The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Geert Wilders Not Guilty of Hate Speech

Posted on | June 23, 2011 | 29 Comments

A big victory for free speech in Europe. The courageous Dutchman’s most enthusiastic American admirer Pamela Geller is celebrating.

I trust commenters will alert us when Charles Johnson tries to rationalize this latest defeat for his “Eurofascist” smear campaign.

UPDATE: Could he possibly be more predictable?

Let’s pause first to ask whether anyone did more in the way “inciting hatred” than did Charles Johnson 1.0, back in the day when LGF was foremost among “the right-wing ‘anti-jihad’ loons.” It was only after he conceived a grudge against Pamela Geller (for her attendance at the October 2007 Brussels “Counter Jihad” conference) that Johnson sought to assert his authority among conservative bloggers to issue fatwas against Geller, Robert Spencer and others.

By the time Johnson denounced Geller as a “Poster Girl for Eurofascists” in April 2009, he had already spent some 18 months waging a one-man crusade to purge others (including Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity) from the ranks of “acceptable” conservative voices. And it was only because his attempted purge failed that Johnson then flipped and began positioning himself as an opponent of conservatives who had once been his only supporters. He has never been able to articulate any coherent political rationale for his conversion to the Left, and we can only conclude that his motives were selfish, spiteful and petty.

Thanks to commenter Randy Rager for the tip.

UPDATE II: The relentless LGF-watchers at Diary of Daedalus suggested checking the history of Charles Johnson’s blogging about Wilders, and from January 2008, we find this:

This is significant for a couple of reasons. Just three months earlier, CJ had begun attacking Geller over her association with European anti-jihadists. Yet he was still referring to Islam with the phrase “Religion of Peace™” — i.e., signifying as a conservative supporter of the Global War on Terror — and did not yet identify Wilders as a villainous “hatemonger.”

In early 2008, then, Johnson still identified with the Right, but was trying to push Geller and Spencer out. As I say, it was the failure of that purge — the frustration of his attempt to play arbiter of membership in the conservative blogsophere — that caused him to “part ways”  with the Right.

Category: Atlas Shrugs, Europe, Islam, Netherlands

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