On the Dhimmi Watch side of this site, comments have disappeared on several recent posts. I did not remove them. I don’t know why this happened, but I have inquired with Hosting Matters, and it seems to have been just a onetime database glitch of some kind.
Also, several people — people who are not banned from commenting — have written in to tell me that they can’t comment or sometimes have difficulty doing so. I don’t know why that is happening, but I’m trying to find out.
Meawnhile, a word about this site and comments in general. It is tempting, I suppose, for people who comment here and everywhere on the Internet to speak as if they were sitting in their living room with a group of close friends. It is easy to forget that this is a public place and that people from all over the world are monitoring it closely, for a wide variety of reasons. When CAIR piled on to ISNA’s recent libel fest about my upcoming seminar for the Indianapolis JTTF, they trotted out their greatest hits package: all their own distortions, half-truths, and libels they have circulated about me over the past few years. Some of those, of course, quoted not me but comments from this site — which is an indication of why CAIR is the only party that is happy, besides the commenter, when someone writes something here that is genocidal, abusive, or genuinely racist (terms like “Muzzies” and worse are not welcome). Of course, they didn’t hesitate to quote comments that have actually been removed from this site, and for that matter may have been posted by provocateurs in the first place (I’ve caught quite a few here), but what does CAIR care for accuracy?
It is absurd to claim that such comments reflect on my own positions, since people of all perspectives have commented here. If they think I agree with a particular comment, let CAIR prove it from my own writings. In reality, comments are unmoderated, and I mostly do not read them. I don’t have time to read them. If you put something in a comment expecting I would see it, I probably didn’t, unless someone emailed me and told me about it. When people do email and tell me about such comments or pertinent material, I generally respond if there is anything to say. But the fact that comments are unmoderated means that if I don’t see an abusive comment, and Hugh and Marisol don’t see it, it will likely remain onsite. That does not mean that we endorse it. But when they are called to my attention, I remove them. Thus if you can email me and call my attention to such comments so that I can remove them, I’d be grateful.
Some — particularly those whose comments have been removed — have said that to erase such comments amounts to the very dhimmitude I am trying to keep America from adopting. I disagree. For one thing, I believe that curses, epithets, racial or other kinds of insults, and the like have no place in any public discourse. I also believe that their presence lowers the level of that discourse and leads many to believe, rightly or wrongly, that a site where such things are said by commenters must have nothing worthwhile to say in its articles. And also I think it’s simply stupid to hand ammunition to those who are doing all they can to discredit people who are trying to raise awareness about the threat of jihad and Islamic supremacism. In a war, fight strategically so as to win; a warrior whose efforts help the other side more than his own can hardly be said to be doing that.
I am trying to keep the focus on what we are doing here. This site is not a place for anyone to vent about how much he or she may dislike any particular culture in its benign manifestations: its music, its art, what have you. It is a site about some particular evils: denial of the freedom of conscience, denial of equality of rights before the law, violent and/or subversive activities in the service of Islamic supremacism, the sources of the evils, and what can and must be done about them. It is an effort working in a very small way for the defense of Western Judeo-Christian civilization and of everyone in the world who is actually or potentially victimized by jihad, Sharia and Islamic supremacism.
Please keep your focus on these things. One formerly frequent commenter here persistently insisted that Hugh and I should turn our focus to a different problem — rather like someone insisting that a baker become an auto mechanic, or otherwise his work would be worthless. People who think our focus is wrong are welcome to find other sites with a focus more to their liking, but this will remain Jihad Watch, not PC Watch or Annoying Music Watch or Immigration Watch or Crimes Against Muslims Watch or anything else people might want to make it into. I have kept comments all this time because I believe the solution to bad speech is more speech, and because many things of value have been posted over the years. Also, I will not be cowed by CAIR’s bullyboys. Nor, however, do I wish to supply them with the rope they so earnestly wish to have in order to hang me.