Yesterday Jihad Watch reader JS brought to my attention an “anti-hate” website that listed Jihad Watch among “Islamophobes” who hate all Muslims and want them all killed. Since, of course, this is a false and slanderous charge, I asked the site author for a retraction. In a series of virulently hostile emails, he refused to give it, and said:
I understand that you have said for some time that unmoderated comments on your site don’t represent your official position, however, allowing such comments to remain on your site clearly implies endorsement.
Is that so? Here are some recent comments that “remain” on this site:
Islam is a perfect, beautiful way of life. If you knew the truth you would WANT to be governed by sharia law because you’d be more free and happier than you are now. It is so far from the warped perception you have of it that you must have been actively and purposefully mislead.
Islam is still the best way forward for all humanity….global Islam IS the way forward….
I am glad that Iran is willing to defend the Ummah against possible attack from the kuffur nations. The Ummah has been dominated and humiliated by the kuffur. The kuffur also dominate and humiliate women….
So let’s see. I guess if allowing comments to remain on this site “clearly implies endorsement,” by the looks of those comments I’m a supporter of the imposition of Sharia law on the West, as well as of Iranian belligerence.
But of course, any such notions can easily be dispelled by reference to my own writings, in which I have been critical of Sharia’s denial of rights to women and religious minorities, as well as of Ahmadinejad’s genocidal aspirations. And that’s just the point: as I have said many times, if you think I endorse a comment here, please establish that from my own writings. But this writer did not do that for the positions he ascribes to Jihad Watch, and he cannot do that, because they are not my positions.
Open comments on this site exist in order to foster mature discussion, strategizing, exchanging of background information, and the like. We have many times asked commenters not to engage in venting that plays into the hands of the jihadists and their useful idiots. Comments are unmoderated, and there are thousands upon thousands of them at this point, most of which I never see. If I see a comment advocating hatred of all Muslims and calling for them to be killed, I remove it (and I ask you to kindly alert me to such when you see them, so that I can do so). But there is a more important point here, illustrated by further remarks to me from this blogger:
I’m sorry, but I cannot retract what is true. I understand that, if you follow your usual practice, you will now post attacks on me, and some of your more rabid followers will send death threats. I have fought online hate speech for quite some time, and am used to effectively dealing with all the consequences and dangers of such. I would hope that you would be a gentleman and not try to incite such, and I will closely monitor the situation.
When I read that, I understood what this man wanted: he was hoping that I would take his bait and post a link to his site (which I will not do, and I have refrained from quoting it also) so that he would be able to claim victim status on the basis of negative emails he would receive as a result of my posting. (It is ironic, also, that I am apparently supposed to accept being slandered without responding, but that’s another matter.) It is plain slander for him to suggest that I incite anyone to issue death threats, but the point is this: I have received numerous genuine death threats, but that doesn’t faze him one bit. He is hoping to use the response he thinks he would get from this site to help shift attention away from the genuine death threats issued by the Islamic jihadists, and the violence they commit daily in the name of Islam, to the alleged “hate” generated here.
This is a common tactic, and a widely-used one. The Holocaust conference going on in Tehran is a large example of the same phenomenon represented in a tiny way by this man who is slandering me. The message in Tehran is essentially that the Holocaust didn’t happen, but that it should have, and will soon. Ahmadinejad and his stooges are trying to shift attention away from the manifest reality of genocide against the Jews to the trumped-up victim status of Iran and its allied belligerent states. They don’t want you to see Israel as a victim, but as a perpetrator.
Likewise, in a small way, so often here at Jihad Watch critics attempt to shift the focus away from the jihad violence we report here, and onto how evil I am simply for the act of reporting it. In doing this, they manifest a moral corruption and hypocrisy comparable, on a vastly smaller scale of course, to that of Ahmadinejad himself.