Pamela Geller supports the EDL!

In my ever growing category of 'shit you couldn't make up', enters once again bat shit crazy Pamela Geller (Oshry), superwoman of American Patriotism and Islamophobia with knobs on, the only woman on Earth that wants to have John Bolton's babies and now it would appear, also supporter of the BNP fringe group EDL (English Defense League). Pamela makes Bat Ye'or, Fiamma Nirenstein and 'Mad Mel' Phillips look like the Three Sage Women of Radical Zionism.

Her latest exploits include posting a photo of a Nazi in uniform with the name 'Ben White' emblazoned on it. The caption to the photo reads:

Ben White is crossing the pond to spew his vile hate and incitement to kill Jews at Israel Apartheid Week Islamic Hate Week at Columbia

Hey Benny boy, this ain't Londonistan. Your Jew hate rhetoric will not fly here, you will be exposed for the Nazi you really are. Stay in the UK, which deserves you, and watch your concentration camp news reels into the wee hours, you miserable wretch.

And now she wants to stand shoulder to shoulder with the EDL:

Geert Wilders was victorious in his bid to strike his banning in Britain by the jihadist infiltrators. The EDL is holding a rally in Defense of Free Speech, in London at the House of Lords.

How I wish I could be there to stand with the English Defense League.

Pam, so do we, think of what a great photo op it would be for us: you, the EDL, Geert Wilders (and maybe Mad Mel?) all in 'Londonistan'! United they stand!

With such an association the EDL could kiss goodbye any claims that their concerns are only with Radical Muslims and Jihadists: Pamela and Geert have problem with Islam, tout court.

For added fun, visit my collection of Pamelisms.

Pro-Israel, anti-Mosque: what's new?

Excellent stuff on Mondo by Jeff Klein on the controversy that thanks to Pamela Geller risks setting the US alight and US Muslims fearing for their existence...

Haven’t we seen this movie before? Yes, in Boston, and with nearly the same cast of characters. The fight against the Roxbury Mosque and Cultural CenterIslamic Society of Boston (ISB) was framed as a battle against “Muslim extremists” and “terror supporters.” In reality (as court documents showed) the campaign was organized by activists with the far-right pro-Israel David Project and CAMERA, spearheaded by founder Charles Jacobs, who now heads a front group with the Orwellian name “Americans for Peace and Tolerance.” Later, the story was picked up and promoted by the Murdoch-owned Boston Herald and the local Fox TV affiliate. When the ISB eventually sued its attackers for defamation, the defendants were represented by an attorney who was also a leader of New England AIPAC (American-Israel Public Affairs Committee). planned by the

Likewise, the New York Islamic Community Center project in lower Manhattan was uncontroversial until it began to be labeled falsely as “the Ground Zero Mosque” and was vilified by right-wing bloggers with a pro-Israel agenda. Although the media has reported on the way the Right has used anti-Muslim bigotry to stir up racist outrage against the Islamic Center, there has been little notice of the Israel connection. Jihad Watch founder Robert Spencer and Atlas ShruggedBoston. Geller is a regular commentator on the far-right Israeli radio network Arutz Sheva. Together they created a front-group to promote the anti-Muslim crusade called Stop Islamization of America. The campaign of slander against the “Ground Zero Mosque” was first mainstreamed in the Murdoch-owned New York Post and has been trumpeted relentlessly by Fox News, as well as by Neocon operatives like Bill Kristol and Liz Cheney. blogger Pamela Geller, who led the charge, are active in the same circles as the pro-Israel extremists in

Why? Because promoting a “culture-clash” between the “West” and Islam is seen as a way to bolster support for Israel and to sustain a permanent US “War on Terror.”

As early as September 12, 2001 the New York Times reported:

Israeli leaders, who have chafed at occasional American criticism of their measures against Palestinians, said the day's attacks would awaken the United States to the threat of global terrorism.

Asked tonight what the attack meant for relations between the United States and Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, the former prime minister, replied, ''It's very good.'' Then he edited himself: ''Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy.'' He predicted that the attack would ''strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we've experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror.''

In an appearance late tonight, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon repeatedly placed Israel on the same ground as the United States, calling the assault an attack on ''our common values'' and declaring, ''I believe together we can defeat these forces of evil.''

When the Roxbury Mosque was under attack in Boston my organization, Dorchester People for Peace, and other progressives took a stand in its defense. DPP sponsored a well-attended public forum on the topic in 2006. Since then, we have worked closely with our local Muslim friends – many of whom are US-born African-Americans with deep ties to our community. Although the current furor is over a proposed Mosque in New York, the issues are much the same. Islamophobia continues to be a racist tool of the war-promoting Right and the most extremist sectors of the Israel Lobby. Anti-war and anti-racist organizations cannot remain indifferent.

Jeff Klein is retired president of a local union at the Mass Water Resources Authority, where he worked for many years as a machinist in the Deer Island facility. He is active these days with Dorchester People for Peace, a local anti-war organization.

Source.

Pat Condell: endorsed by Pamela Geller...

Pat Condell, the British expert on knownothingism of the New Atheism and darling of American Atheists (I write this as an atheist), has his latest videofart displayed prominently by Pamela Geller. Pampams is basically the Ground Zero of... erm... the "Ground Zero Mosque" controversy.

It's a bit like being praised by David Duke, of course. Well done Pat! Nice one mate!

And still it looks as if Pat's Big Break in the US is about as forthcoming as his little break here in the UK, where the Chuckle Brothers appear still to out rival Condell.

More Pamelisms...

Today he’s in denial, tomorrow he’ll be in the Nile?

Fingers crossed…



Of course he could seek sanctuary in Tel Awashington… oh no, major problem: he may be the greatest Arab arse licker to the Zionist Cause ever but he’s still an Arab!

A few worthwhile reactions from around the blogoglobe:

Very succinct: Joe Biden is an idiot. Slightly belated observation perhaps but better late than never…

Surprise du jour: Michelle Malkin gets it more or less right!

Surprisingly moderate reaction: Payama Pam Geller

Angry Arab (As’ad AbuKhalil): Ben Ali’s speech didn’t work, neither did Mubarak’s

Best so far, in my humble opinion: Max Ajl: Yaskoot Hosni Mubarak

Richard Silverstein makes a interesting connection between Tunis/Cairo 2011 and Tehran 2009. Not sure about that but overall good analysis nonetheless

Most risible, but far from surprising, from ‘Joseph W’ at the Brown Sauce in a post that’s not entirely Egypt related but close enough, wait for it because it’s a real corker: ”It is true, of course, that the USA assists democratic opponents of authoritarian rule across the world.” Two words: Latin America. But Joseph W, BTW, is a Zionist and they don't care about Latin America, so now you know…

Having said that, the Lord of Darkness himself, Bibi Netanyahoo, takes the cake with "Having said that, I'm not sure the time is right for the Arab region to go through the democratic process", he revealed in Time. Stoooopid Arabs.

Strange days, I’d never thought I’d find myself temporarily more in some reluctant agreement with Pamela Geller than with Bibi…

Meanwhile in Ha’aretz Aluf Benn frets that “without Mubarak, Israel is left with almost no friends in the Middle East”. Perhaps Israel should look further a field for buddies? I hear Mugabwe is still free and possible looking for alliances? But alternatively it could just ‘do the right thing’…

The Old/New Clash of Civilizations

An excellent piece here by Jerry Haber (The Magnes Zionist) on the Norwegian atrocities. Read and enjoy! (Contains all of Jerry’s links).

In the Norwegian massacres we saw the latest salvo in the clash of civilizations– not between a “Judaeo-Christian” West, and an Islamism bent on taking over the world, but between a totalitarian vision built on fear of the other and feelings of religio/ethnic/cultural superiority, and a liberal vision based on the value of diversity and the necessity to bridge religio/ethnic/cultural divides. This clash of civilizations has been with us for some time: in the twentieth century it reared its ugliest head in the temporary triumphs of Nazism and Stalinism. But it is much older than that; it is found anywhere where a totalitarian worldview is merged with racial, religious, and ethnic prejudice. Tertullian once asked, “What do Athens and Jerusalem have in common?” Well, one thing is tribalism, with its concomitant xenophobia and intolerance of the other.

The reactions on the right to the Norwegian massacre have ranged from the sanctimonious to the nauseating. First there was the assumption that al-Qaeda was involved, since, heck, it’s always the Muslims who poison the wells in their headlong rush towards Armageddon, oops, I mean the messianic world order, oops, I mean the Rapture, oops, I mean the World Khalifate. If you don’t believe me, you don’t know Hebrew/Arabic/Latin, because what they say in their texts and in their cabals is very revealing – I can produce for you any number of ex-Muslims/Jews/PLO-terrorists/Mormons – who will reveal to you the secrets of the order. And frankly, friend, you are in denial – you simply don’t want to know how those Jews/Islamists/Christians are making for world domination.

When the perpetrator turned out to be a rightwing Norwegian and not an Islamist, there was the rush in the rightwing blogosphere to do damage control, because, God forbid, this unfortunate incident could turn out to be a setback for the forces of Good (e.g., Jews, Christians, Old Europe, Zionists, Israelis -- I actually saw that line of thinking in the talk-backs.) So the tactics are to condemn the violence (as perfunctorily and as non-comittally as possible, e.g., talk about “undiluted evil”), to mitigate the act (“lone wolf,” “violent Christian fundamentalist,” “psycho”); not even to mention the ideological motivation; and – equally as important – to move on and not to come back to the story, even though it is one of the lead stories of the week.

For a shining example of a MSM blogger who employs these aforementioned tactics, see the two posts here and here of Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin, who now has won my prize for the Dumbest Conservative Blogger of the Year, and, friends, that competition is no cakewalk.

Some social scientists like to distinguish between circles of support for ideologically-motivated violent crimes. At the center of the circle are the perpetrators, the so-called “lone wolves.” In the circle around them are the ideologues who preach violence, and those who do everything but preach violence. In the next circle are the ideologues who condemn the perpetrators in varying degrees, but who nonetheless support their ideological motives, and somehow mitigate the crime (strategies include appeals to “context,” distinctions between just and unjust grievances, injecting distractions such as, “Yeah, but what about suicide bombing?”)

There is usually no good reason to assign responsibility for an attack on innocents to the ideologues in the outer circle. There are many people who share the perpetrator’s ideology who do not condone the act, much less contemplate doing it themselves. I know rightwing ideologues who were initially shocked and dismayed at Yigal Amir and Barukh Goldstein’s actions; some even remained shocked. All people live with contradictory beliefs and self-delusions. Some of them can say that X deserves death and not mean that literally.

But although those who occupy the outside circle – let’s call them the Ideological tribalists – shouldn’t take the rap for the perpetrators, they are certainly responsible for their own bigotry, which itself is a moral wrong, whatever the consequences. Pamela Geller is not responsible for the Norwegian massacres, but she is responsible for the anti-Islamic hate she spews forth – hate that is a carbon copy of the anti-Semitic diatribes of Father Coughlin in the 1930s.

Europe faces serious questions, and different solutions have and will be tried. There are trade-offs in the amount of diversity a society can allow itself to have, and there are many degrees in the middle between enforced assimilation on the one hand and balkanization on the other. The Jerusalem Post editorial that declared that multi-culturalism in Europe has failed should remember how many Jews left Judaism in Europe because of the pressure to assimilate – and how toleration of diversity has allowed varieties of Judaism to flourish in many places. Sure, there has to be some balance – but to err in the direction of diversity befits the liberal society. What cannot be tolerated is hate-filled bigotry, whether Jewish, Christian, Muslim, or None of the Above.

There always are barbarians at the gates. In every generation they rise up to destroy us. The question is how do we fight against them? And even more pressing, how do we recognize them?

Religious/nationalist/ethnic fundamentalism of all kind, coupled with power, not to mention weapons, has been shown time and again to be deadly. Their adherents are the barbarian at the gates; and fighting them is the clash of civilizations. And liberal and conservative moderates of all stripes should ally to fight those barbarians.

I write this not just as a liberal but as an orthodox Jew. Nobody suffers more from religious fundamentalism than religious moderates.

Another 'AHA!' moment: Ayaan's web of lslamophobic lies

The life, lies and times of Ayaan Hirsi Magan (aka Ali), who lied about her name, her refugee status, her date of birth and her 'forced' marriage until Dutch authorities unearthed the truth and our pathological liar made off to the ole' US of A. Magan/Ali's views on Islam and Muslims are no more interesting or fact-based than most garbage that you would find on any thirteen-in-a-dozen Islamophobic raggy blog but for reasons outlined in the article below, many still consider her an authority on the subject of Islam. In my opinion she's no more than a hyper-ambitious money and status-driven fabulator. Now she's been found fabricating again. Max Blumenthal has the story.

Exposing Anti-Islam Author Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Latest Deception

While promoting her new book, Heretic, on a March 23 episode of "The Daily Show," Somali-born author and anti-Islam activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali made a staggering claim: "If you look at 70 percent of the violence in the world today, Muslims are responsible," she told host Jon Stewart.

Stewart did not demand any evidence and Hirsi Ali provided no citation. However, she made a strikingly similar statement in a March 20 essay previewing her new book for the Wall Street Journal: "According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies," Hirsi Ali wrote in WSJ’s Saturday Essay, "at least 70% of all the fatalities in armed conflicts around the world last year were in wars involving Muslims."

I contacted the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), a leading British foreign policy think tank, to inquire about the source of Hirsi Ali’s statistic. According to IISS spokesperson Kat Slowe, IISS did not state such a figure in its research.

"I have spoken to a number of our experts and they cannot identify where this statistic may have come from," Slowe told me.

"Their best guess is that the journalist in question [Hirsi Ali] may have access/a subscription to the [IISS] Armed Conflict Database and may have calculated this statistic independently. There are some concerns that it could be misleading as, without Syria (near 200,000 total deaths, and almost half of last year’s global conflict deaths) the figure would look massively different (and of course, this conflict did not have its root in religion)," Slowe added.

Hirsi Ali’s AHA Foundation did not respond to my request for a citation on the statistic, nor did the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute that employs Hirsi Ali as a resident scholar. My email query to Hirsi Ali’s personal account at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, where she serves as a fellow, also went unanswered.

Around 24 hours after my initial query, Hirsi Ali publicly backed off her claim that Muslims are "responsible" for most of the violence in the world. "Depressing that 70% of fatalities in armed conflicts around the world last year were in wars involving Muslims," she declared on her personal Twitter account.

Hirsi Ali linked to a survey of casualties in global conflicts by IISS’ Hanna Ucko Neill and Jens Wardenaer which made no reference to Muslims or religiously inspired violence. Apparently Hirsi Ali calculated the statistic on her own by using an IISS report that documented conflicts in territories from eastern Ukraine to sub-Saharan Africa to the Middle East to Mexico, where drug gangs fueled widespread killing. The IISS’ Slowe noted that the year’s surge in conflict-related deaths occurred thanks to the fighting in Syria, explaining that Hirsi Ali’s claim was "misleading" because "this conflict did not have its root in religion."

Instead of responding to my question about her statistic, Hirsi Ali’s AHA Foundation forwarded my email query to the Washington Free Beacon, a right-wing publication with its own history of Islamophobic tall tales and hoaxes. In a currently un-bylined article about the query, the Free Beacon accused me of anti-Semitism.


History of fraud
Hirsi Ali’s highly suspect statistic is only the latest deception by one of the world’s most prominent opponents of Islam. While other anti-Muslim activists like Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller have marginalized themselves on the fringes of the far-right, Hirsi Ali remains a darling of the American mainstream media. In Heretic, a polemic recycling many of her past arguments against Islam, she calls for the emergence of a Muslim Martin Luther — the authoritarian 16th-century zealot who called for burning down the synagogues of Jews, whom he compared to a gangrenous disease. With the book's release, Hirsi Ali has been welcomed with open arms by the BBC, CNN’s Anderson Cooper, and a relatively accommodating Jon Stewart. ABC News has even run an excerpt from Heretic, while the New York Times Book Review hosted her for an interview filled with hardball questions about her favorite children’s books.

Hirsi Ali’s power to persuade lies in her dramatic personal story and the public persona she has constructed. She has marketed herself as a expert native informant who has emerged out of the dark heart of radical Islam and into the light of Western civilization. Her tale is an uplifting, comforting one that tells many Westerners what they want to hear about themselves and their perceived enemies. With anti-Muslim attitudes at their peak across Europe and the US, her sweeping critique of Islam as an endemically violent faith has enormous cachet. The only problem is that like her writings on Islam, much of what she has told the public about herself is questionable.

In May 2006, the Dutch television program Zembla thoroughly debunked the dramatic story Hirsi Ali had told to advance her career, concluding that Hirsi Ali had sold the Dutch public "a story full of obscurities."

Born Ayaan Hirsi Magam, she migrated to the Netherlands in 1992, changed her name to Hirsi Ali, and lied to Dutch authorities about her past. Contrary to the story she told the government, she arrived in the Netherlands not from war-torn Somalia, but from Kenya, where she lived in a secure environment and under the protection of the United Nations, which funded her education at a well-regarded Muslim girls’ school. Though she told immigration authorities and the Dutch public she had fled from civil war in Somalia, she left that country before its war broke out. Indeed, she did not live through a war there or anywhere else. Thanks to her fabrications, Hirsi Ali received political asylum in just five weeks.

Hirsi Ali told astonished audiences on Dutch talk shows that her supposedly devout family had forced her to marry a draconian Muslim man, that she had not been present at her own wedding, and that her family had threatened to kill her for offending their religious honor. However, Zembla told a drastically different story. Hirsi Ali’s brother, aunt and former husband each testified that she had indeed been present at her wedding. It turned out that Hirsi Ali’s mother had sent her brother to a Christian school, not exactly an indication of Islamic fanaticism.

"Yeah, I made up the whole thing," Hirsi Ali admitted on camera to a Zembla reporter who confronted her with her lies. "I said my name was Ayaan Hirsi Ali instead of Ayaan Hirsi Magan. I also said I was born in 1967 while I was actually born in 1969."

Hirsi Ali’s claim of honor killing threats also appears to be empty; she remained in touch with her father and aunt after she left her husband. In fact, her husband even came to visit her in the Dutch refugee center where she lived after leaving him. Even though he had paid her way to Europe on the grounds that she would join him in Canada, Hirsi Ali’s husband consented to the divorce she sought. (Watch the full Zembla program on Hirsi Ali.)


Fabrications that toppled a government
In 2003, just a decade after gaining political asylum in the Netherlands, Hirsi Ali was elected to the Dutch parliament on the ticket of the anti-immigrant People's Party for Freedom and Democracy. VVD leadership knew that the story Hirsi Ali told on her immigration forms was a gigantic lie — she had told them as much — but covered up the fraud and even advanced it to propel her career.

"She’s witnessed five civil wars in her youth, and has fled with her family many times. She’s made of iron and steel," the VVD’s Neelie-Smit Kroes said of Hirsi Ali at the time, reciting claims her party knew were false.

A year after joining the Dutch parliament, where she said she attempted to ban Islamic schools in the Netherlands, Hirsi Ali teamed up with Dutch director Theo van Gogh to produce a documentary called Submission. The film portrayed violence against women in Muslim communities as a logical result of Islamic belief, relying on actresses to portray abused women and featuring semi-nude, niqab clad women with Quranic verses scrawled across their torsos. Van Gogh, a filmmaker and columnist who had taken to calling Muslims "goat fuckers," was gunned down soon after the film’s release by a Dutch Islamist radical. Before fleeing the scene, the killer pinned a note to van Gogh’s body threatening Hirsi Ali with death. Hirsi Ali’s persistence in the face of the episode helped earn her hero status across the West, particularly in post-9/11 America, where Time magazine named her one of its 100 Most Influential People in 2005.

Zembla’s revelations of Hirsi Ali’s lies in May 2006 interrupted her ascent and threw the Dutch government into chaos. No one was more damaged than her friend and close party ally, Immigration Minister Rita Verdonk. Nicknamed "Iron Rita" for her ruthless anti-migrant crackdowns and her demagogic appeals to xenophobia, Verdonk was shamed by the revelations of Hirsi Ali’s deceptions. When she announced her intention to strip Hirsi Ali of her citizenship, however, she was skewered in parliament and forced to relent.

Days after Zembla aired its exposé, Hirsi Ali announced her plans to leave parliament and take up a position with the American Enterprise Institute, the Washington-based think thank that housed many of the neoconservatives who helped orchestrate the U.S. invasion of Iraq. In the immediate aftermath of the furor she caused, Verdonk introduced the so-called "Law on Integration," one of Europe’s harshest anti-immigrant bills. Only one member of the Dutch House of Representatives opposed it. However, the governing coalition soon collapsed because of the scandal Hirsi Ali’s deceptions inspired. With a new coalition seated in February 2007, and without Verdonk and Hirsi Ali in power, the government was able to adopt a more tolerant approach to immigrants.


Winning a Harvard fellowship, defending Breivik
Upon her relocation to the US, Hirsi Ali was embraced by a coalition of liberal interventionists, neoconservatives and "New Atheists" like Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Bill Maher. With extended appearances on the Christian Broadcasting Network of Pat Robertson, who blamed homosexuality for the 9/11 attacks, self-proclaimed feminist Hirsi Ali won droves of fans among the Christian right. Despite her views on Islam, which she called a "destructive, nihilistic cult of death," or perhaps because of them, she received a fellowship from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

As she rose in prominence among America’s intellectual elite, Hirsi Ali’s history of lying tumbled conveniently down the Orwellian memory hole. In promotional material for her best-selling 2007 memoir, Infidel, Hirsi Ali’s publishers at Simon & Schuster have pushed the discredited claim that "Hirsi Ali survived civil war." More recently, conservative pundit Peggy Noonan glossed over the reasons behind Hirsi Ali’s flight from the Netherlands, writing, "Ayaan Hirsi Ali got death threats and eventually fled to America." Few, if any, American outlets have noted that Hirsi Ali left the Netherlands as her public credibility collapsed and her anti-immigrant party fell into crisis.

With support from across the American ideological spectrum, Hirsi Ali sharpened her rhetoric against Muslims. In a candid 2007 exchange with Reason Magazine, she declared that the religion of Islam had to be "defeated." "Once it’s defeated, it can mutate into something peaceful," Hirsi Ali stated. "It’s very difficult to even talk about peace now….There comes a moment when you crush your enemy."

Junketed to Berlin in 2012 to receive the Axel Springer Honorary Award from the right-wing German publisher, Hirsi Ali appeared to blame liberal defenders of multiculturalism for the killing spree committed by the Norwegian extremist Anders Breivik, claiming they left Breivik with "no other choice but to use violence. (Breivik cited Hirsi Ali’s work in his 1,500 page manifesto explaining his plans to commit a series of terrorist attacks across Norway.)

"[T]hat one man who killed 77 people in Norway, because he fears that Europe will be overrun by Islam, may have cited the work of those who speak and write against political Islam in Europe and America – myself among them – but he does not say in his 1500 page manifesto that it was these people who inspired him to kill. He says very clearly that it was the advocates of silence. Because all outlets to express his views were censored, he says, he had no other choice but to use violence." (Her words were met with an extended standing ovation.)

When Brandeis University canceled plans to award Hirsi Ali an honorary degree in April 2014, it appeared that her increasingly vitriolic tirades against Islam and its adherents had caught up with her. But then came the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, a seemingly clarifying moment that Hirsi Ali and fellow anti-Islam activists seized on as confirmation of their darkest prophecies. Two months later, she released Heretic.

Having rebranded herself a brave "reformer" following in the footsteps of the Selma marchers, Hirsi Ali has found her way back into the mainstream limelight. While American media demonstrates an endless appetite for her polemics about Islam, holding her to account remains taboo.

Source: Alternet

　



　

Sunday tidbits...

Mad Mel Phlipsy claims Obama "exacerbated the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster to push his ideological agenda." (Mel of course is neither an ideologue, now does she have an agenda). Mad Mel's an arch-Zionista, climate change denier, Obama hater and anti-MMR crusader nut (yep, still today).

Richard Silverstein has a great post on Jon Stewart (Daily Show) on the flotilla, Hamas' crutchapult and Charlie Krauthammer's Dead Sea heart. And Jennifer Mizrahi's (the Israel Project) Hasbara effort that Silverstein rightly calls an "e mail blast to its activists which is so nakedly honest (and damaging) that it must be seen to be believed".

Anti-Zionism from down under: Loewenstein - Don't show them anything their government does...

And from Haaretz:

Former Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar announced recently that he planned to promote a new initiative which would defend Israel's right to exist, as "if Israel goes down, we all go down," the former premier wrote in London newspaper The Times on Thursday.

Spectacular misjudgments aren't alien to Aznar: he insisted for a long time that al-Qaeda attacks in Madrid were the handiwork of ETA, a position which cost him his premiership.

Interesting names on that Friends for [sic?] Israel panel: John Bolton and Fiamma Nirenstein. Mad Mel Phlips and Pamela Geller Oshry: eat your hearts out!!!

The former Spanish premier ended his opinion by highlighting Israel's central role in defining the West and said that "the West is what it is thanks to its Judeo-Christian roots. If the Jewish element of those roots is upturned and Israel is lost, then we are lost too. Whether we like it or not, our fate is inextricably intertwined."

You've gotta love that Judeo-Christian thingy...

Zionista Fashionista turned Fascista?

This is merely a little bit of schadenfreude at the fate of a ridiculous blogger, Pamela Geller from Atlas Shrugs, who seem to have gotten herself in too deep with some Eurofascists. No big surprise there: Pampams is a great fan of Geert 'the Qu'ran = Mein Kampf' Wilders of unfit Fitna fame and of Paul Belien, Flemish imbecile and bossyboots at The Brussels Journal (look it up, I don't want to catch anything).

Robert Spencer (Jihadwatch) is in it too.

They're now both denying any involvement but Charles Johnson is on the case.

Hehehe...

When Harry met Geert...

This will be the third part of my inadvertent mini-series on Geert Wilders and related subjects. Here I pointed to the reciprocal love affair between Geert Wilders and Israel, here to unsurprising support of Wilders by the EDL and Pamela Geller.

What's perhaps even less of a surprise, at least with hindsight, is that at least one contributor ('Sophia') at Harry's Place is in 'two minds' about Geert Wilders:

There are examples aplenty of politicians seeking election who, at worst, like Galloway, exploit Muslim communities and themselves have adopted the Hamas platform; at best one sees Labour politicians eager for votes apparently signaling their acceptance of certain aspects of anti-liberal culture. Media, even the formerly liberal/left Guardian, seem to have become platforms for the most radical interpretations of anti-Western, anti-American and anti-Semitic writers.

Apart from the ridiculous swipe at Galloway, who doesn't support Hamas, only the Palestinian people's right to elect who they see fit, this paragraph seems to imply that British politicians should shun support from Muslim constituents, on the basis that they're... Muslim. Hard to think of anything more racist, of course.

Then she quips:

So, I hate to admit it but my feelings about Geert Wilders are becoming more mixed than I would wish.

I've followed Harry's Place for a couple of years now and up to about 18 months or so I didn't usually disagree with their posts on Radical Islam and self-professed Muslim Jihadists. But HP's contributorship and Kommentariat have undergone profound changes since then: there's an increasing number of quite conservative American contributors and commenters alike hanging out there, many suffering from a 9/11-induced lobotomy (where that sense of justice used to be) and whose beef isn't with radical manifestations of Islam but, like Wilders, with Islam itself and with Muslims.

At the time of my writing, the post had received 161 comments and perhaps naively I expected some serious counter-fire from such a crowd. I was right but for the wrong reasons. Counting the numbers of comments that were clearly and unequivocally in favour of Wilders' lunacy, discounting 'Sophia's' own comments, discounting double and unclear comments, I counted 107 comments that came out in favour of Wilders (about two thirds or 66 % - in election terms a 'landslide victory'). 'Sophia' essentially got blasted for her unforgivable undecision on the subject of 'Dear Geert'...

Most of HP's support for Wilders is along the lines of the alleged incompatibility between 'Western Values' and 'Islam'. This is of course a complete red herring. Of the legal citizens/residents of any country can be expected one thing and one thing only: that they abide by the Law of the Land. This is precisely what the overwhelming majority of British (or Dutch or whatever) Muslims (or whatever) do. When they don't they're subject to legal due process like anyone else. To believe otherwise is indeed to be deeply racist.

It shows also once again that despite all the clamour about a tidal wave of antisemitism engulfing Ole' Blighty, Weimar-style, the really socially acceptable form of racism here is in fact Islamophobia.

Beautiful People supporting the Brexit...

By its friends yee shall know it:

Donald J. Trump

Sarah Palin

Alex Jones

Pamela Geller

David Icke

Kilroy Silk

Marine Le Pen

Andrew Anglin (editor of The Daily Stormer)

Roosh V. (rapy pick up artist)

Milo Yiannopoulos

Nick Griffin

Tommy Robinson (Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, EDL founder)

Paul Weston (Liberty GB)

Thomas Mair (accused of the murder of Jo Cox)

Paul Golding (was a member of the neo-Nazi National Front, and once attended the Cenotaph in London on Remembrance Sunday while drunk and wearing women's underwear on his head)

Geert Wilders