The EDL, Roberta Moore, and the JTF

MB writes:

An important aspect of the Pamela Geller / EDL fuss (see this and this) has been overlooked. It’s about the Jewish Task Force (JTF), the organization that Roberta Moore was said to have been linking up with the EDL. Moore ran into difficulty with EDL over this because objections were raised against the JTF and its head, Victor Vancier, a.k.a. Chaim ben Pesach. I can see why. I spent a couple of months participating in the JTF blog because I share its convictions that Israel must adopt the ideas of Rabbi Meir Kahane for its survival. But ben Pesach’s leadership is atrocious. A long time ago he was convicted and served prison time for bombing Soviet targets in the U.S. That doesn’t concern me too much because it happened a long time ago. Kahane was no saint either. What does bother me is the immaturity and rashness of ben Pesach’s leadership and the kids who populate his forums. Kahane’s ideas should be presented seriously, not thrown out like bombs for shock value. Ben Pesach is in a permanent state of contentiousness. Anything he touches will sink. For Roberta Moore to have aligned with him shows bad judgment. While I don’t pretend to know all the factors involved in this dispute, on the face of it, the separation of Moore from the EDL—or any organization that wants to be seen as sane—is a good idea.

LA replies:

It’s enough to crack your brain. On one hand, Geller attacked the EDL as neo-fascist and anti-Semitic, because Moore said the EDL was neo-fascist and anti-Semitic, and because Moore was pushed out of the EDL. But if Moore was pushed out of the EDL because of her connections with the JTF, which as a Kahanist group is seen by liberals and “respectables” as an extremist group, then Moore wasn’t pushed out for being Jewish and pro-Jewish, she was pushed out for being extremist. In other words, the EDL in pushing out Moore was behaving the way Geller wants anti-jihad organizations to behave—i.e., excluding extremists. Yet instead of praising the EDL for excluding extremists, Geller denounced and declared war against the EDL for being … neo-fascist.

Welcome to the incoherent, nightmare world of Pamela Geller’s brain, which all of us have to enter into and deal with because she is given vastly more importance and respect than she deserves.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 06, 2011 09:50 AM | Send