NEWSFLASH: POURING GASOLINE A FIRE DOESN'T EXTINGUISH IT (updated)

In the future, if she's being honest, Pam Geller will acknowledge that yesterday was the best day of her life:

GARLAND, Texas -- Shots rang out this evening at the Curtis Culwell Center in Garland, Texas during the Mohammed Art Exhibit and Contest. A law enforcement officer was shot and both suspects have been killed. Officers on the scene said that it is possible that explosives are in the area.

Attendees were immediately forced into lockdown by police, including three Breitbart News reporters. Sources say event organizer Pamela Geller and keynote speaker Geert Wilders, a Dutch politician, are safe....

The "law enforcement officer" was, according to The Dallas Morning News, a security guard for the Garland Independent School District, who was unarmed. He was treated for an ankle injury and released.

Geller and her crew wanted to provoke and inflame:

The New York-based American Freedom Defense Initiative had organized the event to award a cash prize for the best cartoon depicting Muhammad. Caricatures of the Islamic prophet are considered offensive by many Muslims, but the show’s organizers said they were exercising their freedom of expression.

And everything worked out better than they could have possibly imagined. There was violence, but, apart from the security guard and the two assailants, Geller and her crew and everyone inside and outside the auditorium got out without a scratch. Geller has been playacting as a war fighter in her own mind for decades, and now she got her war. Oh, and:

After the shooting, authorities escorted about 75 contest attendees to another room in the conference center, where a woman held up an American flag, and the crowd sang “God Bless America.”

So the theater of this was perfect for Geller's purposes.

She went to the event a cult figure, known to wingnuts and wingnut-watchers (and possibly to also to residents of the cities where she tries to foist her Muslim-bashing ads on public transportation systems), and now these assailants have made her a household name. Good job, idiots.

Matt Drudge, of course, is cranking it up to 11:



He links to a Daily Mail story with this claim:

Isis has claimed responsibility for an attack on an anti-Islam art contest in Texas in which an unarmed security guard was blasted in the ankle by fire from automatic rifles and the suspects shot dead by police....

The SITE Intelligence Group reported that an Islamic State (IS) fighter claimed on Twitter that the shooting was carried out by two pro-Isis individuals.

In a series of tweets and links, a jihadist named as Abu Hussain AlBritani, which SITE said was British IS fighter Junaid Hussain, claimed that '2 of our brothers just opened fire' at the Prophet Muhammad exhibition in Texas.

'They Thought They Was Safe In Texas From The Soldiers of The Islamic State,' added the tweet.

Which tells us nothing except that someone believed to be from ISIS is trying to grab the glory here. But I'm sure a lot of wingers are looking at the news of this incident and at Drudge's headline and concluding that a lot of scary stuff they've been told recently is true -- that there really is an ISIS training camp in Mexico a few miles from the Texas border, and that the U.S. military's Jade Helm 15 training exercise is an effort to bring ISIS fighters into America.

The Mail story claims to have ID'd one of the assailants:

ISIS supporters claimed on Twitter that one of the gunmen was a man calling himself Shariah Is Light on the social media site, but police have yet to formally identify the culprits....

He had posted a message earlier that said 'the bro with me and myself have given bay'ah [oath] to Amirul Mu'mineen [ISIS leader Al Baghdadi]. May Allah accept us as mujahideen #texasattack'.

If you search for "atawaakul" on Twitter, you learn that the user by that name has had his account suspended, and you're told that the tweet appeared shortly before the shooting started:

This tweet was at 6:35 p.m. central time. https://t.co/RUbeuLgXHp News of the shooting broke inside the conference center around 6:50 p.m.

— Matt Pearce (@mattdpearce) May 4, 2015

You also see claims that he was a convert (so perhaps not a foreign fighter allowed into the U.S. by the evil Hussein Obama administration?), and you're told that the his avatar photo is of Anwar al-Awlaki, the now deceased Al Qaeda operative. (Question: Would an ISIS fighter have an Al Qaeda avatar photo?)

.@DaveedGR and is apparently a convert https://t.co/NSGXZJfXpK

— Michael C Moynihan (@mcmoynihan) May 4, 2015

Whether it was this guy and an accomplice or someone else, the shooters rose to the Geller/Wilders bait, and now, in the words of Charles Johnson (a disillusioned ex-ally of Geller):

The only people who are going to “win” from what happened in Garland are the extremists - on both sides.

— Charles Johnson (@Green_Footballs) May 4, 2015

So, on both sides, mission accomplished.

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UPDATE: One gunman has been identified as Elton Simpson, who crossed into Texas from Mexi-- oh, sorry, no, he didn't. (He's from Arizona.) He's reported to have been "posting on social media about the Islamic State"; he's also reported to have been Twitter user atawaakul, he of the Awlaki avatar. So I guess American jihadists don't pay too much attention to the Al Qaeda/ISIS feud.