Why Does LGF Lend Credibility to Eurabia Deniers?

The noted blogger Fjordman is filing this report via Gates of Vienna.
For a complete Fjordman blogography, see The Fjordman Files. There is also a multi-index listing here.


I notice Charles Johnson and Little Green Footballs are at it again with their biweekly — or is it daily? — bash Fjordman/Gates of Vienna/The Brussels Journal/Fascists/Euroweenies post, which is by now becoming as predictable and exciting as watching paint dry.

I admit my initial reaction to all this was a desire to yawn, ignore it, and watch the latest Harry Potter movie on DVD. CJ made another post a couple of weeks ago where he made up claims from scratch with the sole purpose of discrediting me. As was later confirmed by external sources, the claims CJ made were 100% without any factual basis whatsoever. The upstanding thing to do would have been to admit this and perhaps apologize, if not in public then at least in a private email to me. Johnson has had ample time, yet has failed to do so. If CJ and his crowd at LGF cannot even admit it when they publish blatantly false information then I see no point in having any “dialogue” with them about the situation in Europe. Besides, having a rational conversation with LGFers about the threats to freedom in Europe and the West in general is like having a rational conversation with the average Muslim about “Zionists”. I simply have better things to do with my time.

For the most part, I will therefore try to ignore the rantings of LGF as much as I can. However, even though dialogue with CJ may be pointless, there could still be independent readers and third parties who can be reached. I notice that CJ has ceased his attacks against the Sweden Democrats and concentrates on the Vlaams Belang. Is that an indirect admission that he didn’t fully understand what he was doing regarding the SD?

As blog reader Zonka comments:

Another good reason to continue this fight against CJ and LGF, is that if LGF doesn’t succeed in squashing the Counter-Jihad movement, somebody from the MSM and/or the left will pick up the fight using the writings from Charles and his followers as ammunition against the Counter-Jihad movement, painting LGF’s view as the mainstream rightist view, and confirming their claim that everybody who is fighting the islamization of the West is Fascists, Neo-nazis, Racists or worse. So in effect what Charles is doing is not just rattling on in his echo chamber, he is deliberately sabotaging the efforts of countering islamization. His efforts have nothing to do with Vlams Belang, they were just a convenient target for his campaign. The proof of that is that he silently dropped the charges against SD, when it became apparent that he couldn’t use them as a vehicle to smear the Counter-Jihad movement. If his main complaint had been the involvement of the Counter-Jihad movement with VB and SD, he would have stated openly that SD had been cleared or at least that there weren’t sufficient charges against them to continue to oppose them into the Counter-Jihad movement. But no such statement have been made implicit or explicit. The conclusion thus must be that it was never about VB or SD, but to smear the Counter-Jihad movement with any means at his disposal.

I have neither the time nor the inclination to respond to CJ’s every whim, but I will write a reply every now and then if I have the time and feel that some matter of substance is touched upon. In this case, this is Eurabia, the deliberate merger of Europe and the Arab world, conducted by the leaders of the European Union.

The website quoted by LGF’s latest post is run by the Norwegian Leftist Øyvind Strømmen. Mr. Strømmen called me a Fascist long before the current debate began. He has also stated that Bat Ye’or’s writings about Eurabia are “conspiracy theories,” and he is extremely critical of Oriana Fallaci for her views of Islam. This is now linked to approvingly by the “anti-Jihadist” Charles Johnson, who has a photo of Fallaci posted on his website.

So the question to Mr. Johnson becomes: If you link approvingly to “Eurabia denial” websites, what next? Will you also link approvingly to sites claiming that there is no global Jihad, no Islamic threat to the USA and that 9/11 was an inside job? If you discredit Bat Ye’or, perhaps the world’s foremost expert on dhimmitude, the repression of non-Muslims under Islamic rule, is there anything at all left of LGF’s supposedly anti-Jihadist position, or is LGF now simply an anti-European hate site?

Øyvind Strømmen repeated several times his criticism of Bat Ye’or at LGF, and stated that although he doesn’t believe Bat Ye’or is a Fascist, she “spreads a conspiracy theory, a conspiracy theory which in fact makes up a significant part of the mythos of Eurofascism and which sadly has gained quite a bit of a hearing amongst both conservatives and liberals.” He again stated that “I do blame her [Bat Ye’or] for providing a considerable part of the Eurofascist mythos by spreading the false idea of a Eurabian conspiracy.”

I have spent some time checking the Eurabia thesis, and I find it to be perfectly sound, as I have demonstrated in my essay The Eurabia Code, a shorter version of which is also available in Norwegian under the name Eurabia-koden. Strangely enough, this “conspiracy theory” was publicly confirmed by British Foreign Secretary David Miliband, who said in November 2007 that the European Union should expand to include Middle Eastern and North African countries.

Please note that the EU involves the free movement of people across borders. If the EU is expanded to include Muslim nations, Muslims from the entire Greater Middle East would be entirely free to move into and settle in France, Britain, Germany, Italy etc. This would mean the end of European civilization as we know it, and is now actively supported by senior European leaders behind the back of their own peoples. This constitutes nothing less than the greatest betrayal in the history of Western civilization, yet “anti-Jihad” website LGF seems to think this is overrated. The regular LGF reader Thanos says that Europeans need “to get over their hysteria” about the Islamic threat.
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Surprisingly few readers of the “conservative” LGF were critical of the viewpoints of the Socialist Strømmen, although the reader wilinsky stated that “I am widely read and have some professional expertise on the subject of ‘global warming’ and I am, I believe, well-informed on our problems in Iraq. I think you are very, very far off the mark on both issues, so I suspect that anything you have to say about European fascism or Bat Yeor is equally ‘reliable’.”

Indeed. Mr. Strømmen has criticized the conservative politician and writer Hallgrim Berg for including a quote by the “Fascist” Fjordman and several quotes by the Fascist-enabler Bat Ye’or in his book about the dangers posed by militant Islam to the West. Mr. Berg’s book is also available in English. Here are some excerpts from the introduction:

The Euro-Arab ‘bridge-building measures’ are self-deceiving, as long as there is only one-way traffic on the bridge. The author maintains the United States the only power in the world that may secure the world’s free nations. He is discussing the growing anti-Americanism in Europe, a phenomenon evolving despite America’s role as a guaranteeing force for democracy and freedom. Anti-American sleepwalkers do not see that if the American way goes down the drain, Europe will follow. Hallgrim Berg attacks international leftism, which is constantly marketing twisted stereotypes of America, and is also criticizing the feebleness of European politicians, particularly France, where hypocrisy is developed into mastery. Challenged by the most comprising and hard-core totalitarianism the world has seen, the only hope for Western democracy, culture, and our way of living is a more confident cooperation and pooling of resources among European nations and the United States.

For this book, Berg was attacked by members of the Norwegian Left. Another Socialist, Lars Gule, warned that Berg’s writings about Muslims were similar to the writings about Jews in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, although Berg pointed out that he did not write about individual Muslims, but about the threat posed by Islamist ideology. Berg also pointed out that the Palestinian-friendly Gule went to the Middle East with dynamite in his backpack in the 1970s in order to carry out an attack against the Jewish state of Israel. Mr. Gule himself — who was stopped before the plan could be carried out — has never denied this, and continues to be extremely critical of Israel. Yet Mr. Gule gets a free pass for warning against the dangers of anti-Semitism, always coming from the political Right, of course.

Charles Johnson is critical of the Baron from the Gates of Vienna for his use of sources:

One more note to the Baron: it’s time for you to start treating your European ‘sources’ with a little more skepticism. They burned you with their latest attempted cover-up, and now you have egg all over your face.

In defense of the Baron, an upstanding man who tolerates a lot more ideological dissent at his website than LGF — as does The Brussels Journal — I’d just like to point out that CJ linked to a state-sponsored website which used to be run by a rabidly anti-American, anti-Israeli and anti-Christian Communist as his source of information about the Sweden Democrats.

Now LGF links to another Leftist who thinks the Jewish writer Bat Ye’or, who has written excellent books about the treatment of Jews, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists and other non-Muslims under Islamic rule, is an enabler of Fascism by publishing “conspiracy theories” about the advancing Jihad.

Somebody should perhaps inform CJ and his followers that the Scandinavian Left is brimming with Hamas-supporters, Arafat-cheerleaders and anti-Israeli and anti-American attitudes, and that they should be a little bit careful with whom they associate or lend credibility to.