The New York Times has a surprisingly even-handed and generally (but not entirely) accurate piece about how libelblogger Charles Johnson betrayed his friends and abandoned his principles. Unlike the LA Times and Vanity Fair, the Gray Lady, oddly enough, seems less inclined to reward Johnson for his betrayal.
The irrational hatred and determination to destroy others no matter what lies need to be told to do it, the paranoia, the roaring-mouse totalitarianism and cultishness, the self-obsession and self-righteous preening, the howlingly superficial thought processes -- in short, every tendency we have come to know and love in Charles Johnson over the last two years is on display in this piece, "Right-Wing Flame War!," by Jonathan Dee, January 21. Some highlights:
[...] "It's just so illogical," [Pamela] Geller told me heatedly not long ago. "I loved him. I respected him. But the way he went after people was like a mental illness. There's an evil to that, a maliciousness. He's a traitor, a turncoat, a plant. We may not know for years what actually happened. You think he changed his mind?" [...]IN OCTOBER 2007, Johnson was asked to take part in what was billed as a Counter-Jihad Conference in Brussels, a gathering of fewer than a hundred politicians and opinion leaders from around the world who convened to share ideas and strategies for combating the spread of militant Islam. Johnson was not the only writer invited -- Geller was there, as well as Robert Spencer of jihadwatch.org (a Web site Johnson himself designed), to name two -- but he did not go. "I'm just not a joiner of these things," he says.[...]
An aside: he didn't design the site as it currently appears. This one was designed by the superlative, nonpareil Charles Nolan. The site has been thoroughly de-lizardized.
The common line at LGF that he warned Pamela Geller and me not to go to this conference because of the alleged appearance of "fascists" there is false. Johnson never spoke with me about this conference before it happened. And once more, for the record, despite Johnson's lies, this was no "neofascist" or "racist" conference. A Knesset member, Aryeh Eldad, was among the speakers, as was the great historian Bat Ye'or. Another speaker spoke about Islamic antisemitism. Patrick Sookhdeo spoke about the Islamization of England. I spoke.
Johnson began taking shots at not only Vlaams Belang, an organization it seems safe to say the vast majority of his readers had never heard of, but also at formerly favored colleagues like Spencer and Geller, to whom, by attending the same conference, the European neofascist movement was now . . . linked. Johnson first hinted, and eventually demanded, that they publicly distance themselves from both Vlaams Belang and the conference itself, and when they demurred, he publicly distanced himself from them.
This is a hasty telescoping of events that unfolded over a year. Pamela Geller took the brunt of his attacks. He didn't turn on me until later. I was trying to keep the peace between both sides. I regret that I did not call him on his dirty dealing earlier.
"Filip Dewinter has said some things I deplore," Spencer says. "But I don't consider myself responsible for him just because I was at this conference and he was, too. That's an outrageous kind of guilt by association. Let me ask you this: a few years ago I spoke at a Yom Kippur service, and one of the other speakers was Hillary Clinton. Does that make me a supporter or her work, or her of mine?" [...]
The article calmly skewers Johnson for his wild defamation and mudslinging:
It may be difficult to travel to Belgium and build the case that Filip Dewinter is not just a hateful character but an actual Nazi (and thus that those who can be linked to him are Nazi sympathizers), but sitting at your keyboard, there is no trick to it at all. Not only can the past never really be erased; it co-exists, in cyberspace, with the present, and an important type of context is destroyed. [...]"I was such a small fish at the time," Geller said. "I realized I was basically committing blog suicide by going against him. But he was wrong." When one of Johnson's posts about the conference was picked up and incorporated in a press release by the conservative bête noire Council on American-Islamic Relations, Geller called him out on Atlas Shrugs; he responded with a series of posts about her, the most memorable of which was titled, "Pamela Geller: Poster Girl for Eurofascism." (Not that Geller herself, who posted a Photoshopped picture of Johnson in Joker makeup, was exactly on the high road.) Traffic at her site, she says, went down about 75 percent. "He really did put a knife in the trans-Atlantic counterjihad movement, for a long time. People were running for cover. Nobody wanted to go against him then. He was the king."
Spencer says: "I have actually had people contact me and say, 'I understand you're the American representative for Vlaams Belang.' And that is because of Johnson."
In real life -- and I told Dee this -- I have nothing to do with Vlaams Belang, or any other political party. I don't accept Johnson's libels about them, but I still have nothing to do with them, for the same reason that I don't have anything to do with any party: the resistance to the jihad is not a party issue, and should transcend such divisions.
After Spencer wrote last month on Jihad Watch that I interviewed him, Johnson forwarded me several posts by other bloggers charting Spencer's unsavory "associations"; one of them tried to connect him, via a chain of links that is too long even to summarize, to Slobodan Milosevic. The more creatively defamatory the whole dispute becomes, the further it moves from the issues around which Johnson and Spencer and many others have supposedly reframed their lives. But I never got the sense that any of it was put forth by Johnson, either in person or on the blog, in anything other than perfect earnestness. He came of age, as a writer and as a public figure, in the culture of damnation by link, and he does not exempt himself from its logic. [...]
As illogical as that logic may be.
And the hapless Lizard Lord's tinhorn Stalinism even takes a hit:
THE QUESTIONING OF Johnson's tactics started to come not just from without L.G.F. but also from within. Readers both casual and loyal spoke up in the comment threads to ask, sometimes diplomatically and sometimes not, whether all this casual flinging of epithets like "fascist" wasn't maybe an overreaction. Johnson's response, in thousands of cases, was to block their accounts and ban some of them from viewing the blog. "Get off my Web site" was a common farewell. (Johnson insists that this is not true -- that no one has ever been banned from L.G.F. merely for disagreeing with him -- but the anecdotal evidence to the contrary is voluminous, and the fact that the offending comments were instantly and permanently deleted makes it impossible to check others' records against his.) [...]A reasonable approach, which L.G.F.'s exiles mostly rejected. Comment threads all over the blogosphere were hijacked by people sharing stories of their banishment. Another stalker blog -- this one assailing Johnson from the right -- sprang up, administered by banned former "Lizards," as L.G.F.'s registrants are known. Johnson responded by posting those former registrants' real names and photographs on L.G.F. -- an astounding breach of civility on the Internet, where anonymity is often prized above all else. [...]
It was unfair and simplistic and petulant, but it also seems to have achieved its goal. Very few people on the right want to be linked with Charles Johnson anymore....
Who would want to be?
"It's not that the war on terror has finished," he said. "It's never going to be finished, but I think things have reached the point now where it's not as pressing as it was. Some of the measures we took to protect ourselves against extremists have been pretty effective. And so I realized, you know, that maybe it's time to tell people that I'm not onboard with a lot of this social-conservative agenda. And I think that I actually speak for a lot of people." Though our conversation took place in the fall, he told me in a subsequent e-mail message that the failed Christmas Day airplane bombing "doesn't change my opinion about that." [...]
Over one-third of the successful and attempted jihad terror attacks in the U.S. since 9/11 took place in 2009. Yeah, Johnson, we're out of the woods. It's all over.
No one ever said L.G.F., or any blog, had to be about the free exchange of ideas. "It's his sandbox," Pamela Geller says simply. "He can do whatever he wants." Still, if you read L.G.F. today, you will find it hard to miss the paradox that a site whose origins, and whose greatest crisis, were rooted in opposition to totalitarianism now reads at times like a blog version of "Animal Farm." Johnson seems obsessed with what others think of him, posting much more often than he used to about references to himself elsewhere on the Internet and breaking into comment threads (a recent one was about the relative merits of top- versus front-loaded washing machines) to call commenters' attention to yet another attack on him that was posted at some other site. [...] He has banned readers because he has seen them commenting on other sites of which he does not approve. He is, as he reminds them, always watching. [...]"This is one area where I did change," Johnson admitted. "I realized you can't just let it be free speech. It doesn't work that way on the Internet. Total free speech is a recipe for anarchy when people can't see each other."
IN THE LAST DAY of November, Johnson delivered the final blow to his old alliances. In a post that he said took him about three minutes to write, he listed 10 reasons "Why I Parted Ways With the Right." The "reasons" themselves amounted to little more than laundry lists: "Support for conspiracy theories and hate speech (see: Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Birthers, creationists, climate deniers, etc.)," for instance. In the voluminous comment thread attached, Johnson was characteristically interested less in discussing the break itself than in discussing the reaction to it -- calling readers' attention to the number of times it was "re-tweeted," linking to attacks on him, citing praise from quarters that not long ago would have considered him toxic. [...]
"I saw the bill of particulars he nailed to the door of his Web site," says the author Peter Collier -- himself a survivor of the special vitriol directed at those who change sides in the ideological wars, after he and David Horowitz, his fellow former Ramparts editor, publicly leapt from far left to far right in the late 1980s. "Not exactly Whittaker Chambers, is he? I must say I was pretty put off by the profligate and kind of lame use of the word 'fascism,' a word that has been systematically denuded of its meaning, so that now it just signifies somebody you don't agree with. I don't want to say that it didn't take some bravery and forethought and all that stuff -- it just didn't seem like a very considered and certainly not a very theoretical break. More of a take-this-job-and-shove-it moment."...
Not exactly Whittaker Chambers indeed.
UPDATE: Check out McCain and Weasel Zippers on the great Internet Ozymandias.
SECOND UPDATE: Pamela has more trenchant observations on this miserable slug.
Charles Johnson is pathetic. That's how his legacy will read (unless history is indeed a pack of lies agreed upon, as the cynical Napoleon observed). Case closed. Time to move on. Nothing more buries a falsifier than the complete ignoring of him.
I knew LGF was a cult the first time I checked the site.
It really isn't that hard to distinguish, unless one wants to be "cultified".
Lizards lazingly laying on rocks waiting for guidance...
Who cares about this guy? Once he may have been relevant but now seems to have sunk into the narcissistic swamp dragging his followers with him. Thank God for the internet where tin gods and prophets can rise and fall with little tangible effect on the real world.
I just cannot understand what happened! How does someone change from one person into another like that?
I check in on LGF every now and then, for no particular reason, and I notice that 'registration' is open every time I go there, when in the olden days it was only open for a few minutes at a time, once a week or so. Coincidence? You decide.
It really seems odd to me that his focus has switched from Islamists and their allies on the Left, to 'nazis' and creationists and young-earthers. Isn't that sort of like going from being a big-game hunter to shooting fish in a barrel?
Its not beyond the realm of possibility that he is afflicted with an otherwise benign brain tumour.
Charles Johnson is the anti-christ ...his name equals 666.
CHARLES: "...most of all his willingness to accept unverifiable anecdotal information from people who post comments on the Internet under fake names, to claim that their LGF accounts were blocked simply for disagreeing with me — a claim which, in the vast majority of cases, is simply not true."
An outright lie. All one need do is read the comments of Lizardoids when someone is actually in the process of disagreeing with Charles...e.g.,
"Say goodbye"
"You're asking for it"
"Better cool it or you're gone"
The Lizardoids understand perfectly the culture at LGF.
A lot has changed in 10 years.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcKzBo2aWys
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Foster_Johnson
It's some stretch to call him a writer, tho' no doubt he fancies himself one.
Vitriolic narcissist and cut-and-paste merchant would be more accurate.
What is it about that guy that gets him so much attention?
The freakin' Times ?
OK. He broke a legitimate story once. Big whoop!
What is going on here?
Why won't he go away?
It's not like he's doing anything meaningful NOW. He hasn't for ages.
What the hell is up?
Ouch!
That's gotta hurt!
CJ in a nutshell (pun intended):
Johnson's metamorphasis is fascinating causing one to question why. If he hasn't developed a mental condition then what is behind it? I'm curious to know if there is a Saudi/CAIR connection. If Petro Dollar$ can corrupt congress and major news networks then why not a two-bit sicofant blogger?
When CJ first started flame-throwing, then censoring, many of my fellow bloggers were devastated. Sides were taken, and the rift in the counter-jihad began.
In fact, I almost quit blogging -- the rift was that ugly.
CJ's turning on Mr. Spencer was so ugly as to beggar belief. I still recall the shock waves of that time.
Things have calmed down somewhat now, but I no longer count some former friends as friends, even though we may have some things in common.
I've never been sure as to why got banned at LGF, but my banning occurred right after I interviewed Robert Spencer on The Gathering Storm Radio Show.
Truth be told, I wasn't a frequenter of LGF in the first place. I rarely visited there and certainly never argued with CJ at his site nor downed him at my own site.
In any case, as I see it, LGF has lost its priority and prestige in the blogosphere. I find little there of interest now.
The problem with Johnson is that he is an attention seeker...He craves it, so negative attention is as good as positive attention. Attention addicts are focused on themselves and they want you to focus on them also, they are the center of the universe they have created for themselves...Bill Clinton is 'afflicted' and so is Rasool Obama...In short, CJ gets too much press, and too much attention...He should be ignored and marginalized...
The silly name of his website always kept me away. I Little Green Footballs, was there any ever any sense to that, and what about the idiotic "lizards", was that just because they are green? It was something I didn't want to know about. And in retrospect I'm glad I never invested any time in it as it appears much was wasted by many.
Dennis Prager, a talk radio host who ponderously deals with subjects and has a rather high opinion of himself and who takes callers very sparingly dishing out a few seconds to a caller here and there who will compliment Prager and give him something else to talk about after quickly cutting off the caller used to constantly bring up Little Green Footballs and go on and on about what a valuable site it was and how it was keeping a record of important items. Given Prager's personality he may have been slow to notice the problem with Johnson, but at the same time Prager does like to analyze situations and try to get to the truth of a matter and it would be interesting to know if he has ever discussed the total implosion of LGF. Or maybe Prager is still a believer.
I just went to have a look at the LGF site...
what's it there for?
I couldn't work out its purpose.
Charles is such a liar. He DOES block accounts just because you disagree--I wrote that I was sick of his creationist creed and that he was just like Sullivan with his Christianist crap--and he wrote that I was gone and wouldn't have the chance for a farewell--childish little boy. He still has Andy though so he's not quite alone and now he can become bosum buddies with James Wolcott over at Vanity fair--maybe get a blog like Andy has at the Atlantic. I think the Saudis gave Charlie some $$$ and he converted.
What is LGF? It's not ringing a bell.
The NYT seems to have these occasional lucid moments. It's like a patient suffering from dementia.
Credit is due where it is due.
I have many philosophical disagreements with the LGF worldview. Yet, I must give them credit. On those rare occasions when I did post there, I must say I was, overall, very impressed by the conduct of Johnson's supporters, generally courteous and respectful, eager to engage and challenge me in debate. Not a sewer, the way this place looks all too often.
If the character and conduct of ones followers are any legitimate indicator, then Charles Johnson towers over Mr. Spencer.
Thank you, katt, for illustrating my point.
One wonders why you are so attracted to sewers, Fairuzfan.
"that no one has ever been banned from L.G.F. merely for disagreeing with him"
One barely has to disagree with him. I was banned almost instantly after down-dinging two of his ridiculously repetitive articles on AGW.
"I just cannot understand what happened! How does someone change from one person into another like that?"
I notice Pam Geller seems similarly mystified ("I loved him. I respected him. But the way he went after people was like a mental illness. There's an evil to that, a maliciousness. He's a traitor, a turncoat, a plant. We may not know for years what actually happened. You think he changed his mind?").
The mystification pretty much vanishes, however, when you realize that Charles Johnson was always a Leftist at heart, and that it was precisely his Leftist values of compassion and sensitivity to injustice which drew him into the anti-jihadism orbit -- even though it remains highly unusual and rare for Leftists to do so, since their values of compassion and sensivity to injustice virtually always skew toward defending Muslims and Islam (pace Hugh Fitzgerald, who when this issue comes up, tends to remind us of all the many Leftists he can count on his left hand who have shown appropriate alarm at Islam).
It is thus more fittingly Charles Johnson's prior gravitation into the anti-jihadism orbit that ought to elicit our head-scratching puzzlement; what has happened over the past year is that Charles Johnson woke up to his real Leftist self, and recoiled in horror at all the right-wing "fascism" that in his Leftist mind (I suppose from the right side of his brain) infects the anti-jihadism movement.
"Filip Dewinter has said some things I deplore," Spencer says. "But I don't consider myself responsible for him just because I was at this conference and he was, too. That's an outrageous kind of guilt by association.
One wonders what exactly Filip Dewinter says that Spencer finds deplorable, and what "guilt" Spencer would accrue from the imputed association with Dewinter; and why, for example, Diana West -- about whom Spencer in the past has lavished praise (see this essay and scroll down to find many examples) -- has no problem with Filip Dewinter and would not be ashamed to be associated with him (indeed, just the other day, she included an interview she conducted with him in an essay on her blog in which she solicited the views of eminent anti-Islam luminaries from Europe about the Geert Wilders trial).
I had posted there a few times, but when--during the long blog wars between Johnson/Spencer/others--I posted that Islam is antithetical to democracy, is incompatible with the U.S. Constitution, and has no legitimate place here, he responded, 'Bye now', and suggested that I post at JihadWatch, where that sort of thing is permitted.
The exact wording of my posting there, that day, and his response escape me now, but you get the idea.
This was also during a time in which he rightfully put his foot down on the moronic suggestions there that all Muslims should be deported.
And though I never, ever suggested such a repugnent notion--nor would I--that post resulted in rapid banishment.
Chuck either read into my post what he wanted to read, or he disagrees with my point. Either way, he truly does 'have issues'.
It would be a shock if Fitzgerald turned "green slimer" in the manner of Johnson. (Laughable.) But why do people like Robert, Pamela, etc. really know that could never happen? Johnson was also in plain sight.
In any case, people don't leave something. They go to something. Muhammad knew that, just as battered wives know that. People have to have something to go to before they leave anything. What did Johnson go to is the only interesting question left re him. Either he went to something-or he went crazy.
He went someplace when he left.
What did Johnson go to is the only interesting question left re him. Either he went to something-or he went crazy.
He went someplace when he left.
Yes, he went someplace when he left -- he went back to the Left.
(See my post above about this.)
Implying that someone who is against having any Muslims in America or the West is merely calling for deportation is a step up from what they sometimes accuse us of which is calling for genocide of all Muslims.
They do that to avoid dealing with the real issue and solution. Stop all further immigration of Muslims unless they are apostates and therefore ex-Muslim, and deport only those who openly call for jihad or sharia etc., the rest are encouraged to leave with economic incentives such as perhaps giving them 150% of the value of their home or business, pay for their tickets, help them get established in their Muslim country, whatever is necessary. There is no amount of money that could be spent on such a program that would not in the long run save ten times as much and most importantly it would mean saving freedom and democracy for future generations.
The fact that fairuzfan is still allowed to continue posting his flagrant disrespect of Robert, et al, and his bold-faced lies HERE ...only serves to prove how farcical his above comment truly is, because thin-skinned Charles Johnson would never tolerate such things being stated about him on his dime. Hell no.
Johnson totally misrepresents the way he controls his comments. He likes to label anyone who disagrees with him as a troll in order to delete their account. Here is my exchange with him, and subsequent banishment.
"Yes, he went someplace when he left -- he went back to the Left."
My point was/is that he did not leave and go to nothing. No one "leaves" without a place in mind to go to. Maybe he did go home.
BTW-I'll bet the Outdoor Cat (Fitzgerald) had his reservations re Johnson that were not expressed at the time. I can't see him saying "I loved the guy" (as with Pamela).
I would like to see Fitzgerald's thoughts re Johnson. But that is unlikely, and the reason Fitzgerald is not a Johnson. He couldn't care less about the Little-Green-Footballs nonsense. But he would have some heavy-duty insights that he cautiously kept/keeps to himself.
Fitzgerald (the "atheist"-Jesuit) will watch as the cats fight the rat. But his view should carry the most weight.
(Fitz-express your view. It would be of interest-not this "I loved the guy" crap of Pamala.)
Good NYT article. I used to read LGF but was never successful in getting an account, and stopped trying after CJ turned nasty. Hesperado's explanation for his change of heart rings true - he's returning to his roots. It will be interesting to see if he can rebuild his empire around Leftist themes. He has a lot of competition.
"and deport only those who openly call for jihad or sharia etc."
The problem with that argument is that American born Muslims cannot be deported; for America IS their birth country. But, like any other American citizen, they could be tried for treason or sedition. But that ain't likely, unless acts of violence--or a large scale movement developed--from such calls.
Yes, Muslim immigrants calling for jihad or sharia, and who have not yet been Naturalized, could be deported without much difficulty; for a government with the guts to do so.
But a 1967 change to immigration law (I believe) requires already Naturalized citizens to declare or demonstrate their personal desire to renounce their American citizenship in order to be deported.
Thank you again, fairuzfan, for reminding so many of us (yet again) why you are seemingly doomed to never-ending gracelessness and cluelessness. You make for a magnificent study in microcosm of snobbery and eternal ignorance respecting the recognition and proper treatment of malevolence. You fault the wrong people on a regular basis and exculpate the evil or ignorant folk on virtually every occasion. If you don't have things ass backwards, then no one has things ass backwards. And as champ noted above, the very fact that you can still regurgitate your drivel here at JW, but one is so easily blocked at Johnson's site, serves as ipso facto evidence of the deep fallaciousness of your reasoning and ethical analyses (never mind your dearth of common sense).
Freedom is lost on you. What makes for a free people is lost on you. What poses a mortal threat to freedom is lost on you as you blithely defend the guilty and condemn the innocent. Indeed, thank you again for being such a first-rate study in blindness about most eveything that keeps freedom alive.
In closing ponder this: What would Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, Alexis de Tocqueville, Arthur Schopenhauer, Ernest Renan, Bertrand Russell, Winston Churchill, Oriana Fallaci, Wafa Sultan and Hirsi Ali think of your reasoning powers where Islam is concerned? You said before you could provide counters to such folk as these regarding Islam. Folk who were substantive, knowledgeable, respected and persuasive. Well, do so. Just as you never provided an accurate account, as you said you could, of the Allies during the travail of D-Day and beyond which would make the Americans, Brits, Canadians, Poles and others who fought against the Nazis look as barbarous as Hitler's minions, so have you never provided a list of substantive souls who have defended Islam as an enlightened view of the human condition and the cosmos. You talk a lot but you don't back up things. That's your legacy here at JW. It's not a pretty one. And lots of good folk whom you regularly malign know this.
Gee Todd, at least you were important enough to be told why you were banned! I didn't get a thing, but a little notice I no longer had an account with Charles. Considering what that site was becoming I knew it would happen and how I was allowed to post after defending Robert consistently I don't know....it was defending Glenn Beck that got me tossed! Gees, what a mean spirit Charles has become, and he has totally no sense of humor.
Gee Todd, at least you were important enough to be told why you were banned! I didn't get a thing, but a little notice I no longer had an account with Charles. Considering what that site was becoming I knew it would happen and how I was allowed to post after defending Robert consistently I don't know....it was defending Glenn Beck that got me tossed! Gees, what a mean spirit Charles has become, and he has totally no sense of humor.
By the way, a technical question here. I click on Submit and it is ambiguous at best as to whether or not it has been submitted. Then I have to sign out to go to another article on the site. At least my password get me in lately!
I wrote this approximately one year ago, it seems more prescient now than ever. Please excuse the typo's I was pretty hazed at the time.
Chuck Johnson has with his massive cowardly, yellow streak; and complete lack of spine, caused a recursive feed back loop of gutlessness that now even the Duranty times picks up on his obsequiousness, (what a dhimmi twat).with
Congratulations Chuck, surely an internet first. Enjoy your descent into a laughing stock singularity.
Chuck Johnson What a prick!
I mean check out the
the yellow dungarees; thank fuck I am not going with him into battle.
"Not a sewer, the way this place looks all too often.
If the character and conduct of ones followers are any legitimate indicator, then Charles Johnson towers over Mr. Spencer."
You really have some nerve, Mohammedan.
Newsflash: You are the sewer. That's apparent every time you comment.
As for your second insult, RS is brilliant, Johnson is mentally deficient. Kind of like you, I guess. If you don't like it here, why don't you just bugger off and join your bud Johnson. You won't be missed, I guarantee.
I'm proud to have shared beers (Belgian of course) with the great anti-J crowd in Brussels back in '07 when this all kicked off. The meal that VB provided for us in the Belgian parliament was great, Andy Bostom's speech on the Islamic roots of antisemitism (including of course Nazi antisemitism) was very well received and, despite his later mis-represented comments on the podcast I was then host of, I still hold Diana West's view of Filip Dewinter to be a truer picture of the man than any of the insane ramblings slithering forth from Charles.
Now if we really want to talk about assassinating Robert's character, I should think about posting the video clip of him impersonating David Littman in the bar that night.
I frankly don't think Johnson is worth discussion. In Finnegan's Wake there is a character called HereComesEverybody (HCB). Johnson is HereComesBetrayal and he's entering with fanfare and INeedAttention at the wake.
The guy ran his website with a Bernie Madoff attitude, as if it were a "privilege" to be controlled. No wonder he has contempt for people since so many begged for his approval. All the signals were there and were ignored.
One wonders what exactly Filip Dewinter says that Spencer finds deplorable.
Well, there is a comment from 1991, which Dewinter himself later qualified and regretted.
Dewinter is a politician, not an academic, and does say things in a more heavy-handed way than academics. I was present at the conference and heard what he had to say about the state of Belgium. That was unpleasent indeed, but I found out later that he was substantially right.
He had been thrown to the ground a month early by jackbooted Belgian police when participating in a peaceful demonstration that the mayor of Brussels wouldn't permit. This is a can of worms related to the Wallonia-Flandern division of Belgium and only tangentially related to things Islam and Jihad.
My gosh, Wellington, you are sooooo way cool and intelligent. I appreciate what you tell to that fairuzan person..I think this person is messed up.
But you are so funny, too! I wish I could write to you personally like a pen pal.
I'll bet your students enjoy your teaching style and have for you great admiration.
I'm usually the last one to comment here...and this one is really late. oh well.
Stop mentioning him, stop fighting with him, stop responding to his bating.
Follow my lead: "I've never heard of him or LGF!"