Friday, April 17, 2009

Glenn Beck vs. Little Green Footballs

Tundra Tabloids just further expanded its “Under the LGF Bus” picture, because Glenn Beck has now been identified as a dangerous right-wing extremist by Charles Johnson. Welcome to the club!

But Glenn isn’t taking the slurs quietly:


Here’s a quote from the video:

Quite honestly, it’s a destructive attempt to silence free speech. That’s something blogger Charles Johnson should know about, since he’s been called an anti-Muslim bigot by most of the same people that unfairly said the same things about me.

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I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all of our readers, tipsters, correspondents and contributors who have stood by Gates of Vienna since the whole LGF mess started a year and a half ago.

Back then Atlas Shrugs and our blog seemed to be standing alone fighting the slurs, fabrications, distortions, and cheap shots coming from Little Green Footballs. It didn’t matter what the truth was. It didn’t matter that Charles Johnson was as mistaken about some of his “facts” as Dan Rather was about his memo. The larger blogs were unwilling to stick their necks out and risk the Wrath of the Lizard.
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But the truth has a way of seeping out.

It has taken eighteen months, but common sense concerning these issues is finally emerging. Now that Glenn Beck has unmasked LGF’s disinformation on national television, does this mean Pamela and I can come in from the cold? Are we no longer “fascist-enablers” and “apologists for European neo-Nazis”?

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For most of last year our blog was a near-pariah in the American blogosphere. The links from major blogs all but ceased, and only the Europeans and some of the small right-wing American blogs — God bless them! — were willing to take sides.

Presumably the blanket of silence on this issue was due to fear of the Lidless Eye and the havoc Charles Johnson could wreak. Woe betide any American blogger who drew his baleful gaze! Perhaps that is why Dr. Sanity, ShrinkWrapped, and others sided with Charles. There were exceptions, one of them being James Lewis at American Thinker. He was willing to examine Charles’ errors and his naïveté in being used by Swedish and Belgian black psyops.

Now some of the more important and popular media voices are pointing out the nature of LGF. Notice the issues that Glenn Beck has with Charles Johnson:

1. His seemingly willful misrepresentation of the facts.
2. His willingness to take questionable information at face value without doing the most basic due diligence to check its accuracy.
3. His refusal to make any public correction of errors arising from #1 and #2, and
4. His habit of issuing vicious personal attacks that poison public discourse and polarize people who are essentially on the same team.

Do you see a pattern here?

These were exactly the same issues that arose during the Vlaams Belang controversy. Charles Johnson posted slurs, rumors, innuendo, material taken out of context, and outright falsehoods about Sverigedemokraterna and Vlaams Belang. He presented the material in a nasty, divisive, and vitriolic manner. And then he refused to back down and publicly withdraw any of his gross errors and misrepresentations when they were pointed out.

In a watershed moment, some of the major players in the media and the blog world are now willing to acknowledge that the Lizard Emperor has no clothes. But it took eighteen months for the truth to become glaringly apparent.

Those eighteen lost months sucked up energy that would have been directed towards our common cause. Charles Johnson damaged reputations and created fractures within the anti-jihad movement, some of which may never completely heal.

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Our time in the wilderness was instructive.

It taught me that the large blogs are scarcely more principled than the MSM — they were unwilling to stand up publicly for the truth in the face of possible damage to their traffic and their ad revenues. It should have been obvious — we’re all fallible human beings — but it was still a sad lesson to learn.

It reinforced my sense that a distributed network of less prominent players is a better way to accomplish our purposes. Information spreads more reliably and action can be coordinated more effectively when “celebrities” aren’t part of the process. As I’ve said before, we’re an army of midgets. No one will get rich or famous doing this, but the job will actually get done.

Our excommunication became complete when Pajamas Media — unable to distinguish between descriptive and normative prose — told us that we were no longer welcome as affiliates. Once PJM gave us the boot, we experienced the freedom of having nothing left to lose. No more worrying about ad traffic or offending the folks at headquarters — we could call the shots as we saw fit. Our readers promptly stepped into the breach with their generous financial support of our blog.

We stuck to our guns. I’m grateful to those who stayed with us during our sojourn in the Outer Darkness.

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This past January, members of the Belgian Left in Antwerp — including Social Democrat politicians — marched side-by-side with Muslims who chanted, “Hamas! Hamas! Jews to the gas!”

During that time Filip Dewinter was the only leader of a major political party in Belgium to stand up publicly for Flemish Jews. He and other leaders of Vlaams Belang did so vehemently and repeatedly. Mr. Dewinter demanded on the floor of the Flemish Parliament that the government aggressively investigate and prosecute the murderous thugs who attacked Jews and firebombed synagogues. He pointed out the essential anti-Semitic nature of many of Belgium’s Muslim immigrants.

No other Belgian political party did these things. Only Vlaams Belang.

This is on the public record. It was reported in the Belgian media and appeared in English translation on this blog and other sites. But Charles Johnson has never retracted his scurrilous attacks on Filip Dewinter as a “neo-Nazi”. He and many others in the vast anti-European echo chamber continue to repeat the same nonsense.

It’s unfortunate, but Mr. Dewinter acquired the unfair “neo-Nazi” slander in the American media, and nothing seems to be able to shake it loose.

I’m sure Glenn Beck can sympathize with him.


Thanks to Vlad Tepes for YouTubing the video segment.

42 comments:

Qob said...

Well I got banned from LGF today. For posting a challenge to Charles immediately after posting the "Dramatic" goodbye, I had melted down apaarently
"Charles, I am not sure why the main thrust of LGF has moved from combating Jihad to combating conservatives you don’t like (and vice versa)
I have been here since the beginning. I started reading, and sparsely commenting in Sept 2001. I have to say that I have been gradually moving away since LGF simply isn’t interested in what I came here for anymore. You have done great work, and I can not say how much I appreciated what you stood for in the past. But since you are moving on, so will I.
Peace."

Spinoneone said...

Well, Gates of Vienna is in good company. After all, Jihadwatch is also banned by LGF. Think I will believe Spencer over Johnson any day.
Remember that governments come in about five generic varieties: monarchies/dictatorships [includes communism, fascism, nazis, etc], oligarchies, democracies [leads to rule by the majority with minorities excluded], republics [rule of law vs. rule of majority/minority], and anarchy.

Stogie said...

I used to have LGF in my "must reads" link section; then I demoted it to the generic blog list and a couple of weeks ago just deleted it altogether.

CJ has just gotten too darn weird and unpredictable for my tastes.

X said...

Kind of sad, but I've been waiting for this to come up all day. I see you guys as family, in some ways, and I've always had a really bad reaction when people attack my family.

I think it's safe to move on, as they say. Charles has just effectively neutered himself. As Churchill said of the battle of El Alamain, before today all we saw was defeats. After today all we shall see is victories.

Bill Quick said...

"The larger blogs were unwilling to stick their necks out and risk the Wrath of the Lizard."

I wish I'd known. Neither Charles nor Roger inspire any fear in me. Charlie's place has been a mob-driven, one-note cesspool for years, and Roger has been busily driving PJM into the ground of mediocrity and moderation for years as well, with the full collusion of his partner Johnson.

PJM is a place that dumps folks like you and Jeff Goldstein, and promotes hacks like Fake Rightwing Nutjob Rick Moran. Says it all.

-- Bill Quick

Dark Eden said...

Luckily I encountered Gates of Vienna and was a fan long before LGF declared you the enemy or however you want to put it.

I'm a libertarian and I've been called a fascist more time than I can count. Considering a libertarian is about as far from a fascist as its possible to get, that's quite funny.

It also shows that you have to give the benefit of the doubt when people get accused of these things.

I would like to thank Gates of Vienna for exposing me to events in Europe I would never hear about through any other means. I hope you keep it up no matter how many times you are branded with the new Scarlet Letter.

Fjordman said...

I stopped worrying about LGF after they attacked Andrew Bostom and Robert Spencer. They were dead then, they just didn't know it.

In hindsight, I have decided that I will take it as a compliment that CJ attacked me and the blogs that I publish at, including GoV, The Brussels Journal, Atlas and finally Jihad Watch as vehemently as he did. Since it's now pretty clear even to casual observers that he has joined The Other Side, the fact that he spent so much energy trying - and failing - to discredit us shows that he perceives us to be ideologically prominent on The Good Side. And he's right. So let's be happy about that.

I also don't think we should exaggerate the long-term damage from this. He did drain some of my energy at one point, I admit that. But in the end he only managed to discredit himself. GoV is far larger now than it was before this mess began, and Atlas Shrugs is growing so fast that it may soon surpass LGF, which is on its way down. TBJ is doing fine. The serious people at LGF have long since defected to Jihad Watch. They get the picture. Charles Johnson has already lost his reputation and may soon lose his entire blog. If he had listened to my advice a year and a half ago his reputation would still be intact by now. I suppose he will have to think about that...

PatriotUSA said...

LGF is in a tailspin that CJ has wrought upon himself and LGF. I was banned a long time ago and was branded a racist, islamophobic(true!) and a right wing extremeist who only cared about gun ownership and "rabid patriotism, and being blinded by RED, White and Blue patriotism. " I wish I had saved the email, and comments that started my getting banned. So what, I got banned from LGF. Moving on to JW, AS, G of V, SIOE, Brussels Journal, Bare Naked islam and many other WORTHY and serious sources of the truth, I have no regrets about LGF, nor about what got me booted off. I am more educated, vigilant and active!

Paul said...

When C. Johnson, and regrettably, PajamasMedia, decided to side against GoV, it was a sad day for free discourse and open thought.

Since that time it has become painfully apparent C. Johnson is nothing more than a God hater; a deluded Darwinist, anti-Christian zealot, and polarized fanatic Jewish grumbler. And I really hate to say that. But that's how it looks. I feel badly for the many very high quality Jewish persons we have in our midst. Charles muddies the water for all of us.

X said...

If Johnson is Jewish, I'm Moses.

Fjordman said...

"If Johnson is Jewish, I'm Moses."

Funny that you should say it. As a non-religious man, I'm working on an essay about whether Moses might have been a real person, influenced by the heretical Pharaoh Akhenaten's monotheistic reforms in the fourteenth century BC. The idea is not new, but after reading about the subject, I find the hypothesis plausible. It's certainly not ridiculous.

Paul said...

Archonix, what's that big beard you're sportin' there?

Fellas, have you checked out Charles lately? He's bashin' folk speaking out against the lefty swill guzzlers who wrote and backed the DHS toilet paper on Right Wing radicalization.

Seems old Charles is the ultimately lefty troll. Good job Charles, you had us fooled for a long time.

I bet Charles really works for the Dept. of Homeland Security under the almighty --- ONE --- PBUH, and is now just doing his job.

X said...

Fjordman, that theory certainly isn't new but I'd certainly be interested to see your take on it.

*strokes his beard and ponders for a while* Englishmen have always sported some form of face furniture. I'm a bit like Darwin, or Huxley. Or, unfortunately, the present archbishop of Canterbury...

filthykafir said...

I was Moses in a former life. Charles J. is a filthy goyim (not to mention, a "mindless drone"), who has no place at the banquet of the Kingdom. God and I blotted his name from the Book of Life years ago.

Gramfan said...

This is my first post here although I have been reading this 'blog for a long time.

I posted about 5 comments in about as many years and I got banned from LGF last week.(I was using the linkviewer and maybe he didn't like the link I posted.)

The comments section is like a chat room,IMHO.

FJordman
"Funny that you should say it. As a non-religious man, I'm working on an essay about whether Moses might have been a real person, influenced by the heretical Pharaoh Akhenaten's monotheistic reforms in the fourteenth century BC."

Interesting comment. I have a book on various belief systems which suggests they were one an the same!
Apparently most cartouche references to Akhenaten have been removed.
Fascinating book (and movie) called
"The Egyptian" by Mika Waltari: I read it years ago, and although it is fiction there is a lot of insight into Akhenaten.
I watch the movie from time to time also.
I'll look out for your piece.

X said...

The thing about Akhenaten is, his monotheism pretty much killed the steady income and political control the previous religious hierarchy had weilded over Egypt. He was not a particularly popular fellow with the priests as a result and after he died, without an heir, they were very quick to impress on his successor the need for a stable religious climate that involved all the gods. I'd say more but the thing I was reading about him has mostly slipped from my memory.

Moses may have been "inspired" by Akhenaten but there are major differences between Hebrew monotheism and Akhenaten's sun-worship religion. The largest being that he worshipped the sun, which was a big no-no in the hebrew religious dogma. The Hebrew temple faced west, away from the rising sun and there were several times when the priests were castigated for turning their backs on the temple to worship the solar deity.

I'll have to remember the book I was reading. I'm sure it'll come in handy for Fjordman's essay.

Fjordman said...

Graham: I have been familiar with the hypothesis for years. It was championed by Freud, among others, which almost works against it since Freud was often wrong. My general impression was that it was a fluke, and that the traditional religion was quickly restored after Akhenaten's death. On the surface, it was. However, if you read Jacobus Van Dijk's chapter about the Amarna Period and its aftermath in The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt, he says the following:

"Although the Amarna episode lasted barely twenty years, its impact was enormous. It is perhaps the single most important event in Egypt’s religious and cultural history and it left deep scars on the collective consciousness of its inhabitants. Superficially, the country returned to the traditional religion of the time before Akhenaten, but in reality nothing would ever be the same again."

"The history of the 18th Dynasty before the Amarna Period had seen a clear development towards a more personal relationship between the various deities and their worshippers. This development came to a sudden halt when Akhenaten proclaimed a god who could only be worshipped by his son, the king, whereas all individual, personal devotion had to be diverted to the king himself. This total usurpation of personal piety had seriously compromised the credibility of the dogma of divine kingship. In the period after Amarna, the balance between god and king underwent a dramatic change. The king lost for good the central position he had occupied in the lives of his subjects; instead, the god now acquired many traditional aspects of kingship. In the traditional representative theocracy, the gods embodied the cosmic order that they had created at the beginning of time, while the king, as their intermediary, represented the gods upon earth, maintained cosmic order by means of the temple ritual, and carried out their will by his government. Only very rarely did the gods reveal themselves directly, and, when they did, they did so to the king. After the Amarna Period, the problem of the unity and plurality of the gods, which Akhenaten had tried to solve by denying the existence of all but one sole god, was solved in a different way: Amun-Ra became the universal, transcendent god, who existed far away, independent of his creation; the other gods and goddesses were aspects of him, they were his immanent manifestations."

The god now revealed his will directly to every human being and intervened directly in the events of everyday life and in the course of history. Amun-Ra looked down upon his worshippers from afar, but at the same time was near because he heard their prayers and could intervene directly to answer them if he so chose. When a person had committed a sin, even one hidden from human justice, divine intervention could mean divine retribution. This new form of religious experience, often called “personal piety,” was characteristic of the Ramessid Period. Even the King/Pharaoh might appeal to his god in his hour of need, as Rameses II allegedly did during the Battle of Qadesh against his Hittite enemies, when he called out to his god Amun, and the arrival of his support force was interpreted as divine intervention. In this case, the king was no longer God represented on Earth, but was subordinate to him and subject to the will of god just like all other human beings. Jacobus Van Dijk again:

“Once it had been recognized that god’s will was the governing factor in everything that happened, it became mandatory to know his will in advance. Oracles, which had originally been consulted only by the king, perhaps as early as the Old Kingdom (and which had during the 18th Dynasty been used to seek the god’s approval of a king’s accession or a major trade or military expedition), began to be used in the Ramessid Period to consult the god on all sorts of affairs in the lives of ordinary human beings….Appointments, disputes over property, accusations of crimes, and later even questions seeking the god’s reassurance that one would safely live on in the hereafter, were thus subjected to the god’s will. All of these developments further minimalized the role of the king as god’s representative on earth; the king was no longer a god, but god himself had become king. Once Amun had been recognized as the true king, the political power of the earthly rulers could be reduced to a minimum and transferred to Amun’s priesthood.”

Unknown said...

In the clip, Glenn Beck says "I have a dream" and holds up a framed picture of Martin Luther King Jr. for two seconds - one of his many sight gags that aren't that funny.

Here is Charles Johnson's take on it: "And then this freak has the gall to compare himself to Martin Luther King Jr."

Mr. Johnson is a liar in matters big and small.

livfreerdie said...

Thankfully God gave some the ability to distinguish between BS and fact.

An unwavering GoV reader/fan

Tom

Fjordman said...

Regarding CJ: I see some observers speculate that he was bought off by people in high places to discredit the counter-Jihad movement. Frankly, the thought has crossed my mind, too. Stranger things have happened before. But in the end, I don't think we need to assume such a motive. It is sufficient to assume that CJ was always a Leftist at heart. So was I once, but I had the mental disease of Leftism purged from my body by my intellectual immune system. CJ remains a Leftist at core, he just made a brief, unprincipled exception after 9/11. There may be other forces at work. Perhaps he wanted his blog to become more "mainstream" and less tainted by the presence of people like us, who are actually serious about what we do. In short, CJ criticizes the MSM because he wants to become the MSM.

As a sci-fi buff, I could use an analogy from the Star Wars series: Why did Darth Vader join the Dark Side? I suppose that is an interesting question, but the most important thing is the conclusion: He DID join the Dark Side. Exactly why he did that is of secondary importance. I do hope the analogy ends there, otherwise I fear that I might find out in episode 5 that Charles Johnson is actually my father and that I have an unknown twin sister with a golden bikini somewhere. I would hate that to happen. May the force be with us, and all that stuff....

Paul said...

So, Fjordman, a sci-fi buff. Good man. Seems we have more in common than I thought at first.

You did see Contact with Jodie Foster? Written by the arrogant Carl Sagan... but we can overlook that. Good movie. Seems men can't give up reaching for God. It's built into us you see. For some men, the aversion to God is so strong it is necessary to reach out for spacemen. The inner drive is the same, even though it is expressed in different ways.

Aside from that, you may be right about Charles. A lefty from the beginning. Perhaps he just wanted to be the MSM. Maybe so.

Dymphna said...

RE: Moses as a "real" person.

I think if you read his narrative closely, you'll notice that he is not a man of heroic proportions. Nor did he want the assignment he was given. Not well-spoken, he had to use Aaron as his teleprompter in speaking to the Jews on their journey through the desert. No one would have listened to him particularly. IOW, he wasn't charismatic.

It's been too many years since I studied the amalgamation of the northern and southern tribes' stories, but the monotheism of Israel was common to both. And the story of Moses was also.

Among biblical theologians is is conjectured that Moses' sojourn working for Jethro in order to marry his daughter(s) is where he picked up the cult and the code -- so to speak. That is, the aspects of worship to be followed for this new God. The creedal aspects come later, with the Ten Commandments (and notice how Moses flubbed that one).

Abraham Heschel (II think it was) said that Moses' story as a very flawed human being makes it more likely that the story was based on a real person.

Same goes for King David, Solomon, his son, etc.

Anonymous said...

The original kerfuffle over Vlaams Belang was really what catapulted me into politics--specifically, international politics. I supported Gates of Vienna then, and I still do now.

babs said...

CJ did good work exposing the Rather memos and the Lebanon fauxtography. However, I think he loved the attention and turned bitter when it dialed back. Also, the comments on the site were/are so juvenile that I stopped reading them.
Then, I found GoV and BJ. What a breath of fresh air! Hosts and commenters able to engage in civilized debate.
And, BTW, the best thing to happen to this blog was getting kicked out of PJM. The site loads so much quicker and no blinky/stinky stuff in the side bars!
I have no problem throwing a fin your way a couple times a year to keep you up and running.

laine said...

Another scarred veteran of LGF here.

The first problem I noticed with it was the quantity of comments with little quality.

Then the few quality commenters (I specifically remember Fjordman - he stuck out like a sore thumb there) were jettisoned one by one.

It became clear that LGF was just an echo chamber for the King Lizard and his intellectual limitations became more and more apparent. With no justification, he took as gospel the word of some Swede whose name escapes me at the moment but who was obviously a leftist disinformation specialist to blacken Belien, Vlaams Belang etc., parsing crosses on bookshelves.

Then there was the inside posse of commenters who turned into a lynch mob for anyone who challenged their orthodoxy. I was savaged for comments in a non-political area where I know a great deal and the mob knew little but had strong opinions. Their behavior was indistinguishable from left wingers, evidencing bad manners, ignorance. illogic and an unnecessarily acrid tone. Ironically, the ringleader was someone who called herself Mandy Manners.

I left of my own accord after sticking around long enough to establish that I wasn't cowed. I was very new to the blogosphere and was pleasantly surprised at the numerous civil sites for conservative discourse that were available including GOV. I was sorry I had wasted my time at LGF.

Charles Johnson turned out to be a lefty with one narrow "seeing" spot in his leftist blindness and that was the Muslim threat. As 911 receded, his leftism reasserted itself to the point that his fear of racism trumped his fear of the Muslim threat and like all leftists, he started attacking conservatives and Christians as though they are a greater threat to leftists and world peace than are Muslims.

Anyone with a mind of their own has presumably left LGF, unwilling to be led by the nose down such foolish and destructive paths. Speaking of which, are they all Obamaphiles?

Profitsbeard said...

Baron B. & Dymphna-

Concerning LGF's pathetic and continuous "ethnic cleansing"-mode... for anyone who dares disagree with the revealed party line of the head reptile:

C. Johnson doesn't understand the concept "the perfect is the enemy of the good enough".And is willing to alienate his colleagues to retain a familiar delusion of narrow-minded: the mythical "moral highground".

"Moral highgrounds" usual end up as the cemetaries for those uber-purists who will not stoop to "soil their hands" in a fight to the death with an enemy willing to slice off their heads with kitchen cutlery and post the horror online as psyops while screaming "Our God is greatest!" in Arabic.

Johnson thinks this war against Islamic Terror is a kind of detached, disinfected chess match, not a bloody battle for survival that demands every sinew and every bit of cunning we possess.

Had Churchill and FDR used his rarified criterion for allies, we would all ~now~ be either nonexistent (since our ancestors would have been vaporized by the Nazi A-bombs riding in on improved V-3 rockets) or serfs of the successful Third Reich cum Japanese Co-Prosperity Sphere.

Prissiness and alienating your natural allies because they do not meet every requirement of your "perfect" test ends up allowing your less-squeamish enemy to slaughter you with impunity.

*******

The simple sanity and integrity and self-deprecating common sense of you ~and Robert Spencer, and others in this fight for our Freedom~ shines through your work, while CJ merely snarls and snaps at shadows.

Keep on keeping on!

Stability and a sense of humor last longer than one-upman egotism and limp little "ban sticks".

______________________________

Fjordman-Since you're a sci-fi fan, a book on the outcome of this subject of allies is worth a read, if it isn't already on your shelf: - Phillip K. Dick's "The Man in The High Castle" (wherein the Nazis and Japanese have won WW II...).

And:

On the Moses trail~ "The Dawn of Conscience" by James H. Breasted is an intriguing supplement to the Pentatuch.

Anonymous said...

Profitsbeard:

I'm so thrilled you mentioned The Man in the High Castle. (I know your comment wasn't technically directed at me, but I can't resist weighing in.) It's an excellent book--I've read it several times now and it just gets better each time. I'd highly recommend it to anyone.

Sir Henry Morgan said...

I'd actually forgotten all about KGB/LGF until I saw this post.

Literally.

Henrik R Clausen said...

Wow. Another thread worth reading from A to Z. I've been fascinated by the Amarna period in Egypt as well, including the Waltari tome. I'll get back to that when I have more time at hand - economics is the hot issue for me to read up on these days.

As for LGF, I wouldn't bother too much. Alexa has consistently shown that Atlas Shrugs and Jihad Watch have been beating LGF into the dust, with GoV gaining consistently in the background. While Alexa stats isn't exactly hard science, it is certainly an independent indicator.

Charles Johnson continues to alienate people who could be his friend, and seems incapable of even tolerating ideas contrary to his own narrow mindset. The rest of the world has work to do and has largely moved on.

Steven Luotto said...

The test is simple. Go to Islam-on-line and post something STRONGLY Anti-islamic. Then go to LGF and print something MILDLY pro Vlaams. You'll be kicked out by both, that's for sure... but you will find Allah's minions far more merciful than the Lizard. I guess it has something to do with Middle-Eastern graciousness.

I struck the guy off my bookmarks ages ago.

Qob said...

OK here is my take after 24 hours of being off the LGF reservation. The truth is, and if you read Charles' pre-911 archives, he was never a conservative, frankly as GWB never was either. GWB though in his moderateness was a good man who tried to the the right thing as he understood it. And when it was time for him to go, he packed it up and road off into the sunset. The election of Obama, the defacto victory and end of the Iraq war, these events seemed to convince Charles that the jihadis weren't that important anymore.

Free of his "mugged by reality conservatism" Charles is now a liberal again with a big audience. Before 911 he was a webdesigner who played jazz guitar and road a bike, now he's a big time blogger. The jihadis aren't a problem now, who is? Creationists who has a 6 degrees of separation link to the jihadis. Christians who believe in or are sympathetic to Creationism. Libertarians who frankly don't mind what other people believe. These are the enemies that Charles has fixed on. These are bigger threats to the West than islamists are now. If you find this to be irrational, well you are part of the problem. Too bad, I thought CJ was an important figure in the war to preserve the culture, now I fear he's just a self-important figure.

dienw said...

Re Moses and Akhenaten:

To say that Moses got his monotheism from Akhenaten/Egypt is to ignore the spiritual sources and assume that all religions are man made. Such is the equivalent of saying or consenting to the lie that Allah is the same as God (YHWH) -- or that they are equal.

One scholar I read in the past few days researched the identity of the deity Allah back to the god Bel: that author found the link to Allah through the crescent amulets common to both Bell and Islam: the crescent moon is the symbol/totem of Satan.

Another good resource for understanding the nature of the demonic deception of false religions is "The Two Babylons."

The primary consideration is to recognize/assent that God is and that He has given us information by revelation regarding Himself, the world, humanity's nature and state, the devil, and the spiritual warfare around us. To deny this is to remain subject to the great deception: to write a treatise on Christian/Judaism and Islam in this spiritual state is vanity.

dienw said...

As a sci-fi buff, I could use an analogy from the Star Wars series: Why did Darth Vader join the Dark Side? I suppose that is an interesting question, but the most important thing is the conclusion: He DID join the Dark Side. Exactly why he did that is of secondary importance.I came to the conclusion that, as both "force" adepts were using the same source for their power and both cults were man made, the Jedi and Sith were two sides of the same coin: one was based on cool, rationality: aloof from the emotional and intimate attachments; the other was grounded in the emotional: the stronger the better. In fact, the defeat of the Emperor by Luke was the winning over of his father based on the deep emotional attachment of father to son: it was Luke's appeal to the basis of the Sith cult that won the day.

blogagog said...

LGF? Is that thing still around?

CAPTAIN THURSTON said...

I am very proud to have stood by this blog. God speed on your travels in the future.

Ilíon said...

Baron: "I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all of our readers, tipsters, correspondents and contributors who have stood by Gates of Vienna since the whole LGF mess started a year and a half ago."

Well, ya know, 9/11 was a long time ago ... I'm not too shocked that a "liberal" who was shocked by eventts into a more "conservative" stance has since reverted to type after this many years of no further successful attacks on another American city.

Charles Martel said...

LGF was never of any particular interest to me. I never even registered to comment. I needed the more full bodied anti-Islamism found at GOV, ROP, AS, and BJ. I always found CJ to be, at the very best, a milquetoast. I bookmarked him for no more than a week before I gave up.

GOV has always been dependable and is a civilized meeting place where accusations of racism rarely, if ever, vitiate the atmosphere.

Dymphna and Barron, you are a larger part of my life than you can possibly imagine. Without you, I would feel more alone. There are so few of us who actually get it. That's one reason I have such difficulty on those few occasions when Dymphna goes wobbly.

Thank you Barron and Dymphna. You are a HUGE and absolutely essential part of the fight against Islam.

Henrik R Clausen said...

Charles, same for me. When I started roaming the blogosphere some three years ago, I saw many link to LGF. Going there was a disappointment. Sure, interesting stuff was posted, but the comments fields were boring, bigoted and lacking the supplemental information that makes GoV, JW and other quality blogs good.

The idea of registration windows kept me from ever posting a comment. I simply didn't hang out frequently enough to see anything but "Window open - window closed".

Charles runs his own little world, which he's perfectly entitle to. The influence he used to have is dismantled, and CJ constitutes no threat to anyone.

That PyjamasMedia didn't have the guts to stand up for the small blog against the large is worse in the long run, IMHO.

Joe said...

I don't even remember how I heard of Gates of Vienna. I do remember that at first glance I thought it was a crusty, dry blog about obscure events in European history with hardly any relevance to today (that view changed, of course).

On the other hand, I was a regular reader of LGF for years. The comments were always unworthy of reading, and I noticed a lapse in (frankly) sanity of Johnson over the last few years. His obsession with Creationism is boring, if nothing else, but his slur and excommunication of Robert Spencer was the last straw. I agree with the view that LGF was dead at that moment, even if Johnson did not know it. Thankfully, he is like the man behind the curtain in Oz, and there are plenty of better alternatives nowadays.

CWB said...

Charles Johnson is a sad and pathetic man. Does anyone take him seriously anymore?

PRCalDude said...

As a non-religious man, I'm working on an essay about whether Moses might have been a real person, influenced by the heretical Pharaoh Akhenaten's monotheistic reforms in the fourteenth century BC. The idea is not new, but after reading about the subject, I find the hypothesis plausible. It's certainly not ridiculous.Not this again. Does anyone ever read Christian responses to the critical scholars, or do they just get ignored?

The Exodus predates Akhenaten by 100 years at least, and there are significant theological differences between the worship of Aten and the worship of YHWH, as someone else mentioned. MG Kline defended Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, and the Bible itself dates the Exodus to around 1500 BC (again, before Akhenaten).

Generally, when you scratch the surface of the arguments of critical scholars who like to "debunk" Biblical historical data, you find nothing more than presuppositional bias, to whit, the Bible simply can't be true.

The Old Testament historical record is treated with much more skepticism than Eqyptian, Assyrian, and Mesopotamian references, despite the fact that the latter also contain references to their various gods as well. The reason? Again, the Bible simply can't be true.

If it were true, all the unpleasantness about sin and judgment are true as well, which is depressing.

AMDG said...

Those who resist, win. You can be proud of your firmness.