Pamela Geller has opted to continue her anti-Muslim campaign in a new extremely incensing advertisement that she has submit to the Washington Metro Transit Authority. The new ad, funded by her American Freedom Defense Initiative, depicts the World Trade Center during the September 11, 2001 , alongside a contentious verse from the Qu’ran:

Geller — featured prominently in the CAP’s report on Islamophobia in the U.S. — explained the impetus for the new ads on her blog:

Citing the quran, are we? I think that’s a grand idea. AFDI is launching a new ad campaign much like Hamas-CAIR’s. Here is the ad we have submitted to WMATA. I want to thank Hamas-CAIR. What a wonderful way to educate millions of Americans on what is that book. We hope to feature all of the verses that call for jihad.

Geller’s new ad is in direct response to an ad launched by the Council on Islamic-American Relations (CAIR). In CAIR’s banners, a young woman wearing a hijab is depicted with the words “Show forgiveness, speak for justice, ignore the ignorant.”

The proposed ad marks a new round in what is becoming an escalating messaging war between Gellar and various religious groups. While counter-ads have been posted in response to Geller’s “savages” ad in New York City as well, D.C. is the first city to earn a response by the AFDI to these groups’ rebuttal.

Manssor Arbabsiar, aka Mansour Arbabsiar, pleaded guilty today in federal court to taking part in a plot to murder the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States. Arbabsiar is a naturalized citizen who holds both U.S. and Iranian passports. The charges stated that Arbabsiar served as an intermediary between the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), an elite Iranian paramilitary group, and a third-party who would carry out the killing.

Arbabsiar claimed to be acting on the behalf of his cousin, a “big general” in the Iranian army, in arranging for a meetings during several trips to Mexico in 2011. Arbabsiar believed that he was speaking with a member of the Zetas, one of Mexico’s most feared drug gangs. Instead, he was meeting with an undercover Drug Enforcement Agency agent. In the course of several interactions with this source, Arbabsiar agreed to pay $1.5 million to carry out the assassination, $100,000 of which Arbabsiar wired to an FBI bank account as a down payment.

Arbabsiar was later arrested and agreed to make monitored phone calls to Iran. The speaker on the other end, identified as Gholam Shakuri, told Arbabsiar to move forward with the assassination attempt against the ambassador. Both men were charged with attempting to hire an assassin and plotting to commit terrorism.

Shakuri is a member of the Quds force, the special operations wing of the IRGC, and was charged in absentia. The Department of Justice has stressed that Shakuri remains innocent until proven guilty.

“Though it reads like the pages of a Hollywood script, the impact would have been very real and many lives would have been lost,” FBI Director Mueller said at the time charges were filed last year. Reaction to the plot then ranged from incredulity to relief, with one commentator arguing that the alleged missteps made a feared force in the Middle East look “like a bunch of miscalculating buffoons.”

The United States tightened sanctions against Iran in retaliation and Saudi Arabia passed a resolution at the United Nations condemning Iran.

President Obama has received more than $500,000 in donations from military members, a figure that dwarfs the amount Mitt Romney raised by more than $250,000. That’s according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan election money tracking site, which released a report on October 15th detailing the political spending habits of military personnel.

Here’s the Open Secrets chart for total donations:

The trend has stayed consistent throughout the campaign. By September 2011, military members donated $13,000 to the Romney campaign; in contrast, his opponent Ron Paul had received more than $90,000. President Obama out gained Romney by more than $50,000 during that same time period.

Months later, after Romney all but secured the nomination, more of the military donations started moving toward Obama, who raised $184,000 from military members from January 2011 to March 2012, and away from other candidates. Romney’s total only went up $32,000 to a paltry $45,000 in total by that same point.

Obama has a strong track record when it comes to securing donations from military members; in 2008, then Sen. Obama raised more than $300,000 from military service members who donated more than $200, besting his opponent Sen. John McCain by $100,000.

Our guest blogger is Joel Rubin, director of policy and government affairs at the Ploughshares Fund

The killing of four American patriots in Benghazi, Libya last month was an act of terror. Those four Americans, including the U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens, represented the best of our country. They put their lives on the line to advance American interests in a volatile region. They deserved the support of their government back home.

Instead of getting that support, their deaths are being used as a partisan attack on President Obama, part of a false narrative that the president failed them. What has failed them is our political system. Rather than supporting a serious, nonpartisan investigation into what took place and what went wrong, waiting to get all the facts out, conservatives are trying to affix blame for their deaths for political advantage.

This is how some conservatives use terrorist attacks against America. They blame their political opponents. We have seen this movie before, in the run up to the war in Iraq. Back then, conservatives argued that anyone who opposed invading Iraq was equivalent to being soft of terror, and implicitly, an appeaser of Osama bin-Laden.

Their public extortion of a national tragedy — the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks — was used to partisan advantage to start a war whose rationale was deeply flawed and whose results were disastrous for our country.

It is happening again with the Benghazi attack. Now, some conservatives are using the Libya incident to characterize the President as weak and soft on terrorism.

In fact, many of those conservatives making these attacks were actually the ones who went weak on bin-Laden, preferring to ignore him in Afghanistan and Pakistan to go after terrorist phantoms in Iraq.

Who would you trust then, to get the terrorists who killed these four patriotic Americans in Benghazi? The people who got bin-Laden or the people who forgot bin-Laden?

What this desperate political maneuvering demonstrates is a deep insecurity by conservatives about their national security credentials. Obama’s actual response to the riots in the Arab world last month demonstrates strength, not weakness. Obama worked with our allies in the Middle East to shut these riots down. This is not the unraveling of Obama’s Middle East policy; on the contrary, it’s the demonstration of its effectiveness. Facts like this matter.

And so the proverbial waters edge, where partisan politics do not to wade into foreign policy but instead stand in unity when terror strikes, has been violated. It’s a shame. Just after that first fateful September 11th tragedy 11 years ago, the country united when Democratic Senate Leader Tom Daschle embraced Republican President George W. Bush. Regretfully, this September 11th, conservative leaders viciously attacked the president during a time of national tragedy to the detriment of us all.

During the past several weeks of campaigning, Mitt Romney has argued that President Obama’s supposed failure to label the killing of Benghazi “terrorism” for two weeks was evidence that he had failed to lead on the issue. After Candy Crowley debunked Romney’s claim during the Tuesday debate, the right doubled down on Romney’s argument, suggesting Obama only used the term “act of terror” generally despite clear references to Benghazi on September 12 and 13.

Setting aside the dubious propriety of this semantic standard for leadership, it turns out Romney himself has failed on these terms: Obama managed to label the attacks terrorism twice in the two days following the attacks before Romney used the term once.

The first unmistakeable reference to terrorism from the Romney campaign came on September 20, after top counterterrorism officials had publicly described the attacks as terrorism. The first clear statement from Romney himself was on September 25, when he told Fox News that the Benghazi attack was “an act of terror. … But the White House doesn’t want to admit it.”

Here is a timeline of the relevant events, starting the day after the September 11th attack:

SEPTEMBER 12: Romney gives a press conference to clarify his initial press release accusing Obama of sympathizing with the attackers.The full transcript of the event shows that he never used the words “terror,” “terrorism,” or “al-Qaeda.” That was Romney’s first statement on the event since the initial release the night before. Roughly 30 minutes afterwards, Obama used the phrase “acts of terror” to describe Benghazi in his Rose Garden remarks.

SEPTEMBER 13: The President used the same phrase to describe the attacks at a September 13 at a campaign event. Romney also addressed the tragedy in Libya at a campaign event, but the on-site reporting (the campaign does not appear to have provided a transcript) does not mention him referring to the attacks as terrorism and, moreover, suggests that Romney did not directly challenge the administration’s approach (semantic or otherwise) to the events.

SEPTEMBER 19: Matt Olsen, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, says “[Americans] were killed in the course of a terrorist attack on our embassy.”

SEPTEMBER 20: Romney spokesperson Ryan Williams says “Governor Romney believes our immediate priority in Libya is to track down and bring to justice those terrorists who brutally murdered our diplomats. The attack is a clear reminder that terrorists, particularly those linked to Al Qaeda, remain a grave threat and one that is growing in North Africa.” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said “It is, I think, self-evident that what happened in Benghazi was a terrorist attack.”

SEPTEMBER 25: Romney tells Fox that “That’s an act of terror. But the White House doesn’t want to admit it.”

Republicans and right-wing commentators are calling President Obama a liar for his accurate claim during the debate that he referred to Benghazi as an act of terror. After a question from the audience about the attack on a U.S. diplomatic mission there last month that killed four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, Obama said that he referred to it as an “act of terror” in his statement in the Rose Garden the very next day.

The following statement, from towards the end of his Sept. 12 remarks, substantiates Obama’s claim:

OBAMA: No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for. Today we mourn four more Americans who represent the very best of the United States of America. We will not waver in our commitment to see that justice is done for this terrible act. And make no mistake, justice will be done.

The screenshot from the White House website makes the context of Obama’s remarks clear:

Governor Mitt Romney questioned whether Obama was telling the truth, saying it took him two weeks to refer to the Libya attacks as terrorism. But moderator Candy Crowley then rebuked Romney. “He did call it an act of terror,” she said.

Now that Romney was caught passing false information, the right wing is trying to provide cover, claiming that Obama was speaking more generally about terror, or the September 11, 2001 attacks, in his remarks, and it seems like it has taken hold as their new talking point.

Following that debate, several commentators attacked Crowley for her interjection and claimed, still, that Obama was lying. Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Preibus after the debate said, “I will say, though, that tonight, point-blank, the president lied to the American people about Libya. I think the moderator may have helped that along as well.”

Fox News’s Host Chris Wallace during a post-debate panel dismissed the idea that President Obama was speaking about Benghazi when he used the phrase “act of terror” in his Rose Garden statement. “All he said was ‘no acts of terror will shake the resolve of this great nation’, and did not refer specifically to [Benghazi] at all.”

In an interview with CNN, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal repeated similar claims, saying “[Obama] used act of terror, generally, didn’t identify it specifically.”

The conservative narrative maintains that it took two weeks for the President to call the attack in Benghazi terrorism. But, in addition to the Rose Garden comments, the story is further debunked by comments given at an Obama campaign rally in Denver on Sept. 13, where he also spoke about Libya:

OBAMA: So what I want all of you to know is that we are going to bring those who killed our fellow Americans to justice. I want people around the world to hear me: To all those who would do us harm, no act of terror will go unpunished. It will not dim the light of the values that we proudly present to the rest of the world. No act of violence shakes the resolve of the United States of America.