OOHHH, HELL, SOLIDARITY AND RESTRAINT WERE STOMPED INTO THE MUD ANYWAY...

Whatta lovely July 4th weekend. The Anti-Jihad blogosphere has been at daggers drawn about a who-said-what-when debate, based on the need/lack of need to purge the English Defence League of anti-Jewish elements...Like the gigantic bulk of those elements aren't already happily working for/with the jihad already.

If anyone should care, I had a clear idea early on who was more sinned against than sinning in this recent unpleasantness, but felt the difference was relatively petty, and therefore neccessitated no real comment. I did put up identical cautionary posts on both AtlasShrugs and GatesofVienna, but they were ignored, in spite of my excellent advice:

A useful, please pardon my French, French expression, which has never got a lot of support in the blogosphere:
"Words are silver, but silence is gold."

Another, this one from Oliver Cromwell: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken."

Another, from Boston pol Martin Lomasney: "Never write if you can speak. Never speak if you can nod. Never nod if you can wink."

What is not said need not be explained, or explained away.

Also: Today's burning news is tomorrow's fishwrap.

Remember that one beautiful, cardinal word, my CounterJihad comrades, one single, precious word: Solidarnosc.

A little while later, a correspondent whom I'll call the Atlas Mega Fan (AMF) emailed me to urge me to support her. I think my responses to AMF, with appropriately redacted portions for AMF, will give a fairly good idea of my perspective:

AMF, I can do no better than Henrik Clausen at EuropeNews:

In recent days, the situation in the EDL has drawn a bit of commotion in the blogosphere. The latter of these articles is woefully uninformed, as the concerns raised there have been addressed a year ago, including on this video The John Snowy Shaw Show. Some of these articles are superficial, some are an avalanche of details of questionable relevance. One can pore over these for hours, trying to figure out who did Right and who did Wrong. But quite honestly:

Why waste your time nit-picking when the house is on fire? For as Reagan is often quoted for:

The person who agrees with you 80 percent of the time is a friend and an ally — not a 20 percent traitor.

The bottom line: The English Defence League is the most broadest and most effective anti-Jihad and anti-Sharia movement on this side of the Atlantic Ocean. It has achieved much in a mere two years, and continues to operate in spite of government harassment and systematic slander from the establishment. The EDL deserves emulation – the highest form of flattery - not vilification.

As bad as it is here, in Europa the house truly is on fire. We need to be very careful with our criticisms so as to not give aid & comfort to the enemies.

Then, a little while later:

AMF, last night a poster wrote about "sand niggers" on Pam's blog--I called him on it. It is still there today.

Does that mean Pam condones it? No, nor does it mean AS2K is racist. The Net is an incredibly fluid, uncontrolled place, esp in the big, active sites.

I think both sites over-reacted, and Pam over-reacted without adequate evidence. GoV over-reacted by going public, in a confrontational way. Oh, well, Pam will get over it, she's a big girl with a big site.

I don't have time nor inclination to get outraged over such nits, indeed like firefighters screaming at each other over who overcooked the casserole while the house is burning down. It boggles my mind to see such time/energy put into it.

Then:

AMF: "then, call for a cessation of hostilities."

I thought I VERY clearly did that, from Day 1.

AMF:"... without adequate evidence ... ." [Edited riposte referring to T. Robinson's confirmation of problems in the EDL]

I think her concerns could & shd have been made much less counterproductively than they were by publishing this:

"Now that the person whom I most trusted in the EDL, Roberta Moore, has resigned, as she was increasingly uncomfortable with the neo-fascists that had infiltrated the administration of the group, I too am withdrawing my support from the EDL. I hope that genuine anti-jihadists in Britain will also leave the EDL and work with Roberta on starting a new group that will resist definitively and firmly all attempts to divert it from its mission of fighting against jihad and for human rights."

AMF: "Pam thought the situation amenable, capable of being rectified, so, she addressed the issue. Tommy Robinson replied, substantiating her concerns."

Again, a grossly counterproductive way of "addressing the issue." How hard wd a private inquiring email to TR have been? As it is, her friends at LGF (and more important media) have a lovely idiotic set of statements to throw at anyone who cares to defend the EDL in the future.

Pam has a tendency to shoot from the lip, as they said about Reagan, she even publicly accused me of denying the Armenian genocide [!!]. Nobody's perfect. But because she has such a large, influential blog, I think she needs to think twice, nay, thrice before calling on people to abandon one of the few active CJ orgs across the pond. Ned May didn't make her do that.

[end correspondence]

I'd like to elaborate a bit here on my critique of GoV and the petition. First, there is absolutely no doubt they had ample cause for such a response--Pam's knee-jerk call for good people to leave the EDL was off-the-charts irresponsible. But anyone who seeks to actually come to an acceptable accommodation with a woman with a strong personality surely knows that the LAST way to get that result is to "INSIST on an APOLOGY." It doesn't matter whether an apology was merited or reasonable--women with strong personalities just do not function that way, even the more so when they are clearly in the wrong! (As Pamela Geller was in this case.) I can hardly imagine that the petitioners were innocently unaware of that apology poison-pill. And surely Pam's strong support of the European resistance over the years was worth a little forebearance--she should have been given the benefit of the doubt. Wouldn't "a prompt correction" have sufficed?

This little bottom-feeding blog has been overwhelmingly supportive of Pamela Geller since 2007--in fact, I wrote what was probably the single most complimentary serious analysis ever of her efforts here. But on those rare occasions when I disagreed with her (for example, I've defended Zuhdi Jasser, and Rifka Bary's attorneys, when Pam attacked them), she indeed resorted to ad hominem attacks that were unworthy of her and her talent. She did the same thing to GoV last year. And now look at the comments she is making about people like Fjordman, Tundra Tabloids, Diana West, and the eeeeeevil Baron at GoV:
**the motives of the people in question are so nefarious...
**the Machiavellian plotter behind this attack on me...
**He has posted scurrilous attacks on me and Robert Spencer...
**Perhaps because he has accomplished little, he seeks to attain some sort of notoriety by destroying elements of the counterjihad movement that are more effective than he is...
**Gates of Vienna has become a home for many anti-Semitic rants that are deeply disturbing; not only are these sanctioned by the proprietors, but they’ve added to the chorus...
**Now the “Baron” is urging other bloggers to join him in this campaign of destruction...
**Why would they knowingly propagate falsehoods? What’s their real agenda?...
**are being strong-armed into signing this statement...
**these bloggers are sanctioning this vile racism...
**the signers of this Open Letter are trying to destroy those of us who seek to maintain the proper focus of our mission and the EDL’s mission, which is fighting for freedom...
**the blogwar against Atlas that is being waged by vultures with an altogether nefarious agenda...
**these bottomfeeders just bang keyboards and jockey for position on the bottom of the food chain...
**This campaign to gang up on Geller by small "counter-jihadists" trying to make a name for themselves clearly is motivated by something enitrely different. Something very ugly and transparent...
**I am not sure who he is working for or why, but it's not kosher...

Good grief. This is an unfortunate and self-limiting habit, and she would do well to refrain from it in the future, at least when she is arguing with people who are fighting the counterjihad fight with the sincerity, if not the effect, she has.

Diana West came out with a great book a few years ago, "The Death of the Grown Up." I gotta say, the internet is conducive to certain habits of writing and thinking that effectively overrun or obliterate sober and mature discussion. Oh, well, if we truly seek to move beyond a marginal effectiveness based only in cyberspace, we need to clearly remember to behave, both online and off, like grown-ups.

And NEVER--EVER--forget that one beautiful, precious word we all learned from Lech Walesa: solidarnosc.