Rebirth and Resistance

Remember the 910 Group?

This past Monday, September 26, was the fifth anniversary of the founding of the 910 Group. I was still in London that day, so I couldn’t give the occasion its proper recognition until now.

The 910 Group was formed in the comments section on a Gates of Vienna post entitled “The Emperor is Naked”. People were motivated by the discussion there to found a Counterjihad action group. Several of them took the initiative and formed an online discussion group to recruit volunteers and discuss what could be done.

A few days later the name “910 Group” was adopted, and the above image became the logo for the organization. If you read through the comments on that first post and the ones that appeared during the weeks following, you’ll see a lot of names you recognize. Some of them are still active in the movement, and have become part of the “network of networks” that has emerged over the past five years.

In 2007 the group changed its name to the Center for Vigilant Freedom, and took on the CVF shield as its new logo. The phoenix at the center of the shield is the same as the one in the 910 Group logo emerging from the ashes of the World Trade Center. It ties the two organizations together in their common purpose.

The golden nodes with their interlocked connections on the periphery of the shield represent all the different groups that are linked with each other in the struggle against Islamization and sharia. Notice that there is no central node: this is a distributed network. It has no command structure, no hierarchy, and no central authority.

A year or so later CVF was folded into the International Civil Liberties Alliance, which retained the shield as its logo. The ICLA site reflects our extended network of associated groups. In addition to English, it publishes material in Spanish, Dutch, Italian, and German.

People who are ambitious — who want to become powerful leaders and boss everyone else around — quickly lose interest in ICLA, because that is not our modus operandi. We are forced to operate under conditions of official harassment and repression, meaning that a hierarchical structure would be vulnerable to “beheading”.

In contrast, a loose horizontally-organized structure is more flexible and resilient, and is better able to withstand attempts to dismantle it. There are so many nodes and so many interconnections that the network cannot easily be destroyed. If you remove any individual node, the effect is the same as taking down a server in a large computer network: the remaining servers route around it.

Six months after our founding we held our first Counterjihad conference in Copenhagen, and we have held at least one every year ever since. We work with a variety of groups, including political parties as well as all kinds of activist organizations. We are willing to talk to any group that shares our goals of resisting sharia and stopping the Islamization of the West, without any politically correct shibboleths to inhibit the discussion.

Happy birthday, 910 Group!

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The two keywords in the 910 Group’s mission are Rebirth and Resistance.

Rebirth describes the process we all went through as we recovered from the trauma of 9-11. It signals the resolve to move from the grieving process — a passive position — to one of resolute action, which brings us to

Resistance. It’s not enough to say “never again”. We are faced with massive Islamic infiltration and intimidation, a campaign of disinformation and subterfuge masterminded by the Muslim Brotherhood, and the determination of our governments, our media, and our educational institutions to stop us from doing what we do. A process of conscious, continuous, active resistance is required if we are to overcome the pressure from institutions demanding that we submit to Islamization.

Strangely enough, after five years of this endeavor, resistance is more necessary than ever. Almost all the political arrests and prosecutions of Counterjihad activists have taken place since the beginning of 2007. As the resistance intensifies, so does the repression.

Our political leaders are currently in the midst of the worst financial crisis in a century, and a failure to contain it may end their careers. Making Muslims happy is considered an absolute necessity, not just to keep the price of oil down, but to guarantee the quiescence of all those Muslim ghettos in the banlieues and inner cities across Europe, Canada, and Australia.

To maintain the stability of the system, dissenters must be silenced. The more instability, the greater the pressure on dissidents. The current level of repression is a sign that the system is in danger, and is desperately cracking down on those who question its legitimacy.

The totalitarian methods described here have been employed against Counterjihad activists by ostensibly democratic governments in Western nations, not by Third World dictatorships. These fascist tactics were deemed necessary to fight “racism” and “xenophobia”. The “crimes” committed have been variously described as “incitement of racial or religious hatred”, “incitement against an ethnic group”, and “denigration of a religion”. Rationales for the suppression of free speech include the necessity for “community cohesion” and the maintenance of “inter-group harmony”.

Below is a very partial list of dissidents who have lost their jobs, or have been harassed, intimidated, arrested, prosecuted, fined, and/or imprisoned by their governments since the 910 Group was founded five years ago:

Australia:		Andrew Bolt, Martin Brennan
Austria:		Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff
Belgium:		Bart Debie
Canada:		Ezra Levant, Mark Steyn
Denmark:		Lars Hedegaard
Finland:		Jussi Halla-aho, Tomashot
France:		Philippe Val
The Netherlands:		Gregorius Nekschot, Geert Wilders
Norway:		Fjordman
Sweden:		Dahn Pettersson
UK:		Tommy Robinson, Kevin Carroll, and many, many rank-and-file members of the English Defence League
USA:		Derek Fenton

Mind you, these were just the names I could remember off the top of my head. A complete list would be much longer, and would probably include hundreds of individuals by now.

The acceleration in arrests of political dissidents in Britain is so great that it is all but impossible to track what is happening there. The recent actions against the EDL are just the latest in a long series of politically-motivated arrests, detentions, and prosecutions.

This week’s conviction of Australian journalist Andrew Bolt is particularly ominous. It has surely sent a shudder through the community of opinion writers across Australia and beyond, sending them the clear signal that any disagreement with Multicultural orthodoxy could result in severe legal consequences for them.

Resistance is needed today more than ever. At the rate repression is increasing, if we don’t engage in massive resistance now, any resistance at all may soon become impossible.

The long-expected crackdown is at hand.

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In “The Emperor is Naked” I said this:

Gates of Vienna’s mission statement requires it to do battle with the Great Islamic Jihad in the realm of ideas.

We agree with Fjordman and many others that the Jihad is just a symptom, and that the enemy lies within. This war is a civil war within the West, between traditional Western culture and the forces of politically correct multicultural Marxism that have bedeviled it for the last hundred years. It is being fought in the back halls and cloisters of the culture, with untenured nobodies like me wielding a salad fork against the broadswords and maces of the fully-armored knights of the media and the academy.

Even so, there’s no doubt that the Emperor has no clothes. He struts up and down the esplanades of the culture with his full entourage, confident of his own splendor, but wearing his birthday suit.

Ours is the collective voice of the little boy in the crowd who dares to say, “The Emperor is naked.” It’s just not loud enough to be heard.

Five years on, the enemy still lies within, and the Emperor is still naked. But today the hand of the state is poised, ready to strike down the little boy who does no more than tell the simple truth.

Numerous people were already being silenced before July 22, but in the backlash after the Oslo atrocities many more decided to pull down their shutters and close their businesses.

For those of us who remain, it’s more imperative than ever to speak out, to tell the truth stridently, passionately, emphatically, and frequently.

We need to remind our fellow countrymen who they are and where they come from.

We need to celebrate what is good and fine and great and true about Western Civilization.

We need to oppose those who would deny, deride, deprecate, denigrate, and destroy our heritage.

We’ve had our Rebirth. Now it’s time for Resistance.