Atlas Shrugs has finished third in the 2008 Weblog Awards voting for Best Conservative Blog, and that is a major victory because Little Green Footballs, the ugly libel and slander site that used to be a significant anti-jihad voice on the web, finished…fourth.
Pamela has background about the stupid blog war that has gone on since October 2007, and I explain here how Charles Johnson smeared and defamed me for a couple of weblinks under a disclaimer. None of this would be important were it not for the fact that Charles Johnson from the beginning of the controversy made a ridiculous leap of illogic: he concluded that those who were unconvinced by his evidence that various European parties were racists and fascists must be racists and fascists themselves — with the evidence for that being their very skepticism. And then he set out to destroy the reputations of those whom he had decided were racists and fascists.
That was unconscionable — and he is still doing it. And even worse, he met with some success. That this vile behavior would meet only with obsequiousness or indifference in what can be called “the Internet community” compounds the injustice of it all. How many of those who have gone along with him like sheep, shunning those he has defamed, are really convinced by his arguments (which consist of things like people standing together in photos, as if getting your picture taken with someone means you agree with all his views), and how many are simply afraid of his numbers and influence?
And so it is deeply satisfying that one of Johnson’s chief targets, Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs, a great friend of Jihad Watch and warrior for freedom and human rights, beat his site out in these Weblog Awards. Sure, it’s just an Internet contest — but tonight, it is a bit of poetic justice.