"An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last." -- Winston Churchill
Make no mistake: the attempt to hang blame for the murders in Norway on me and others with whom I work or who work in this field is an attempt to discredit and silence any and all resistance to the global jihad and Islamic supremacism. That's why the principal organs of the Left, which in its hardened hatred of the West has consistently been warm and welcoming toward Islamic supremacism, have been leading this charge: the New York Times, NBC News, etc.
The effort is transparent in its double standard and ideological bias: my criticism of jihad activity is supposed to have incited violence, but the Left's criticism of Western policies is never seen to have incited the manifold incidents of terrorist violence against Westerners. This campaign against me and Pamela Geller and others is a transparent attempt to advance the Organization of Islamic Cooperation's long-term agenda of shutting down the freedom of speech in the West and criminalizing all criticism of Islam, thereby leaving the West mute and defenseless in the face of the advancing jihad.
That's why it is dispiriting to see someone who has spoken out against the jihad and Islamic supremacism in the past willingly serve himself up as a useful idiot in this effort, but that is just what Damian Thompson, a British columnist who has written against jihad activity and even praised me and Jihad Watch in the past, is doing today: "Anders Breivik and the echo-chamber of the trolls," by Damian Thompson in the Telegraph, July 29 (thanks to Alan of England):
Speaking as someone who hates the way the mainstream media suck up to radical Muslims, I find it frustrating that websites devoted to monitoring Islamism are dominated by trolls and writers who play up to them. I don’t trust a word that the BBC tells me about “the religion of peace” – but equally, I can’t trust either the articles or the comments on the Gates of Vienna or Jihad Watch websites. (This I learnt the hard way, by quoting on my own blog an anecdote about Muslims besieging a hospital that turned out to be an urban myth.)
Thompson is referring to an on-the-scene account about an incident in Australia that I published at Jihad Watch. Mainstream media versions of the incident didn't match the account here, so the egregious Leftist Guardian columnist Andrew Brown skewered Thompson for picking up the story here -- as if the mainstream media always and in every case tells the story fully and accurately. Thompson thereupon folded abjectly and retreated from writing so frequently about jihad issues.
In any case, I wouldn't hesitate to put my record for accuracy at Jihad Watch up against the Telegraph's and Thompson's, and I have no doubt as to who would come out the winner.
The last thing that anti-jihadists should do when confronted with smear merchants like Brown is fold. As the Left and its Islamic supremacist allies step up their smears and defamation of anti-jihadists, it is all-important for us not to falter in the breach, but to stand on the truths that we tell and not give an inch.
Thompson, however, chooses otherwise:
Someone who did trust them, however, was Anders Breivik, whose manifesto draws far more heavily on anti-Islamic and anti-EU blogs than it does on neo-Nazi sources. This is massively embarrassing for the Right-wing bloggers he cites, three of whom are old friends of mine, but it demonstrates cunning on Breivik’s part.
It also demonstrates monumentally poor judgment and poor critical thinking skills on Thompson's part to endorse this Leftist smear. By the logic of the Left's assault on us over Norway, no one should ever be critical of anything, for fear that some evil person will misunderstand that criticism and commit violence because of it. There is nothing "embarrassing" for me or anyone else in what Breivik writes, any more than the Beatles should have been embarrassed when Charles Manson invoked their songs as his inspiration for the Manson murders. There was nothing in the songs, so only the madman was accountable for his murders. There is nothing in my work that could conceivably be seen as justification for murder by any reasonable person, and so only Anders Breivik is responsible for his actions.
Damian Thompson should know better, and I think he does. He apparently hopes he will be eaten last. But here again, make no mistake: when his turn comes around, the crocodile will still be hungry.
RSS Feed
The Telegraph and Daily Mail in particular have published stories and hosted authors highly critical of the Islamization of British society. Often, the only difference between their reporting and ours is that we add 1.) more background when we have it, linking extensive prior coverage sometimes going back several years, and 2.) chapter and verse from Islamic texts where rhetoric and practices in the given stories reflect them.
What I suspect is going on in the reaction from the British press is in part a game of "CYA" ("cover your...") to avoid potential legal action against them -- as spurious and unjust as it would be -- for "Islamophobic" reporting.
And so we get thrown under the bus, despite the fact that the logical extension of the equally spurious and unjust blame game they level against us is that the reporting we pick up on from places like the Telegraph, the Daily Mail, and also the AP, AFP, Reuters, UPI, etc., etc., "incited" us. Someone can say, eyes wide with horror, that we cited the Telegraph x number of times in our writing.
When a major paper is in the crosshairs, suddenly that line of thinking is absurd. When it's a blog and there are political points to be scored, here comes the bus.
The conclusion that the mainstream press is supporting is that reporting on Islamic supremacism and terrorism causes violence. That is also obviously absurd, and by advancing acceptance of that conclusion, the press can indeed only hope the same crocodile they are feeding will eat them last.