London’s Daily Mail reports on a recent Sean Hannity show on Fox News Channel:

The right-wing blogger who organized the ‘Draw Muhammad’ event that was targeted by two gunmen over the weekend has had a fierce TV confrontation with a hate preacher, who thinks she should receive capital punishment.

Extreme anti-Islam activist Pamela Geller argued with British-based cleric Anjem Choudary during Fox News’ Hannity on Wednesday night, just days after Elton Simpson, 31 and Nadir Soofi, 34, tried to storm the controversial cartoon event in Garland, Texas.

Geller, 56, who has received death threats since the anti-Islamic exhibition, began by claiming President Obama has ‘created an environment that raised the stakes’ on terror in the United States.

Host Sean Hannity then reminds his viewers what Choudary believes in – which is imposing Sharia law across all countries, including America. 

The controversial imam then says: ‘Let’s be clear we are not talking about Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck. We are talking about people who deliberately had a competition to insult the messenger Muhammad.

‘If you saw the cartoons that Charlie Hebdo drew, you would understand the anger.’

Rabble rouser Choudary, who once said ‘the flag of Islam will fly over the White House’, then goes on to talk about how Geller was fully aware that many Muslims consider blasphemy a crime that is worthy of the death penalty.

Host Sean Hannuity then shouts: ‘You want her to die!’

To which Choudary replies: ‘She should be put before a Sharia court and tried and, if guilty, face capital punishment.’

Geller says: ‘To blame me and say that my cartoons are controversial… murdering cartoonists is controversial.’

The head of the American Freedom Defense Initiative then tries to get Choudary to stop interrupting her, and at one point says: ‘I know you’re used to stepping over women.’

Choudary then says Geller is worse than a ‘Khanzier’- Arabic for pig – and starts ranting about Americans murdering innocent people, prompting Hannity to intervene.

He ends the conversation by saying the cleric is ‘evil and pathetic.’ …

Geller has hinted that she held the event in response to killings in Paris over the public depiction of the Muslim prophet Muhammad, whom Islam dictates must never be drawn or painted.

Through websites, books, ad campaigns and public events, Geller has been warning for years about the ‘Islamic machine’ that she says threatens to destroy the U.S.

She famously led the campaign in 2010 — under a different group, called Stop the Islamization of America — to prevent the opening of an Islamic community center blocks from the World Trade Center site. She called it the ‘Ground Zero Mosque.’ …

The weekend contest in Garland, Texas, was offering $10,000 for the best cartoon of Muhammad.

Choudary is currently on bail in the UK for allegedly being a member of a banned terrorist group. He founded the organization Al-Muhajiroun 20 years ago and is seen as a recruiting sergeant for Britain’s radical Muslims.

He has previously called Americans ‘the biggest criminals in the world today.’

He hit U.S. headlines in 2011 after a furious exchange with Hannity on Fox News. The presenter became so enraged with his anti-American comments he ended the interview by calling him a ‘sick, miserable, evil S.O.B’.

Speaking of “sick, miserable [and] evil,” well, click on this for what radical Muslims also apparently believe.

If you believe Geller overstepped her free speech rights, then you are automatically defending what Choudary and his fellow S.O.B.s believe. Either that, or, as David French notes …

Let’s be clear: The great freak-out over Pamela Geller’s “draw Muhammad” contest isn’t about love for Islam or for robust and respectful religious pluralism. Indeed, many of those expressing anguish over blasphemy against Islam show no such concern over even the most vile attacks on the Christian faith. Beyond that, they’re among the leaders in movements designed to banish religious liberty — including Muslim religious liberty — to the margins of American life.

Instead, the fury against Pamela Geller is motivated mostly by fear — by the understanding that there are indeed many, many Muslims who believe that blasphemy should be punished with death, and who put that belief into practice. It’s motivated by the fear that our alliances with even “friendly” Muslim states and “allied” Muslim militias are so fragile that something so insignificant as a cartoon would drive them either to neutrality or straight into the arms of ISIS.

That’s why even the military brass will do something so unusual as call a fringe pastor of a tiny little church to beg him not to post a YouTube video. That’s why the president of the United States — ostensibly the most powerful man in the world — will personally appeal to that same pastor not to burn a Koran. They know that hundreds of millions of Muslims are not “moderate” by any reasonable definition of that word, and they will,in fact, allow themselves to be provoked by even the most insignificant and small-scale act of religious satire or defiance. After all, there are Muslim communities that will gladly burn Christians alive to punish even rumored blasphemy.

Our nation’s “elite” knows of the 88 percent support in Egypt for the death penalty for apostasy, and the 62 percent support in Pakistan. They know of the majority support for it in Malaysia, Jordan, and the Palestinian territories. They know that even when there’s not majority support for the death penalty for exercising one of the most basic of human rights — religious freedom — that large minorities still exercise considerable, and often violent, influence on their nations.

The elite also knows this bloodthirstiness extends to supporting terrorists. The following Pew Research Center numbers should sober anyone who believes in the “few extremists” model of Muslim culture:

That’s a staggering level of support for a man who not only targeted innocent men, women, and children in the West, but who allied himself with the most medieval Muslim regime in the world: the Taliban. And, ominously, his support waned only as his power waned. Islamists have a new jihadist idol — ISIS.

Further, our elites also know that while ISIS’s brutality certainly repels many Muslims, it attracts many others — that there are Muslim young people who are so captivated by images of beheadings and burnings that they’ll defy the law and their own nations to make their way to the jihadist battlefronts of Iraq and Syria.

Unable or unwilling to formulate a strategy to comprehensively defeat jihad or even to adequately defend our nation, our elites adopt a strategy of cultural appeasement that only strengthens our enemy. Millions in the Muslim world are drawn to the “strong horse” (to use Osama bin Laden’s phrase), and when jihadists intimidate the West into silence and conformity, the jihadists show themselves strong.

In a sane world, our national elites would not only rally unequivocally around free speech, they would point to the events of Garland, Texas, as perfectly symbolic of the way we handle threats against our Constitution and our culture — by defeating our enemies and defending our liberty. Instead, they express fears that provocative speech not only threatens our troops abroad but our cities here at home.

Geller’s critics should spare us all the high-minded rhetoric about tolerance and liberty and “democratic values.” In a continent-sized nation of more than 300 million souls, “offensive” speech is always happening. Geller’s speech is different not because it’s uniquely insensitive or even uniquely “hateful.” Her speech is different because it makes people afraid.