Charles Johnson finds the smoking gun!

The smoking gun, that is, which proves Vlaams Belang is Nazi-like. Is it a tape of Filip Dewinter giving an exteminationist anti-Semitic speech, or even a mildly anti-Semitic speech? No. Is it a secret entente between Vlaams Belang and David Duke? Uh, no. Is it a table of hate literature at the recent counter-jihad conference that was attended by VB leaders, as well as by those notorious white nationalists Bat Ye’or, Robert Spencer, and Andrew Bostom? Nope. It’s a couple of symbols. First, there’s the circle and cross, which Johnson has discovered on an armband of a cartoon figure in a VB publication, and (get this, this is really big) in a video image of Filip Dewinter’s bookshelf, a little circle-and-cross bric-a-brac all of four or five inches high being used as a bookend. Second, there’s a tiny Masonic symbol on a judge’s bench in a VB cartoon. Johnson says that the Nazis demonized the Masons along with the Jews, meaning that VB is Nazi too. Isn’t he aware that the main people who have always been bent out of shape by the Masons are traditionalist Catholics?

Johnson also makes a point of singling out “jeppo,” a commenter at LGF who last weekend heroically dissented from the LGF orthodoxy concerning the supposed evil of Vlaams Belang, in a thread that included over 1,000 comments. Jeppo was repeatedly attacked, smeared, and personally insulted in degrading language, but stood his ground. Throughout the exchange, he did not attack or insult anyone, but simply kept asking the Johnson cultists where was the evidence that Vlaams Belang is Nazi-like. It wasn’t enough for Johnson that a well-behaved commenter at his site had to endure such abuse. Johnson himself is exercised by jeppo’s recalcitrance. It bothers him that even a single commenter at his popular site declines to accept his positions.

It becomes more and more evident that Charles Johnson is a man without intellectual substance, a figure whose main claims to prominence are the cult of personality that surrounds him, and his restless desire to smoke out supposed racists and Nazis.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 06, 2007 07:44 PM | Send