Posted on October 20, 2011

Hotel Cancels Tea Party Event After Learning That Anti-Islam Activist Was Due to Be a Speaker

Meghan Keneally, Daily Mail (London), October 19, 2011

A hotel in Texas cancelled a Tea Party event that was going to be held in their conference room because it didn’t approve of the group’s keynote speaker.

Pamela Geller, a political activist and blogger, was schedule to headline the event and caused hotel representatives to deny the group use of their space.

Officially, the Hyatt Place Houston Sugar Land hotel cancelled the event citing ‘changing security needs’ after they learned that Ms Geller would be speaking.

This is not the first time that Ms Geller has ruffled feathers: the staunch conservative has written extensively against Islam and regularly attacks the religion because she deems it ‘the radical most radical and extreme ideology on the face of the earth’.

‘I’m not bashing Muslims. I’m not bashing people. I love people, It’s why I do what I do,’ Ms Geller said.

In spite of that, the event was forced to move to the Sugar Land Community Center, where it was held Tuesday night

‘I think it’s reprehensible, the restriction of free speech, because that’s what we’re talking about,’ Ms Geller said.

While event attendees were boycotting the Hyatt, a few dozen residents of Sugar Land, Texas, which is right outside of Houston, boycotted the event, calling it ‘hate speech’.

Ms Geller took to her blog, Atlas Shrugs, to critize the Hyatt organizers, who released a statement saying the hotel ‘respects the various opinions expressed by our guests and visitors. In this particular situation, the changing security needs required for the safety of our guests and others on the hotel property and to avoid business disruption prompted us to ask the organizers to move it to an alternate location.’

On her blog, Ms Geller called Hyatt representatives cowards who ‘prostrated themselves, wet their pants and cancelled tonight’s event’.

Though she has been a star in Tea Party circles for some time, Ms Gellar gained a national audience in the fall of 2010 when she spearheaded the movement against the construction of the so-called ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ near the World Trade Center site in lower Manhattan.

Part of her speech at the event was intended to promote her new book, titled Stop The Islamization of America: A Practical Guide To The Resistance.

Never known for timidity, Ms Geller likened Hyatt administrators to the Iranian president.

‘Mind you, where does Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stay and entertain his murdering comrades when he comes to New York? The Hyatt,’ Ms Geller wrote.

[Editor’s Note: Read Miss Geller’s account of the cancellation here.]