No, the shootings are in no way excusable

[Maedhros]

29. I think Geller was playing off the response to the Charlie Hebdo incident,

hoping to turn anti-Islamic bigotry into heroism.

Glenn Greenwald addresses the Hebdo incident here (http://www.salon.com/2015/05/05/it%E2%80%99s_pure_authoritarianism_glenn_greenwald_exposes_the_link_between_baltimores_uprising_and_the_nsa/) and I think some of the same sentiment applies to Geller's latest stunt:

You’ve written a lot about the controversy over the PEN “Freedom of Expression Courage Award” being given to Charlie Hebdo, which has inspired a lot of writers to speak out in opposition. Why do you think this story is so important?

It’s actually kind of a complex issue. I think any decent person is torn by the fact that what happened to the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists is obviously vile and repugnant. They are obviously people who were exercising what should be their right of free speech … and they were killed because of it. And that’s a bad and dangerous thing.

On the other hand, the way in which that incident was seized on was designed, I think, to bolster a very tribalistic and dangerous narrative, which is that we in the West are the advanced, progressive, enlightened people and there are these kind of marauding hordes, who are primitive and violent and threatening to all things decent, called “Muslims” or “radical Islam.” And this incident was seized on to bolster that narrative as kind of propagandistically and powerfully as anything that I can recall probably since the 9/11 attack.

So you have a magazine that became known in the Western world, regardless of what the reality is, for publishing images that are very offensive and upsetting to the Muslim minorities in the West, and whose cartoonists were turned into heroes and martyrs … who were victims of Muslim violence. I think the reason why people are so eager to turn them into martyrs and heap all sorts of praise and awards on them is because it does make us Westerners feel good about ourselves; it tells us that we’re the victims and the people who we’ve been bombing and invading and torturing and pillaging for the last 15 years are actually the evil ones.

It fuels this whole war narrative that has been sustaining a lot of really bad policies in ways that are quite propagandistic and manipulative, because of the heavy emotions involved.