Bodissey says again to Geller: supply facts to back up your charge of an anti-Semitic takeover of the EDL, or apologize

Baron Bodissey at Gates of Vienna responds to Pamela Geller’s amazingly dishonest response to the open letter written by him and other anti-jihadists in which they called on her to withdraw her indictment of the English Defense League. As I pointed out in my own analysis of Geller’s response, Geller, instead of admitting that her indictment contained not a single fact and withdrawing the indictment, insisted that she didn’t need no stinking facts, because, as she claimed, EDL leader Tommy Robinson in his own response to Geller had supposedly supplied the facts when he supposedly admitted that Geller’s charge was true that anti-Semites had taken over the organization. In reality, Robinson said no such thing. To the contrary, he forcefully stated that the EDL has always eschewed anti-Semitism and that any anti-Semites who have joined the organization will be ejected. Geller with a Stalinesque lack of conscience constructed Robinson’s statement as an admission of her charge that anti-Semites had infiltrated the leadership of the organization and taken it over.

At the same time, Bodissey continues, Geller claims that the signers of the open letter were being “divisive,” when in reality they were only trying to get Geller to retract her appallingly divisive attack on the EDL in which she called for the EDL’s members to abandon the EDL and thus destroy it as an organization.

Bodissey concludes:

[T]here’s no way that a reasonable observer could conclude that Tommy Robinson’s statement “admits that there is a problem” in the EDL of the type alleged by Ms. Geller. Mr. Robinson admitted nothing of the sort, given that she referred to “neo-fascists that had infiltrated the administration of the group”—that is, that neo-fascists were part of the EDL’s leadership.

That is false.

That is why our open letter was first composed.

That is why an apology and a retraction were requested.

I’ll go out on a limb once again: Ms. Geller, if there is a “neo-fascist” in the leadership of the EDL, publish clear, unambiguous, factual evidence supporting your accusation.

If you do this, I will apologize and retract my previous criticisms on these matters. I will publish my apology and retraction in this space.

If you cannot produce this evidence, then I repeat what the signatories requested last Thursday in the open letter: Apologize for your calumnious words, and retract them.

The EDL deserve nothing less.

Among the signers of the open letter are Diana West, Elizabeth Sabaditch-Wolff, and Paul Weston.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 03, 2011 08:31 PM | Send