Joe Bloggs on the EDL Jewish Division affair
Dymphna just closed the comments to the post An Open Letter to Pamela Geller and deleted some of the comments (relating to Jews). And while I have recently expressed strong sympathy for the idea of staving off discussions in this way, before they go out of bounds, I found that some of those deleted comments were worth saving. Here follows the comment by Joe Bloggs. He was the one setting up the Jewish Division of EDL: "...JewishEDL set up by the wondrous Joe Bloggs who set up the LGBT EDL." His GoV comment appears authentic to me, and in accord with what he is writing in the EDL forum, so I post it here:
Joe Bloggs said...
I will show you how unreasonable some of the people involved in this have been.
A non-jew, I met several jews on EDL demos, and on talking to them realised that they had been fighting islamisation in ones and twos for up to 7 years (and in my opinion, getting nowhere). They were angry about a specific event, and I suggested to them that if they joined EDL and headed up a jewish division they would have a far more effective platform to crush that event (the event was crushed), And their Division would serve to flush out any hidden Nazis in EDL (the rump neo-nazis groups have been circling EDL from the beginning and have been rebuffed with extreme violence from EDL, but that didn't mean there were not some inside pretending to be borderline moderate). EDL hierarchy welcomed the creation of the Jewish Division, and whilst I was sharing some admin functions at the start, within weeks the Division was run only by jews.
Over the following 12 months I have had an unimpeachable record in supporting jews, Israel and that Division (I'm proud to have become a believer in zionism.) However, upon the resignation of Roberta Moore, one of the remaining admins of the Jewish Division denounced me as a "retarded, dhimmi, kapo, Nazi turd". It is that type of insane response that leads others to be hostile to the Jewish Division. And if Pamela Geller was getting her information from someone with such a distorted grasp on reality, then no wonder Geller has been misled. On an individual level, there are different opinions about Israel, and that issue divides our conventional parties, student politics, and even friends. Yet one cannot name someone "Nazi" just because they disagree with one about the morality of some Israeli actions. Even worse, in the context of an organisation that must constantly be on the lookout for infiltration by undesirables, spraying the term "Nazi" around permits any real Nazis (should they be there) to conceal themselves amongst all the innocent people wrongly being called Nazi.. There may be no Nazis in EDL, but there are undoubtedly government agents who are planted in such organisations to manipulate, spy and disrupt. As in such stories (google '"Mark Kennedy" police'), these agents go undercover for up to a decade (maybe longer). No matter if an apparent Nazi is genuine or a government destablising agent, calling all those you disagree with "Nazi", just provides cover and makes the leadership's job harder.
It is quite clear that the EDL leadership take steps (often unannounced) to render powerless those who they suspect of being against the mission statement - 6 months ago it looked like some dodgy people (not conclusively Nazi) were attempting disloyal activities against Tommy - they were neutralised (they weren't killed, but their power was greatly diminished).
The job of rooting out enemies. is made harder the more such terms are bandied about in a totally unfounded manner. Pamela Geller served nobody but the Nazis (real or government) by making her unfounded claims. Whoever fed Geller those claims must admit fault and recognise the stupidity of providing cover for any real Nazis, or should simply leave the EDL, since that person has no confidence in the leadership's abilities and sincerity.
Geller should admit that her actions were wrong, and that she has simply invited Nazis to join EDL, and have made the EDL's job of neutralising such enemies more difficult. No-one gained from Geller's actions except her enemies and ours.
7/02/2011 3:34 AM
The admin of the Jewish Division mentioned by Joe Bloggs is Robert Bartholomeus. Also Armance had a comment on him and other aspects of the affair (before it was deleted):
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What's interesting regarding the resemblance between EDL and the Tea Party is not only their grassroot movement traits, but also the fact that, it seems, their leaders' and members' main fear consists in being called "racists" or "fascists". Thus, when they have minority members they pamper and spoil them to no end, always ready to meet their demands, to the point of endangering the very premises on which the organization was founded. As far as I understand, Roberta Moore and a few others were basically like Herman Cain in the Tea Party: she was listened to with religiosity and fear and paraded around as a trophy member, no matter how adsurd her stances were (well, unlike the Tea Party, some people couldn't stand it anymore).Here is where Robert Bartholomeus talks about "drunk idiots". And in the EDL forum he said to a female EDL member: "I hope a muslim rapes you", among other things.
But an organization based on the fear of being called names will implode at some point, or it will be transformed into something unrecognizable. The Tea Party is on the point of becoming the popular branch of Neocon Central or the WASP worshippers of MLK, and EDL has just avoided, after many hardships, the fate of being transformed into the English division of Kahanism (I don't know for how long).
The funny thing is that probably the "robertamoores" share the same contempt for the British "hooligans" (the basis of EDL) as the British liberal upper class: they've just believed that the "drunk idiots" (as an angry pro-Jewish Division poster called them these days on Atlas Shrugs - finally, he admitted what he thought about his colleagues in all these years) would be easy to manipulate. But the "drunk idiots" proved to be a nut harder to crack than initially believed. Their common-sense was underestimated and they refused to let their organization to be transformed into something unrecognizable. That's where the "neo-fascists, anti-Semites" atlashrug-ish outburst came from. Basically, it can be translated as "Stay in line, drunk idiots! What, do you dare to THINK? You were supposed just to go in the streets, there are others who can think for you".
3 comments:
Reading your essay, the image that came to mind was from the chemistry of fluids, though I don't know what process is called. This site describes what happens, kind of. Anyhow, that image of distinctly different fluids in a swirl is what you've produced (and reproduced) here.
Poltical movements (and the blogs which attempt to delineate them) are chock-a-block with snafus. So many hatreds, so little time.
Thank you for preserving what I had to remove. I'd rather not do that, but experience has made me wiser now. And when a thread goes on for that long, I am simply too fatigued to use a scalpel. It's simply hatchet time.
[I shudder to think what shape I'd be in if we weren't on that HFLC food system. I refuse to call it a "diet". My fatigue would've set in long since]
I'm still trying to figure out a work-around for the diminishing returns that are invariable in long threads. So far, we stay open most of the time. But I wonder what it would be like if our limit was, say, 50 comments a post, then close the thread...while leaving the newsfeed open for OT comments.
Things are becoming so balkanized & fractured that all of us may go Auster in the end. Not just us, but others, too. I mean, look how productive he is...
I'd like to talk more about American politics on GoV -- the Tea Party & Herman McCain for example, but then I'd have to pay more attention to American politics. Ugh...But the main reason I hold off is the audience it would draw. Besides, the US has become one long reign of campaigns. Someone gets into office and as soon as he sits in the chair, the next election cycle begins. Give.me.a.break.
Maybe we could have two-tiers: those who campaign and those who actually work. Oh wait...we already have that.
Just noticed you've got an Auster set-up, too. Good for you!
Dymphna,
There are many things that I will never find the time and patience to convince you about. But I'm sort of fine with that nowadays. I'm not looking for soul-mates anymore. It's so clear to me, after all these years, that nobody is a soul-mate to me.
The only thing that really matters to me is that I managed to convert you fully in to HFLC - or LCHF as it is known as in Sweden: Low Carb High Fat. You needed it so badly (quite as so many others). So now you will live longer, and I will have more time to screw your mind with my radical ideas :-)
You already knew all the bits and facts about it - I'm impressed by how much you know about food and cooking. But you needed that final push to get out of the grip of the zeitgeist, the dogmas of the establishment, and the fear-mongering of the medicine men in the white robes. And that's the sort of thing I'm good at :-)
And you are right about my bad-ass style of moderation. You were lucky that I didn't delete your comment immediately. Because I'd do such a thing just for fun. But now I'd had a glass of excellent Bordeaux wine, and I'm in a very good mood. So your comment stayed, and I even wrote a proper answer to it, which I almost never do.
Considering this, I obviously have no objections whatsoever to the fact that you deleted those comments. I only posted them here since I thought they were worth saving.
Btw, check out this site: http://www.gnolls.org/
CS, thanks for saving my comment here. While I understand the reasons for which the GoV administrators deleted it (and, as I said, I respect the decision of a blog owner to accept or reject anything he wants), my post was the result of reading incessantly, for a few days, different blogs and forums related to the EDL affair. And after reading all the viewpoints I came up with a heartfelt sympathy for those "drunk idiots" (I use this expression as a badge of honor in this context) and I understood what they had to come through. Besides, I will still respect the GoV blog owners just for publishing Kipling's poem "Tommy" on their blog. That poem summs up, in a metaphorical way, the fight of the EDL. It summs up the resistance of the British working class (or "hooligans", as they are named by the British elitists) because it's their neighborhoods that are wrecked, it's their country that is destroyed, it's their daughters that are raped or groomed, it's their sons that are tortured and beaten to death like Kriss Donald. This is their fight and I can't stand watching how it's hijacked for foreign purposes, no matter how viable those purposes might be. This is the battle of the British commoners to protect their Kriss Donalds for being beaten to death, that's how I see it. Anybody who denies these premises of the EDL is not a friend of their movement and it's not a friend of a sovereign Britain.
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