The Leftist/Islamic supremacist propaganda machine is crowing today about their victory over the freedom of speech and the truth about Islam and jihad in Worcester, Massachusetts — and Salon’s Alex Seitz-Wald is enraged that Pamela Geller and I have the temerity to fight back against the endless barrage of libel, defamation, and smears that he and his colleagues constantly direct at us and our work. In a screed at Salon today that is remarkable for its hypocrisy, projection, and leaps of logic, Seitz-Wald sketches out his ideal world, in which Geller and I shut up, stop fighting for human rights, and allow them to demonize and destroy us completely as they march forward confidently to authoritarianism, a tightly controlled single-viewpoint public square, and Sharia.
Well, sorry, Alex. I am never shutting up, and I am never giving up. Every day’s headlines shows yet again that what I am saying is true (and rather obvious) and that your defamation and lies are in service of a truly sinister agenda: enabling jihad violence and Islamic supremacism.
Note the “anti-Muslim” in the headline and first paragraph — as if fighting for the freedom of speech, freedom of conscience and equality of rights for all people were actually a fight to deny a group of people their rights. This is a common defamation tactic from the Left and Islamic supremacists, but it reveals more about them than about me: if fighting for human rights for all is “anti-Muslim,” Alex Seitz-Wald and others who use the phrase must think those freedoms are incompatible with being Muslim. So Alex Seitz-Wald turns out to be a greasy Islamophobe.
“Catholic diocese boots anti-Muslim speaker,” by Alex Seitz-Wald for Salon, January 31 (thanks to Pamela Geller):
Add this to the increasing marginalization of radical anti-Muslim views: A Catholic diocese in Massachusetts today rescinded its invitation to Robert Spencer, a prominent anti-Muslim writer and activist, to speak about Islam at an upcoming conference….
The response from Spencer and Geller was predictable: Blame the media. Writing at FrontPage, Spencer claimed that he was “informed” that the Boston Globe’s reporter, Lisa Wangsness, “instigated the entire controversy” and that she “asked [Muslim groups] to call the diocese and demand the cancellation.” Spencer published his entire, lengthy email exchange with Wangsness, including her phone number and email address, along with a correspondence with Wangsness” editor. They declined to comment in an email to Salon.
I was indeed informed that Wangsness asked people to call the diocese and demand that my talk be canceled. I did indeed publish her email address and phone number. Seitz-Wald postures as if this were something heinous, without bothering to mention that I asked people to contact her and “politely and firmly” register their disapproval with her flagrant bias and unethical behavior. He doesn’t mention that I gave out her Boston Globe email address and phone number, which are easily obtainable public information. Reporters who have unpublished phone numbers and email addresses don’t get much reporting done.
Seitz-Wald never complained when his comrade in the “Islamophobia” industry, Reza Aslan’s tiny gunsel Nathan Lean, published on Twitter information about where he thought I lived, in an obvious attempt to frighten and intimidate me into silence in light of the many death threats I’ve received from the jihadis Seitz-Wald and Lean think I’m so hateful for opposing. Lean’s publishing what he thought was real personal information about my whereabouts got no protest from Seitz-Wald, but my initiating a phone and email campaign of protest against a Leftist journalist’s unethical conduct, after the manner of innumerable such campaigns initiated by the likes of Hamas-linked CAIR and other pals of Seitz-Wald — now, that’s beyond the pale! “Right wingers” aren’t supposed to fight back!
Geller picked up the same line of attack, writing, today, “I am surprised that Lisa Wangsness didn’t shout allahu akbar at her attack and victory over the free exchange of ideas.”
This is typical for a group of people who want the First Amendment to work only in their favor. They cry foul any time anyone writes something critical of their work, condemning the supposed infringement on their freedom of speech, yet they turn around and try to bully critical voices in far more aggressive ways than any action directed at them.
The audacity of Seitz-Wald’s projection here is astounding. Geller and I are constantly hounded by these people. The whole idea that we are “bigots,” “racists,” “hatemongers” and the like for resisting jihad and Islamic supremacism is a Big Lie they have invented and pound out every chance they get. And so desperately insecure and authoritarian-inclined are Leftists and Islamic supremacists that they can’t bear the thought of our speaking anywhere — they are determined to drive us out of the public square and render our message outside the bounds of acceptable discourse, and so every time we speak anywhere, they mount protests. They demand that we be canceled (and they succeeded in Worcester), and if that fails, they show up to yell obscenities and insults at us from the audience to try to drown us out and prevent us from speaking. They relentlessly retail lies, half-truths and distortions about what we say and do, trying to stigmatize us so that no one will dare invite us to speak for fear of all the controversy that will inevitably ensue.
Yet even if they were to succeed in demonizing us utterly, such that everyone will fear to have anything to do with us, their enterprise in a larger sense is doomed to failure, because what we say is true, and its truth grows clearer all the time. That’s why they have to keep the heat on, and make it ever hotter, as hot as they can, for us and for every freedom fighter — only by a never-ending barrage can propaganda succeed in drowning out the truth, and even when that barrage seems to have succeeded, the blades of grass will always poke through the concrete. Seitz-Wald and his friends know this, also — and so they know they have to yell all the louder, and smear us all the more energetically, in their increasingly desperate attempt to obscure the truth.
Pamela Geller makes a superb point on this: “Seitz-Wald claims that we ‘want the First Amendment to work only in their favor.’ Uh, wrong. I only want the First Amendment to work. Period. I want to be able to run my ads without having to file six-figure First Amendment lawsuits. I want to speak and not get canceled. I want a scintilla of truth to be reported about the work I do. Just for starters, we are anti-jihad, not anti-Muslim. No matter how many tens of thousands of posts, columns and books I write to the contrary or how many Muslim girls we help get to safe houses — these tools propagandize and carry water for the most notorious Islamic supremacists. Seitz-Wald shills for the most brutal and extreme ideology on the face of the earth and he is pulling moral superiority. What he lacks in spine and guts he compensates for in cojones.”
Any journalists or public advocates who cross them are bound to have their emails published and a string of ad hominem attacks thrown their way in a manner than can only be intended to intimidate. This effectively silences many critics, who may feel it’s not worth incurring the hate to write about Geller or Spencer.
I had to laugh. It seems as if every few days I am writing a response to another critical article defaming me and disparaging my work. There hasn’t been any silencing of any critics as far as I can tell. Nor have I ever published the email address of a reporter before, because I never before asked people to complain about the conduct of an irresponsible journalist. And as for “ad hominem attacks,” I laughed even harder. Seitz-Wald here is accusing us of exactly what he and his friends are actually guilty of: they keep up an endless stream of ad hominem attacks in order to effectively silence us, doing their best to intimidate people into being afraid to associate with us.
Of this reporter, for instance, Geller once said it was “only a matter of time before he is getting measured for a suicide vest.” She called a Jewish group in Chicago that spoke out against her anti-Muslim bus and subway ads “Judenrat,” as in Jews who collaborated with Nazis.
Alex, you left out that I called you a “dim bulb” for calling a column of mine an interview and then admitting you hadn’t even read it before pouring out your vitriol. He provides no link to that one — probably because he doesn’t want anyone to see a post that includes much more than just that name (which he richly deserves): a comprehensive evisceration of his factual assertions, logical deductions, and journalistic integrity.
Seitz-Wald is firmly ensconced in the Left’s academic and media echo chamber, where only one perspective is heard and challenges are not allowed. Guys like him are amazed when their work is not received with fawning praise. In contrast, Geller and I know that every mainstream media reporter who ever contacts us is going to try to make us look as bad as possible, and that our views will never get a fair hearing in that mainstream. We know we’re not going to get a fair shake, and just hope we can get enough in to show someone who is reading a truth of which he may have been unaware.
That’s fine and they have the right to call anyone whatever they want, just as the diocese is free to rescind its invitation to Spencer and the Muslim groups are free to criticize it and the Globe is free to write about it, but you can’t have it both ways. It seems Spencer and Geller are not interested in “the free exchange of ideas,” as Geller said, but rather licence [sic] to express themselves with impunity and without criticism.
More projection! He accuses us of not being interested in the free exchange of ideas, when it is I who have asked innumerable Leftist and Islamic supremacist spokesmen and writers to engage in discussion or debate, on my ABN show or in another venue, and they have almost all refused. Meanwhile, when I write substantive responses to opposing views, there is hardly ever a response — no discussion, no free exchange of ideas. Here are two recent ones: responses to Haroon Moghul and Harris Zafar. Moghul and Zafar did not bother to respond to the points I raised; they didn’t have to, because the propaganda machine they serve had already sufficiently demonized me with ad hominem attacks that they didn’t think it necessary to reply to the “Islamophobic bigot.”
And one final irony. Seitz-Wald is whining about Wangsness’s freedom of speech, but remember: the Globe reporter didn’t just “write about it,” but (if my sources are correct, and I have no reason to doubt them) worked to make sure that I would not be heard in Worcester. Free exchange of ideas, indeed. But perhaps I shouldn’t expect more rigorous thinking from such a dim bulb as Alex Seitz-Wald.