Little Green Fumble

Notwithstanding my fairly recent post about the popular anti-jihadist blog Little Green Footballs, I have not been much of an avid reader of it (as I have of Jihad Watch); nor do I know much about its rhetorical record over the years as captained by its owner, Charles Johnson. I have largely been a distant admirer, rarely finding anything to quibble with whenever I did happen to stop by to sample some of the articles and comments by Charles Johnson (as well as breezing through the mountains of comments left by readers, most of whom provide helpful indicators of what to skim quickly past).

The blog recently, however, came on my radar with regard to a recent conference this past October in Brussels, the Counterjihad Summit, attended by many of our unsung luminaries of the anti-Islam movement from around the world, including the assiduous dhimmitologist Bat Ye’or, the patiently scrupulous gadfly of the United Nations David Littman, the deeply Islamosavvy Patrick Sookdheo, the one-man reviver of dusty and therefore serious Islamic studies Andrew Bostom, and many others, including Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch. Increasingly, as the days passed after the conference ended, one could not help get wind of a major controversy brewing, percolating and bubbling over, over at the Little Green Footballs blog, concerning this Summit. As Spencer himself posted on Jihad Watch on October 27:

. . .virtually the entire discussion of the Counterjihad Summit has degenerated into accusations and counter-accusations revolving around the alleged neo-Nazi ties of some of the people who attended.

This was mainly because a few of the participants of that Summit were members and/or supporters of European political parties putatively “racist”. Now, I do not intend in today’s post to cover all the complexities of this problem, nor to condemn Charles Johnson and his Little Green Footballs in anything remotely resembling a wholesale fashion. I am, however, here to report on a major faux pas by Mr. Johnson—and that centers on perhaps the very crux of all the complexities involved here: namely, the fact that in the PC MC West of our time (and most concretely—i.e., legally—in Europe), the label, charge and consequent opprobrium of racism is increasingly becoming an Orwellian weapon used against critics of Islam. Mr. Johnson’s heart might be in the right place, since of course we anti-Islamists do not wish to court support from actual racists; but his mind seems to be a bit out of kilter on this issue—at least as it appears from his recent fumble about a specific, circumscribed, but very significant point.

I have not done the heavy lifting in this regard; I am here only as a humble reporter, relaying the pertinent information marshalled and articulated in ostensibly fine fashion by the organization Center for Vigilant Freedom.

Charles Johnson’s fumble in question involves the following:

In this essay of November 12 of this year at the Center for Vigilant Freedom (CVF) site, an impressively articulated overview of the problem regarding Charles Johnson was presented. As I said above, I am not here to unpack the overall issue in all its complications (and even that fine essay at the CVF site would not suffice to do so). I am today only interested in calling my reader’s attention to one particular point: Among the many actions that, to Charles Johnson, revealed the unacceptable “racism” of one of the so-called “far-right” European political parties represented at the Counterjihad Summit, the Flemish Vlaams Belang, was their refusal to endorse a 2005 resolution ostensibly condemning the Holocaust. As Charles Johnson with sincerely simple-minded blockheadedness observed, anyone refusing to support an anti-Holocaust resolution must be bad guys, right? The CVF essay linked above, and more pertinently another essay at CVF, however, makes painfully clear one simple fact that escaped the notice of Charles Johnson: That 2005 Holocaust Resolution contained a rider that officially obliged any group voting for the resolution to support the following:

6. Welcomes the declared intention of the Luxembourg Presidency to restart the stalled discussions on the proposal for a Council Framework Decision on combating Racism and Xenophobia, and urges the Council to reach agreement on a ban on incitement to racial and religious hatred throughout the EU while preserving legitimate free speech. . .

The CVF essay then provides a quote (with link conscientiously supplied) that illuminates further what this “Council Framework Decision on combating Racism and Xenophobia” is all about (if there were any doubt from the aforementioned rider about the Orwellian mentality involved):

Certain forms of conduct outlined below committed for a racist or xenophobic purpose will be punishable as criminal offences:

public incitement to violence or hatred;
public insults or threats;
public condoning of genocide or crimes against humanity as defined in the Statute of the International Criminal Court;
public dissemination or distribution of tracts, pictures or other material containing expressions of racism and xenophobia;
directing of a racist or xenophobic group (by “group” is meant a structured organisation consisting of at least two persons established for a specific period).
[…] In all cases, racist or xenophobic motivation will be considered as an aggravating circumstance in determining the penalty to be applied to the offence.

Any anti-jihadist worth his salt should know by now how the terms of proposed crimes quoted above—particularly those chilling words “public dissemination or distribution of tracts, pictures or other material containing expressions of racism and xenophobia”—can have real impacts upon the freedom of expression of anyone criticizing Islam today and possibly more so in the coming years.

Clearly, Charles Johnson has been seriously ignorant of a key fact, and is now apparently being obtusely stubborn in digging in his heels (perhaps to bury the pain of the foot he shot), and in refusing to spend the necessary time to study the facts, available for all to see.

As the CVF essay put it so placidly yet searingly: when Charles Johnson and his hangers-on throw around, like so many little green footballs, such labels (ironically the same labels mostly used by Leftists and Muslim apologists to smear anti-jihadists) as “racist,” “Crypto-Nazi,” “neo-fascist,” “fascist,” “Nazi,” “white supremacist,” “white nationalist,” and so forth, they employ the Orwellian terminology of the leftist-oriented EU. Agents of the latter, however, are not merely using these labels as rhetorical footballs, as are Charles Johnson and his team, but rather as terms that have real concrete consequences with legal weight and the potential for official punishment—economic sanctions or imprisonment.

For Charles Johnson to begin to recover from this serious fumble, and continue to carry the ball of the anti-jihad movement on to further progress on the field (if not, one hopes, solid touchdowns down the line), he needs to do, at the very least, the following: present an in-depth engagement and refutation of the CVF essays written about him. Let’s see if he bothers to take the time and trouble to do so in the near future. He might even change his mind and apologize. But even if he doesn’t, at least he will have regained the intellectual respect he has, at least momentarily and in the minds of many, lost.