Washington: Since being abandoned by even her former Fox News champions, Pamela Geller, the activist behind the Draw Mohammed competition that was attacked by gunmen in Texas on Monday, has only intensified her language.

Told that the mayor of Garland, where the incident took place, believed she had needlessly provoked the attack, Geller told the BBC: "How ridiculous. I mean, that's like saying the pretty girl was responsible for her own rape."

The links between the shooting the Texas shootings and the attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris are undeniable – both were murderous in intent, both perpetrated by Islamist militants fuelled by rage and hate.

But there are few similarities between the targets.

Charlie Hebdo contributes vitally and vibrantly to French cultural life. The targets of Charlie Hebdo's satire are hypocrisy and cant, and the magazine is an equal opportunities offender. It takes on Christian, Jew and Muslim, the left and the right with equal enthusiasm. And it does so in the context of relevant current events.

By comparison the Draw Mohammed competition, had a single intent: to provoke and insult. Geller, by comparison, has spent nearly a decade stoking division and fear in American society.

Vile and preposterous conspiracy theories are her currency.

So strident are Geller's anti-Islamic views that she has been banned from travel to the United Kingdom and her organisation has been listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center as well as the Jewish Anti-Defamation League, which says her group is dedicated to, "promoting a conspiratorial anti-Muslim agenda under the guise of fighting radical Islam" and "seeking to rouse public fears by consistently vilifying the Islamic faith and asserting the existence of an Islamic conspiracy to destroy 'American' values".

Geller, who began her career at the New York Daily News and went on to become an associate publisher of the New York Observer, first became prominent when she attacked a plan to build an Islamic community centre near the site of the former World Trade Center.

Via her blog, Atlas Shrugs, she led the campaign that cast this as the "Ground Zero Mosque". It was to be a "shrine to the very ideology that inspired the jihadist attacks", she claimed, falsely.

The campaign made her famous and Geller went on to co-found the American Freedom Defence Institute with Robert Spencer, committed to preventing "specific Islamic supremacist initiatives in American cities".

In 2012 it won a court battle to run subway ads that read: "In any war between the civilised man and the savage, support the civilised man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad."

Savage is a key word in Geller's lexicon. She refuses to recognise a distinction between Islam and Islamist militancy. Adherents to both she commonly refers to as savages.

Geller and Spencer were cited positively by the right-wing Norwegian mass killer Anders Breivik, who murdered 77 people, most during an attack on a youth camp in 2011, throughout his manifesto.

Geller returned the favour later, noting that his victims were "future leaders of the party responsible for flooding Norway with Muslims who refuse to assimilate, who commit major violence against Norwegian natives including violent gang rapes, with impunity, and who live on the dole".

Geller has described Barack Obama as "a third-worlder and a coward" who would "do nothing but beat up on our friends to appease his Islamic overlords".

She is found of the run of the mill Obama/Kenyan/Muslim nonsense, but she has added a few elements of her own to the canon.

"Why not tell the truth about Obama and his reported strange sexual predilections?" she has written. "My question is, it is well known that Obama allegedly was involved with a crack whore in his youth. Very seedy stuff. Why aren't they pursuing that story? Find the ho, give her a show!"

She has praised Joseph Stalin's genocide of Muslim Chechens on the (false) grounds that they were allied with Adolf Hitler.

This all came to a head on Sunday in the suburb of Garland on the outskirts of Dallas, Texas, when the American Freedom Defence Initiative held a conference at which the keynote speaker was the far-right Dutch anti-Islamic firebrand Geert Wilders.

A key part of the conference was an effort to offend as directly as possible, by offering a US$10,000 to the "best" cartoon of the prophet Muhammad.

It now seems two militants took the bait - though the investigation is not yet complete.  They were shot dead as they attacked the event armed with assault rifles and a guard was injured.

The response to the attack and the deaths has been quintessentially American. Rather than calling for group to banned or her voice to be silenced, there has been condemnation of how she has chosen to use her right to freedom of speech.

The Garland mayor, Douglas Athas, lamented Geller's ugly stunt in an interview with the Dallas Morning News.

"She picked my community, which does not support in any shape, passion or form, her ideology," he said. "But at the end of the day, we did our jobs. We protected her freedoms and her life."

Before the conference, American Muslim leaders defended Geller's right to incendiary speech even as they urged their supporters to ignore her provocations.

The New York City Muslim community leader Linda Sarsour told The Daily Beast that Geller "can draw any damn cartoon she wants and I defend her right to do so . . . I have always fought for her right to be a bigot and I have the right to counter her bigotry with my own speech."

Since the conference even Fox News, on which she was once a fixture, appears to have backed away. She has been chastised by high-profile hosts, including Greta Van Susteren and Bill O'Reilly.

Even the clown prince of Obama conspiracy theorists, Donald Trump, has dismissed her.

"She's a provocateur. All she is doing is provoking and taunting people and this country has enough problems right now."

Geller was unapologetic in response, likening herself to a hero of the Civil Rights movement.

"What would he have said about Rosa Parks?" she said in an interview on Tuesday. "'Rosa Parks should never have gone to the front of the bus?"

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