic trying to bait unrepresentative members of a particular group into lashing out so that she can falsely claim vindication. How does that work?