Newsweek on the Jewish Defense League

Thought you might like to see this piece Mark Hosenball did on the EDL. Clearly the left is attempting to split the counter jihad movement. They want me to distance myself from brave souls fighting Islamic supremacism. N-O-T G-O-I-N-G T-O H-A-P-P-E-N.

If I lived in England, I would surely be active in the EDL Jewish division. Members of the EDL will be attending our rally to stop the Ground Zero Islamic supremacist mosque on September 11th (be there).

Read the whole thing. Newsweak's bias is obvious, but at least they published my responses. That is, in itself, a small victory:

Excerpt: N.Y. Anti-Mosque Leader Defends Group That Clashed With British Police Mark Hosenball, Newsweek

Pamela Geller is a conservative blogger, activist, and a principal organizer of Stop Islamization of America (SIOA), which seeks to block construction of the proposed center. The group is sponsoring a protest rally at the site on the 2010 anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, a week from Saturday. In a posting on her Atlas Shrugs blog, Geller expresses sympathy for the goals and actions of the English Defense League (EDL), a far-right group implicated in violent clashes with police during an anti-Islamic demonstration last Saturday in the northern English city of Bradford. "The stated goal of the EDL is to oppose militant Islam and the sharia," Geller writes. "What's wrong with that? Everything to the PC, leftist slaves in the media and the government."

In an e-mail to Declassified, Geller affirmed her support for the EDL and defended the group's actions in Bradford, which, with its nearby sister city of Leeds, has a substantial Muslim population, many of Pakistani extraction.

[....]

Geller wrote: "The media has been defamatory and libelous towards any and all counter jihad activists, including the EDL, which far from being neo-Nazi and racist, is pro-Israel and has Sikh and other non-white members and spokesmen. The EDL's own explanation of what happened in Bradford is here. As you can see from that statement, a group of Islamic supremacists and Communists actually began the violence by throwing rocks at EDL members. White supremacists at the demonstration did not represent the EDL, and EDL members actually removed them from the demonstration."

[...]

By her own account, Geller's support of the EDL and other anti-Muslim groups in the U.K. has put her at odds with what are considered mainstream groups representing Britain's Jewish community. In an interview with the conservative FrontPage Magazine Web site, Geller claims that rabbis and prominent Jewish groups in Britain had urged Jews to boycott a demonstration that a group called Stop the Islamization of Europe (SIOE) organized last December to protest plans to build a mosque in the North London neighborhood of Harrow.

According to Geller, the Community Security Trust, which keeps watch on extremist and anti-Semitic activities in the U.K., much like the Anti-Defamation League does in the U.S., urged Jews not to support the SIOE protest, as did unnamed rabbis who said the protest's "only purpose" was "to spread hatred and fear." Geller accused U.K. Jewish groups like the CST of "aiding and abetting Islamic jihad and Islamic anti-Semitism." A person familiar with the views of British Jewish leaders, who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive information, said mainstream Jewish groups regarded the English Defense League as "politicized football hooligans."

In an e-mail to Declassified, Geller acknowledged that some epithets that The Telegraph attributed to EDL protesters in Bradford were "in bad taste, although in saying that I am not accepting the accuracy of The Telegraph account, and also understand that words said in anger are not always words the speakers would endorse in moments of reflection." In a move apparently designed to avoid such embarrassments at her group's upcoming 9/11 event, she said, "We have already published several notices warning that inflammatory signs will be removed."

Geller said the EDL itself acknowledged that there may have been neo-Nazi thugs among its ranks: "The left and real neo-Nazis frequently attempt to infiltrate EDL rallies in order to discredit the EDL. This is amply documented. Both have an interest in seeing the EDL fail: the left so that there will be no serious resistance to its agenda, and the neo-Nazis so that there exists no respectable alternative to them in opposing the British elite, and also because the neo-Nazis have generally aligned with the Islamic jihad that the EDL resists."

She added that while she would not assert that the EDL "can do no wrong, I just refuse to accept accounts of EDL misdeeds from sources that have been proven in the past to have lied about EDL activities."
Atlas Shrugs