Last week at the Conservative Political Action Conference, James Lafferty of the Virginia Anti-Shariah Task Force spoke at Pamela Geller’s panel opposing the construction of mosques and the supposed threat of sharia law in the U.S. and bragged that while attending a hate crimes summit convened by the Department of Justice he watched “pictures of some mosque somewhere, and it was usually in the South I’m proud to say where a guy would drive a pickup truck right into the mosque.”
Today in her WorldNetDaily column, Geller responded to the “anti-freedom, pro-jihad left” for trying to “twist the meaning of remarks by one of our speakers, James Lafferty.” She then included a short statement to “set the record straight” saying that he “does not condone ore encourage nay criminal act or vandalism against any mosque” and believes in the free exercise of religion:
I have been organizing events at CPAC since I first brought Geert Wilders to the conservative confab back in 2009, but this was our most powerful one yet. The only coverage of our landmark event in defense of freedom, however, was from the anti-freedom, pro-jihad left. Islamic supremacists and their quisling apologists in the leftist media immediately tried to twist the meaning of remarks by one of our speakers, James Lafferty. They accused Lafferty, founder and chairman of the Virginia Anti-Shariah Task Force, of applauding the destruction of mosques. Lafferty set the record straight in a statement he sent me: “I do not condone or encourage any criminal act or vandalism against any mosque. I am a firm believer in the rule of law and the protections our Constitution provides for the free exercise of religion – and that means all religions.”
But this brief statement does nothing to “set the record straight,” and doesn’t even come close to addressing what Lafferty said at the panel.
Lafferty may have released a statement saying he doesn’t “condone or encourage” vandalism after the video of him was released, but Lafferty in his statement in no way explains how his statement didn’t express his pride in the fact that his home region of the South is where a preponderance of attacks on mosques take place.
