Since it is the topic of so much discussion, I thought I would post the email in which the man behind Weasel Zippers asked me to stop linking him (it was an email, not a phone conversation). I received this email from Zip on August 17, 2011:
This is off the record:I've read and re-read all of this Perry is a fifth-columnist stuff Pamela is writing that originated with Salon and to be honest, it sickens me. There way too much guilt by association to take it even remotely seriously.
I need to ask you and your writers to stop hat-tipping my site because more often than not she uses the same tip (usually cut and pasted directly onto Atlas Shrugs) and I don't want to be associated with her in the slightest.
It's nothing personal with you, I've always and still do respect you but she has gone too far with this one.
This is alienating a lot of people besides myself.
I responded:
Oh, how ridiculous.Answers to the evidence she has presented? Why, no. Of course not.
You want me to delink you also? Hey, no problem. Just say the word.
Alienating a lot of people that we cannot even have a discussion about Perry? Why, yes, you have done that.
The exchange degenerated from there, until finally Zip wrote me this:
What's it like being a smart guy playing second-fiddle to an illiterate attention whore?
I'm told that the man posting as WM at IOTW is the same man who was the Jihad Watch tech man for a considerable time; he even designed the present site, although he stopped answering my emails or doing any work on the site quite some time ago, around the time he started doing extensive work for Weasel Zippers.
I called him about this controversy a couple of days ago. He told me that Zip's policy was to report on jihad outside the U.S., but to ignore the stealth jihad, creeping Sharia, and most jihad plotting inside the U.S., as he wanted to attract advertisers and make a living off his blog, and didn't want to be associated with Pamela Geller and me, so as to avoid the taint of the Norway killings -- he is the only person outside of Leftists and Islamic supremacists who seriously thinks we are responsible for that evil madman's actions.
He also told me that Weasel Zippers was not hacked, but that he himself had recently fallen out with Zip after Zip had failed to pay him the amount they had agreed upon for his extensive work on that site. He consulted a lawyer, he said, and removed all the design elements and other things he had added to the site, rendering it inoperative -- on the same day that Pamela posted her original piece about the Right abandoning the jihad. A coincidence, I'm sure.
I am not sure how much of what he told me is true, or to what extent it is true, as he himself has not been fully honest with me about his long disappearance and non-responsiveness to my numerous requests for technical help (for which I did pay him). But if any of this is true, it certainly illuminates much of Zip's current stance and the situation in general.
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'What's it like being a smart guy playing second-fiddle to an illiterate attention whore'?
How ridiculous!
Pamela is smart, erudite, legally literate and passionate. The two of you make a formidable team both likeable in equal measure and both bringing individual talents to the counter jihad.
This is not the first time I've heard slander against her by so called allies and I'll not mention names but suffice it to say my visits to the pertinent site are now zero as is my email correspondence.
Sure Pamela represents another side of the coin and rather than pretend academic she offers vitality and a ground level knowledge second to none.
I know how long it takes to write and research pieces such as hers and her work ethic is phenomenal.
To put oneself into a position such as hers takes guts a few of our so called academics and political leaders could borrow from.
And without over gushing, her work on the Rauf/GZ Mosque slice of Islamic chicanery should be regarded as text book. It worked which in our present atmosphere of complete insanity has to be a crowning achievement.
Keep it up.