NEW UPDATE July 31: Big Fur Hat responds brilliantly to a commenter over at iOwntheWorld:
Katherine,
This is not a flame war. And I fully expect commenters from WZ to come here and defend your site.
You offer opinion ie: Geller is nuts.
(Dagwaker offers idiocy ie: Spencer is Jewish (as if that would matter, anyway.))This article offers nothing but facts, and they are not presented to damage WZ”s finances, traffic, or say they suck, or anything of the sort.
Here are the facts:
Zip called Spencer and said “Do not link to my site anymore.”
Spancer asked why.
Zip said because if he did, Pamela might link to that story, and his name would appear on Atlas Shrugs and he wants nothing to do with Atlas.
The discussion ended with Zip saying that Spencer was responsible for the Norway massacre.When a story was suggested on Twitchy by a contributor, the contributor was told by Jessie Malkin that, “we won’t do anything with Atlas Shrugs.”
Hot Air asked Robert Spencer to produce a series called “blogging the Quran.”
The series was popular and then abruptly pulled by Malkin. Morrissey offered this as a reason — the Obama/McCain election is heating up and we don’t have time for this.
Does anyone believe that excuse?I think it is important to have these top blogs say publicly what their problem is.
What I am hearing from you (and dagawker) are two simultaneous contradictory arguments –
Weasel Zippers doesn’t back down from blogging about Islam, he does war porn and calls them barbarians and in the comments we call them goatf*ckers, and we piss on them yada yada yada –
but Geller is too toxic.Do you think that makes any sense to you whatsover, particularly when Geller doesn’t come close to doing, in terms of decorum, what you”re boasting WZ”s does?
Ask yourself this, as well. Spencer and Geller are a team, why does Zip have a problem with Geller and not Spencer? Makes no sense unless it is personal.
Listen, talking about goatf*cking is nice, and dutifully putting up fapping videos of war is great.
With all due respect, the real work is being done in the courts by “that nut” Pamela Geller. What you don’t know, and what Zip doesn’t know, could fill a reservoir. Frankly, you”re way out of your league.
Now, having said that, you”re not just a wee bit curious as to the exact reason the top tier blogs are cutting Pamela out of their incestuous dutch rudder linkage club? Or are you merely content with the marginalizing of one of our top warriors and content that Jihad will be challenged by Zip and the Zip commenting community?Remove Geller from the landscape and what are you left with?
Stay at home bloggers trying to “make a living” who conspire to damage a woman who has her ass on the line defending the first amendment, for you and I, with her own money.
Tell us all again how Geller is nuts, it was charming.
———-
UPDATE: Big Fur Hat over at iOwntheWorld has figured it out: the blogger being discussed below is Weasel Zippers. Zip and I had once been friendly and actually had been planning to meet again for lunch when he wrote me and asked me to stop linking his posts at Jihad Watch, because then when Pamela Geller would link my posts, a link to his site would show up at Atlas Shrugs, and he didn’t want to have anything to do with her because of her exposure of Rick Perry’s Islam curriculum. When I responded incredulously, he grew progressively more abusive, finally ending up by repeating the Leftist/Islamic supremacist smear that I was responsible for the Norway murders. He still does cover jihad issues at Weasel Zippers, but not in a way that would trouble anyone who buys the propaganda line, purveyed by both Leftists and Fox, that Islam is a Religion of Peace that has been Hijacked by a Tiny Minority of Extremists.
———-
Ah, now it all makes sense — not just about Malkin, but I also had been quite friendly with the blogger discussed in the email below, until he suddenly and inexplicably began sending me abusive emails demanding that I stop linking to him. It’s ironic that a central part of the Leftist/Islamic supremacist myth about freedom fighters is that there is some lucrative “Islamophobia industry” and that people are in this for money and fame, when actually the path to money and fame today is to dissemble and downplay the reality of jihad and Islamic supremacism, and their root causes within Islam itself.
“The Right’s dirty little secret,” by Pamela Geller over at Atlas Shrugs today:
Actually, it’s a big dirty secret.
I could not help but notice, over the past few years, the right wing blogosphere’s silence on jihad and Islam. When I started blogging
back in 2004-2005, there were literally scores of counter-jihad blogs
in an already crowded field. Seven years later, it is a paltry few, save for Jihadwatch, The Religion of Peace, Creeping Sharia, and political bloggers like Logan’s Warning, IOTW, American Power blog, Zilla, ….. [UPDATE: and The Right Planet].The first jolt and obvious disconnect was back in 2008, when Michelle
Malkin and Hot Air suddenly and without explanation stopped running
Robert Spencer’s “Blogging the Quran” series and his Jihad Watch v-logs.
They were fantastic, informational and needed. Around the time she
dropped Spencer, Malkin had a short-lived show on Fox and was trying to
get more exposure there, and she also stopped writing
as much as she had about Islam and jihad. I was surprised and
disheartened at the time, but was unaware that these were just some
early signs of a decision by the most influential people on the Right to
sanction the jihad and sharia with their silence. Silence is sanction.
Malkin still posts on big jihad stories every now and then (as do other
right-of-center bloggers), and acts as if nothing has changed and she
is still in the fight, but it has gone to the periphery of her concerns.But this is not about just Michelle Malkin — not by a long shot. I
wrote about her because the evidence in her case is fairly clear. But it
is also about all of them: Drudge, Rush, Kathryn Lopez of National
Review, Mark Levin, Michael Savage, etc. The email below makes the
Right’s actions intelligible. It is unlikely — in fact, inconceivable
— that the blogger described in it, who saw his path to money
and traffic in abandoning the fight against jihad and Islamic
supremacism, was the only one. Obviously, many others have gone down
this road as well. The big blogs on the right never link counter-jihad
blogs. They have all but surrendered.It irked me that the party of constitutional rights and individual
rights would adhere to the blasphemy laws under the sharia (do not
criticize or offend Islam).Which is worse: the left’s vocal support of the sharia or the right’s
silence? The silence is more insidious. At least you know where you
stand with the left. The following email came from a new blogger who was
communicating with me on an unrelated issue. He used to blog at a very
well known, well-trafficked right wing blog, one of the biggest. When I
made a passing remark about the blogger’s negative behavior toward me,
the new blogger responded [names redacted]:Wow. I didn’t know you were aware of XXXX’s attitude towards you. He
is nasty. He hides it well but if you displease him he’ll lash out at
you. He got pissed at me when I posted an article that made Rick Perry
look bad. He changed my headline and comment.I posted a link to one of your blog posts in early 2011. Another blogger on the site pulled the link to you and sent me an email saying stay away from posting links to Atlas. He said XXXX [the owner of the blog] would get mad.
I
think it also had to do with the fact that XXXX changed the blog’s
policy towards Islamic issues. I used to post uncensored stuff about
Islam. Pictures with insults to Allah, swastikas on muslim terrorists,
cartoons I made saying “Heil Allah!”In December 2010,
XXXX decided to tone down XXXX and make it more like a Hot Air style
site. He told me to stop insulting Islam because he wanted to attract advertising and make a living from doing XXXX.
I complied with his wishes and toned down not only Islam stuff but
other subjects as well. I gradually became disenchanted with posting at
XXXX. My daily output became less and less.