LGF: Opponents of the mosque are a populist mob led by neo-fascist sympathizers

(UPDATE: see below what Charles Johnson was saying about my views of Islam six years ago.)

Over at Little Green Footballs, Madeline Brooks, a critic (along with 70 percent of the American people) of the Ground Zero Mosque, is being attacked. Here is the logic of the argument. (1) Brooks hosted a debate (read and watch here, here, and here) in 2009 in New York City between Supna Zaidi, a moderate Muslim who works for Daniel Pipes, and myself on the subject of the Islam threat and what to do about it. (2) I am a self-described racialist (true, I am; see note below) who writes about such subjects as black violence against whites and opposes certain aspects of the 1964 Civil Rights Act (namely Title VII, which bars racial discrimination in private employment). (3) Therefore Madeline Brooks supports my racialism, and the entire anti-Ground Zero Mosque movement is similarly tainted.

Naturally the article makes no mention of the fact that my debate on Islam with Supna Zaidi dealt with Islam, not with race, and that Madeline Brooks chose me to participate in the debate because of my views on Islam, not my views on race, about which she knew nothing. The article also does not mention that at the beginning of the debate, Madeline Brooks, who earlier that day had been told for the first time something about my racial views by a group trying to stop the debate, introduced me by saying that some people consider me a racist.

The piece at LGF was written not by Charles Johnson but by Jeffrey Imm of R.E.A.L, the same “anti-hate” group that tried to get Madeline Brooks to call off the Zaidi-Auster debate. Nevertheless, the article employs the reasoning process made famous by Johnson and the Southern Poverty Law Center, which goes something like this: if person X who is part of movement Y has had some contact with person Z, and if person Z is said to be a fascist or a racist, then the entire movement Y is fascist or racist. Thus Johnson writes:

[T]he schism between myself and the “anti-jihad” bloggers was all about their unfortunate associations with all kinds of nasty creeps. Now these people, who advocated strongly for “joining forces” with European far right and neo-fascist groups, are leading the populist mob opposing the Cordoba House project.

_____________

Note: When I call myself a racialist I mean two things. First, that I believe that race matters in specific ways that are important to society (two simple and undeniable examples: if Chinese or black people had populated Europe instead of whites, there would have been no Western civilization as we know it; and if a society inhabited by a race with an average IQ of 100 is repopulated by a race with an average IQ of 90, that society is going to change radically in all kinds of ways). Second, that I care about the well being of the white race, the race which created our nation and our civilization, the race which is the source of everything we are and everything we have, the race without which, it goes without saying, we ourselves would not exist.

To state openly that one believes these unremarkable, ordinary, commonsensical things, these things which in normal times and places most people would take as a given, is, in today’s mainstream society, enough to make oneself into a non-person. Such is the rule of liberalism—which will endure until enough people state openly that they don’t believe in it.

* * *

UPDATE: Jeffrey Imm is the person who harrassed every hotel in the Dulles airport area in order to shut down the 2010 American Renaissance conference. See the full story at Vdare.

- end of initial entry -

August 18, 1:15 p.m.

Dean E. writes:

Johnson runs one of the dumbest sites on the web. He and his group-think mini-minions are incapable of making or following reasoned arguments. Here’s Johnson’s site in a nutshell:

Johnson: “He’s a racist!”

Commenter 1: Yeah, and a bigot!”

Commenter 2: “I hate racist bigots!”

Commenter 3: “Are you sure he’s a racist?”

Johnson: “What the hell?”

Commenter 3: “Uh, well, the charge of bigotry is too often expressed in terms of a sophisticated, liberal-thinking elite trying to rein in the emotional and illogical unwashed masses. I mean, there’s not such a simple ideological, racial, or religious divide between a monolithic “us” and “them.” It seems we’ve devolved to the point where promiscuously crying “Bigot!” and “Racist!” only means you’ve failed to convince people of the merits of an argument.”

Johnson: “Get off my site you racist scum!”

Commenter 1: Holy crappola, can you believe that bigot?”

Commenter 2: “I hate racist bigots!”

LA replies:

Last night in order to find the current article mentioning me at LGF which someone had told me about, I did a Google search for my name at LGF. As I looked at the search results, it was an Orwellian experience to see Johnson’s current article in which he attacks (via Jeffrey Imm’s attack on me) Madeline Brooks and indeed all the people who are concerned about the Ground Zero Mosque; and, on the same page, an entry of Johnson’s at LGF from a few years ago recommending my FrontPage Magazine article, “The Centrality of Jihad in Islam”:

Lawrence Auster who calls himself a “racialist,” condemns the 1964 Civil Rights Act, stating that “in passing the Act, white America in effect admitted that it was … littlegreenfootballs.com/article/36954_NYC_Anti-Mosque …—Cached

Little Green Footballs

Lawrence Auster who calls himself a “racialist,” condemns the 1964 Civil Rights Act, stating that “in passing the Act, white America in effect admitted that it was … littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog—Cached

Little Green Footballs—The Centrality of Jihad in Islam

Lawrence Auster has a must-read piece at FrontPage, arguing for The Centrality of Jihad in Islam. All thoughts of pacifying Islam by assimilating it into the global … littlegreenfootballs.com/article/12227_The_Centrality_of …—Cached

To provide a more specific idea of the kinds of ideas Johnson was strongly endorsing six years ago, here is the entire LGF entry about my article:

The Centrality of Jihad in Islam

Fri, Aug 20, 2004 at 12:23:05 pm PDT

Lawrence Auster has a must-read piece at FrontPage, arguing for The Centrality of Jihad in Islam.

All thoughts of pacifying Islam by assimilating it into the global democratic system must fall down before a simple, terrible fact: Jihad—holy war against all non-Muslims—does not represent a mere excess or defect of Islam, but its timeless core. According to Muslim scholar Bassam Tibi (quoted recently at FrontPage Magazine), “Muslims are religiously obliged to disseminate the Islamic faith throughout the world…. If non-Muslims submit to conversion or subjugation, this call can be pursued peacefully. If they do not, Muslims are obliged to wage war against them.” World peace, according to Islamic teaching, “is reached only with the conversion or submission of all mankind to Islam.”

Moreover, continues Tibi, when Muslims disseminate Islam through violent means, that is not war (harb), as that word only describes the use of force by non-Muslims. Islamic wars are acts of “opening” the world to Islam. “[T]hose who resist Islam cause wars and are responsible for them.”

In other words, simply by the act of existing, the entire non-Islamic world is equated with war. That is why Muslims call it the Dar al-Harb, the Realm of War. Yet when Muslims wage jihad, they are doing it to bring about the peace of universal Islam. So whatever Muslims do, is by definition peace, and whatever infidels do, is by definition war. This explains, by the way, why “moderate” Muslims almost never admit that Muslim terrorists are terrorists. It is because jihad itself is not war, but a way of pursuing peace. By such manipulations of language and such massive double standards, Islam reveals itself as a closed system that precludes any critical thought about itself, as well as any fair and honest dealings with non-Muslims.

[end of 2004 LGF entry quoting me]

When LGF began, its main mission was to oppose Islamic jihadism (indeed, as we see above, LGF didn’t just oppose Islamic jihadism, it endorsed my article in which I said that Islam is indistinguishable from jihadism, and thus that Islam itself must be opposed). Yet now LGF’s main mission is to oppose people who oppose Islamic jihadism. As a prototypical Orwellian phenomenon, LGF’s reversal on Islam equals, perhaps surpasses, that of the Communists who between August 1939 and June 1941 went from opposing Nazism to supporting Nazism to opposing Nazism. It was those fantastic, conscienceless reversals by the Communist leaders and their loyal followers all over the world that inspired Orwell’s famous slogan in Nineteen Eighty-Four, “We are at war with Eastasia, we have always been at war with Eastasia.” Similarly, Charles Johnson is at war with anti-jihadists, he has always been at war with anti-jihadists.

I also wonder—how many of Johnsons’s current readers/commenters were with him at the beginning? Did his original commenters loyally follow him in his switch from anti-jihadism to anti-anti-jihadism, or have his earlier commenters been entirely replaced by new commenters?

Dean E. writes:

You wrote:

I also wonder—how many of Johnsons’s current readers/commenters were with him at the beginning? Did the same commenters loyally follow his switch from anti-jihadism to anti-anti-jihadism, or have his earlier commenters been entirely replaced by new commenters?

Well over 90 percent of Johnson’s former commentariat either were purged outright or left in disgust. Some stuck around wondering, idiotically, how so many other commenters, all of a sudden, could want to stab the poor Lizard Master in the back. A tiny cadre of thugs who supported Johnson in the purges remain: Malenkov, Molotov, Kaganovitch, and the loathsome Voroshilov. Everyone else has been replaced by blockheads.

Daniel F. writes:

Is a transcript or recording of your 2009 debate with Ms. Zaidi on the possibility of moderate Islam available anywhere? Your contemporaneous post about the debate did not have a link. I am intrigued that a person of her views would acknowledge that there are no actual “moderate” mosques anywhere today.

LA replies:

Thanks for the request, which made me realize I had not posted the most useful links on the subject. I’ve added several links with text and video of the presentation (though as I remember the volume of the audio is too low).

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 18, 2010 12:04 AM | Send