Inside the LGF bunker
Back in October 2007, libelblogger Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs first began tarring several European political parties as racists and neo-Nazis, and accordingly smearing the Counterjihad conference in Brussels as some kind of neofascist gathering, despite the fact that one speaker spoke there about Islamic antisemitism, and Israeli Knesset member Aryeh Eldad spoke as well, along with the great historian Bat Ye’or and others, including me.
Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs, who was also there, wrote of Charles’s reaction that it was “wrong to dismiss this incredible effort by so many brave fighters and truth tellers so casually and so out of hand.” The next day it got even more wrong when the Council on American-Islamic Relations — unindicted co-conspirators in a Hamas jihad terror funding case — used Johnson’s material to defame me in a press release; I responded to CAIR’s libels here, and Pamela wrote a post entitled “LGF and CAIR,” saying, “It is most unfortunate when a group of Islamic thugs get inspiration from LGF. I never thought I would see the day that CAIR and Charles over at Little Green Footballs would be aligned against a counter jihad movement, but perhaps pigs do fly.”
Johnson, in response, started his damaging blog war, which continues. Pamela was roundly criticized for her post about LGF and CAIR, but it turns out to have been entirely accurate, and, indeed, prescient: Johnson’s libelous and spiteful Little Green Footballs blog has become a source of talking points for Honest Ibe Hooper and Co. at CAIR. In a fantastic paroxysm of illogic, Johnson accused Pamela, and later Gates of Vienna, Fjordman, and others who found his flimsy evidence wanting, of being racists and Nazi sympathizers themselves. And CAIR laps it up: today CAIR issued a press release about Geert Wilders’s upcoming speech in Florida — thanks to all who sent it to me.
CAIR: Fla. House GOP Leader Linked to Anti-Islam Hate Fest
Rep. Hasner asked to disassociate himself from ‘Islamophobes and Muslim-bashers’
WASHINGTON, April 13 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — The Florida chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) today called on the leader of that state’s House Republicans to disassociate himself from an upcoming anti-Islam conference backed by a “motley collection of Islamophobes and Muslim-bashers.”
CAIR said Rep. Adam Hasner is on the “host committee” for the April 27 conference in Delray Beach, Fla., featuring Dutch anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders. Wilders was recently denied entry to Britain because of his extreme anti-Muslim views, including urging that the Quran, Islam’s revealed text, be banned.
Then follow the usual CAIR collection of half-truths and distortions, along with plain truths about Islam and jihad presented as if they were outrageous falsehoods, all retailed here in an attempt to defame the speakers at and sponsors of this conference — including, besides Wilders himself, Joe Kaufman, Frank Gaffney, and Pamela — who is raked over the coals for blog posts entitled “Advancing Islamic Lies,” “Islam 2008: Religion of Barbarism” and “Slavery: An Arab custom” — as if it were unheard of that Muslims today were in the name of Islam lying, condoning slavery, and committing acts of barbarism. And then comes the CAIR/LGF link: “Geller has even been criticized by other Islamophobes for her extremism and for supporting far-right groups in Europe.”
After that, in a considerable stretch, since I am not speaking at this conference and have had no part in organizing it, the CAIR press release turns to attack me, relying heavily on Charles Johnson’s talking points:
Robert Spencer, who has also been criticized for the extremism exhibited on his anti-Muslim blog, is listed as a conference “coalition partner.” Spencer was recently involved in a controversy over his joining a Facebook group advocating genocide of Muslims in Turkey.
This charge comes, of course, from Charles Johnson. I responded here. The reality is that I was joining every group that invited me to join on Facebook, and had not read what the group was all about — which was undeniably careless. Johnson, his cohort Ned Humphrey (“Cato the Elder”) and the cult followers who remain to comment at Johnson’s blog gleefully insisted that this was some indication of my true, secret sentiments — as if I would cleverly and fiendishly conceal genocidal desires for years, only to casually reveal them in a Facebook group. This kind of attack is absurd on its face, and impervious to reasoned rebuttal — after all, how can one prove anything in the realm of secret thoughts? But it is noteworthy that Johnson can’t produce a shred of evidence for his claim from anything I have written. Instead, he has relied on fellow libelblogger Kejda Gjermani’s increasingly implausible guilt-by-association sand castles, but nothing from what I’ve actually written, in eight books, hundreds of articles, and thousands of blog posts. You’d think that if I’d be cavalier enough to join a genocidal Facebook group on purpose, because I approved of what it stood for, that the mask would have slipped a few other times.
But no — for evidence of genocidal tendencies Johnson has to resort to Jihad Watch commenters, and CAIR quotes him:
The Little Green Footballs blog, also widely known for its Islamophobic viewpoint, wrote of Spencer’s site: “His website has descended into a true hate site at this point, dominated by extreme, bigoted commenters who regularly advocate genocide and mass murder of Muslims.”
Johnson did not, of course, produce any evidence to back up this claim. As I have stated many times, genocidal comments are not welcome here. Marisol does a terrific job monitoring the comments fields, and removes such comments when she sees them. But there are a great many comments, and sometimes one may slip by and remain. Does that mean I endorse it? No — read the disclaimer at the top of every comment field. And for the best explanation of why it is preposterous to try to tar me with what commenters say, let’s go to…Charles Johnson! Before he went stark raving mad and betrayed all of what had been or at least seemed to have been his principles, Johnson wrote this (you’ll have to copy and paste the link for it to work; the aging adolescent libelblogger has blocked direct links from this site) at LGF when CAIR tried to defame him over comments on his site:
* There are more than 25,000 registered users at LGF.
* There are often more than 5,000 comments posted every single day.
* It is run by *one* person, and comments such as those quoted by CAIR are policed and deleted as soon as possible. But this is an open discussion forum, and comments do not represent the opinion of LGF — as the disclaimer states on every single page of comments.
* The comments quoted by CAIR were posted at LGF for less than two hours before CAIR sent out their press release, and were deleted as soon as the administrator (that would be me) became aware of them. CAIR did not contact me about the comments either–they just went straight to the FBI, and put out a libelous press release.
We don’t have registered users, and we don’t have that many comments in a day, but the general points hold: comments do not necessarily represent my opinion — if you think one does, find a statement like it from my own writings — and we remove genocidal comments whenever we see them.
How interesting that what Johnson would criticize CAIR for doing in February 2008 he now does himself, and CAIR makes use of his libels. I imagine that Johnson must be very proud of having become a tool for a Hamas front.
Finally, what is especially despicable about Charles Johnson and his cult members is that they continue to libel me, Pamela and others as being willing to “get in bed with Nazis” — and they self-righteously proclaim, “I won’t share a foxhole with Nazis. Never!”
Great. But they never admit of the possibility that Johnson has not made his case against Filip Dewinter and Vlaams Belang, the chief targets of his smear campaign. They don’t even consider the possibility that someone might be unconvinced by Johnson’s tissue of funeral photographs, political cartoons, and bookshelf knicknacks, and not believe that Dewinter and the VB are Nazis at all. The reality of the situation is not that Pamela or I or anyone else whom Johnson has defamed and who is trying to call on the West to resist jihad and Islamic supremacism is willing to “get into a foxhole with Nazis.” The reality is that they aren’t Nazis. Nazis are antisemitic in the extreme, they do not support Israel, etc.
If Charles Johnson were fairminded in the slightest degree, he would say, “They don’t believe they are neo-Nazis,” not “They are willing to ally with neo-Nazis.” That he says the latter instead of the former indicates that he is a desperately mendacious little man whom no one should any longer be taking seriously as an analyst of the contemporary scene. Except, of course, for CAIR.
Yid with Lid weighs in on the CAIR press release here.
(Riotous video at the top of the post thanks to Pamela. Those who have been following Johnson’s prodigious meltdown and realization that it is actually September 10 will understand it — for others, apologies for all the inside baseball. “Killgore Trout,” “Sharmuta,” and “Iron Fist” are LGF sycophants. The immediate reference is Johnson’s closing of his “Lizard Lounge” chat room after finding in it too many dissenters from his patently false claim that George W. Bush bowed to the Saudi King in the same way as Obama recently did.)
UPDATE: The fallout — new video (thanks again to Pamela)!