I noticed for the first time the following comment from Marisol fresh in the wake of her banning me from participating in Jihad Watch comments, back on September 27 of this year. Her comment I italicize, while my remarks are interspersed in bold:
Captain Nemo: As "Neil," you used the word "raghead." That's what got you banned, and it's pretty beyond the pale...
Oh, but threatening to kill a fellow commenter (as long-time Jihad Watch friend "awake" did to me) is not beyond the pale, eh Marisol? Gotcha.
...playing directly into the hands of CAIR and their ilk.
I guess death threats won't play into their hands, since they understand such fascistic bullying.
... We don't ban without good reason.
But you seem to refrain from banning for bad reasons (viz., awake threatening to kill me).
Hesperado is indeed banned, and has been banned before... The post that got him banned was a culmination of two problems. The first was his long-standing habit of sideline sniping, and I stand by that description. After all, we don't go over to his site and tell him all the stuff he's doing wrong.
If Marisol and Spencer came to my blog and posted comments that offered critiques of my approach in methodology and conception, I wouldn't ban them; I would actually engage in a discussion with them (wow, what a concept!). And I wouldn't tendentiously label it "sideline sniping". And I don't say that as a way of trying to sound superior; after all, in this circumstance, it's hard not to be superior without even trying.
He seems to feel he owns the One, True ideological approach, and to feel entitled to lead the movement, coming across (in my opinion) as resentful and envious of the stature of this ideologically "impure" site.
Even if Marisol's characterization here is accurate, so what? Is that cause to ban someone? If not, why does she mention it in a context of explaining why I was banned?
The second is part of an intensifying trend in his comments over the past year which culminated the other day in denying the human status of Muslims ("does there still linger here an unconditional granting of humanity to Muslims?").
Marisol is unconscionably (or obtusely) cherrypicking that sound bite of mine. For a fuller appreciation of the context, see my detailed argument of the unfairness of my banning.
Obviously, I find this rhetoric appalling, and all too CAIR-friendly.
She finds the cherrypicked sound bite appalling; apparently, the context was lost on her. Or is it her paranoia about CAIR and other PC MC hostiles that is motivating her hair trigger? (Now watch all the Jihad Watchers crawl out of the woodwork to declare that I must think CAIR is not an ideological danger. You'd think that after all the problems Spencer has gone through being misconstrued, they'd have a sense of appreciation for the problem of misconstrual, and therefore of the need to read carefully and fairly.)
Worse yet, he has shown a penchant for belittling those who disagree even among fellow commenters, for, again, he is his self-appointed ideological standard bearer.
To which I repeat what I said above: Even if Marisol's characterization here is accurate, so what? Is that cause to ban someone? If not, why does she mention it in a context of explaining why I was banned?
It was, indeed, a combination of the two factors...
Two factors? She's listed four factors at least. I think the straw that broke the camel's back was that I just rub her the wrong way; then she happened to raise "that Hesperado" up to Spencer one day in an email, and he, remembering this little pesk of a gadfly, said "whack 'im".
11 comments:
"Kinana of Khaybar" has another comment on the now infamous thread which begins seemingly rationally enough, but soon devolves into virtual lunacy:
If it [awake's comment about me] were a death threat, I don't think the discussion would be about banning versus not banning, or banning versus deletion. It would be over whether or not to contact the authorities (i.e., police).
To which one has to say, huh???!!! Is Kinana of Khaybar able to scratch his stomach and pat his head at the same time? Why can't a comment that warrants a call to the fricking POLICE not also warrant a fricking banning? What planet is Kinana of Khaybar inhabiting these days? Oh, apparently the same planet Marisol and Spencer reside on.
"Kinana of Khaybar" is at it again. The memo doesn't seem to have gotten through his thick skull.
He posts a copy of one of the death threats of "awake" against me, then quotes from several other comments by other Jihad Watch commenters that in his mind are "in the same general category". At least he has the presence of mind to qualify this comparison with "As I see it".
However, there is a more egregious mistake he is making here. He has forgotten a crucial piece of information that champ brought up, and then "awake" and Marisol confirmed:
Marisol had sanitized the egregious comments of "awake".
I.e. -- the comment "Kinana of Khaybar" located and copy-pasted is not the original comment, by the admission of both awake and Marisol. It was cleaned up. The original was worse.
Apparently, from a cryptic comment by Marisol, Robert Spencer might have the originals; though I hardly think he will deign to step down to help us hoi ochloi out with this insignificant matter (even if he does leap with alacrity into JW comments like a shark whenever he sees a potential "attack" on him).
I quote now a part of a comment by a reader here, "Ghostrider", who remarked after learning about the reason for my being banned from Jihad Watch comments:
I want you to know that your saying, in the comments part of JW, that you are thinking that Muslims aren't truly human is something I didn't see at the time, but if I had I would have understood, generally, what you were saying. Knowing that the commenter Hesperado is a well-educated intellectual (as I am myself) I would instantly know what that comment was alluding to, generally, and what it was meant to say. But then there's the possibility our uneducated fellow anti-jihadists might not know what was meant by that, so a brief explanation of it (by you or some other commenter) would have sufficed. For some reason that didn't happen. (Speaking for myself, even if a similar comment had been made, calmly and soberly, by a less highly educated commenter, it wouldn't have alarmed me. We treat murderers as non-human in a certain sense, so it's not wrong on any level to speak of a murderer as less than human. Muhammed was a murderer).
I welcome this unremarkably apposite observation. The only slight problem with it I can see is the following:
"But then there's the possibility our uneducated fellow anti-jihadists might not know what was meant by that, so a brief explanation of it (by you or some other commenter) would have sufficed. For some reason that didn't happen."
Actually, if one reads my two comments in the September thread which were the focus of my reason for being banned, one will see the rhetorical and philosophical context in which my "Muslims not human" comment was framed. I.e., the "brief explanation" was there already.
Hi Hesp ...
It's important to note that the egregious comment made by awake, the one that was sanitized, was posted on a different thread about a month after the first threat was made by awake.
I distinctly remember reading awake's second egregious comment and thinking *here we go again*, but this time I was going to report him to Marisol and NOT defend him, and I was also thinking that surely she would ban awake this time for making threatening comments to Hesp once again.
But as I was preparing to copy/paste awake's comment to include it in my email to Marisol I suddenly noticed that awake's comment had been edited, and I remember thinking that Marisol must be protecting awake, because he had already blown it before by threatening Hesp and she didn't want anyone to notice, but I noticed! I noticed, and it made me very angry.
Marisol was protecting awake then, and clearly she's protecting him NOW. I am very disappointed in her apparent favoritism, and she has some nerve throwing ME under the bus on that thread by stating that I should have been banned in an attempt to deflect attention away from awake's outrageous threat against Hesp. Really, she has some nerve in doing that since I have NEVER threatened physical violence against another poster. Never.
Oh, and then there were Kinana of Khaybar's obtuse comments. Why he weighed in on this discussion is beyond me, since he never even participated in the original debate to begin with. He cannot possibly give a proper perspective since he never read any of the other egregious comments written by awake on the thread that he provided on JW. And I once thought that KofK was very intelligent, but now it seems that the man cannot put two and two together. What is wrong with him?
Lastly, I am also very disappointed in some of the other posters on JW whom certainly remember the threats leveled by awake, but they will remain nameless. I guess awake's outrageous threats of violence are A-OK as long as they're useful in defending Robert.
Yeah I think that Marisol will keep awake around as long as he remains useful to her as JW's bouncer. And I have totally lost my trust in Marisol's ability to keep things fair over there, especially once I read what she did for awake by sanitizing one of his comments, and then allowing awake to stay on board after leveling those threats. Wow, must be kinda nice to be teachers pet.
Take care, Hesp :)
Hesp,
This is Allah Snackbar, you may/may not remember me. I know you and I have had our disagreements, but I want you to know that I remember your discussions with awake and I am very disappointed with Marisol and Spencer for allowing him to remain on the site. Awake should have been banned the very first time he threatened you.
I enjoyed reading your posts at JW, even if I didn't agree with all of them, and I am very disappointed to learn of your ban.
Take care.
champ and Allah Snackbar,
Thanks for your comments -- I only just realized they were here just now (for some reason, every time I saw that this essay had "5 comments" I assumed it was the ones I had already seen (my own)...).
Anyway, champ:
"...she [Marisol] has some nerve throwing ME under the bus on that thread by stating that I should have been banned in an attempt to deflect attention away from awake's outrageous threat against Hesp."
Actually, I've begun to realize it's not "nerve" so much as calculated cover-up. As I've mentioned before, I have evidence (albeit tangential) that awake is a closer friend to Spencer than are most Jihad Watch readers; and so there may well be a reason why awake is being favored.
You also mention your disappointment in the other JW posters. I also realized recently that one reason why some (or many) of them are being so reticent is because of the climate of intimidation at Jihad Watch I alluded to in one of my earlier essays -- the very same climate that moved dumbledoresarmy to that extraordinary action of self-censorship of a mere author's name (a mere author, that is, who is on Spencer's blacklist, regardless of whether Spencer recently "reached out" to him through an intermediary or not). I.e., many of the JW readers may fear they too will be banned if they exercise their free speech too much in this regard.
So thanks again, champ, for being brave.
Allah Snackbar,
Thanks for officially acknowledging what champ has been saying. I recall many of your posts, and you strike me as a man who would not advise a banning of someone lightly and without a good reason.
Thanks for officially acknowledging what champ has been saying. I recall many of your posts, and you strike me as a man who would not advise a banning of someone lightly and without a good reason.
That's a fair assumption. I have been reading/commenting at JW for years, and awake is the only person I've encountered who openly threatened another commenter. Considering how others have been banned for far less serious infractions (you), I completely agree with the accusation of favoritism.
Moharebeh,
On the other side of the equation, there's another example of a JW commenter who was behaving wildly inappropriately, verbally abusing other commenters left and right in many different threads, threatening to sue them and so forth (she even threatened to find out my real identity and my family's identity and publicize it in order to endanger me to Muslims) -- and because she was a friend of Spencer (indeed, he even "thanked" her for a story as recently as last April of 2010), he let reams of her outrageous crap go without any punishment and only a relatively mild slap on the wrist at one point.
Indeed, she was causing so much grief to other JW commenters in one particular thread, myself included, that I exploded in anger and called her the foulest names in the book (including "Muslim" which she claims she's not) I could think of -- and that was one of my four bannings from Jihad Watch.
So Spencer saw fit to ban me over one understandable outburst, but let reams of crap from her stand unpunished.
If you don't know who I'm talking about, remember the Lady of the Double Vowel in her Name.
Moharebeh:
One minor correction: that JW lady had threatened in the comments section of my blog, Jihad Watch Watch, to find my and my family's real identity and location -- not on Jihad Watch. All else I described stands.
She and awake are the kinds of people Spencer grants favors to.
Hesp, can you still read these? What happened to your blog? It says it's been removed... yet this page is still here. What happened?
Hi Moharebeh,
My blog was gone for about a few days. I was unable to access it as owner through my password, and readers were unable to access it, getting the message it had been "removed".
I tried to get it back but didn't know how -- went to the Blogspot help forums, which were no help, etc.
Anyway, it's mysteriously restored. I will make sure to copy everything and put it in a Word file, in case the fickle Google God decides to make it vanish again.
Post a Comment