Pamela Geller has a terrific response here to Melanie Phillips’ hysterical and inaccurate rejoinder to our initial responses to her gratuitous attack on our work. (Got that?) My earlier response is here, and Pamela’s is here. A bit from Pamela’s latest:
The EDL has nothing racist or xenophobic about its platform. Phillips knows full well that the rare nazi salute at an EDL rally is most often the work of an infiltrator, a deliberate schemer attempting to smear the group. They are removed from the demo immediately. She ought to be more critical of those who seek to manipulate her good opinion.
Phillips says that the EDL targets mosques, but it doesn’t. Actually Islamic supremacists fake attacks on mosques and try to pin them on the EDL, but Tommy Robinson has said: “Anyone who knows anything about our group knows there is no way we do anything like that. It’s just so blatant it’s not us.”
Her reference to Vlaams Belang is really a low blow. First, because we attended a conference in 2007 that Filip DeWinter happened to be at (here). That is the extent of my relationship. I knew nothing of him or his group (I still don’t) when I went to Brussels along with Bat Ye’or, David Littman, Dr. Aryeh Eldad (Israel), Robert Spencer, Dr. Andrew Bostom, Friends of Oriana Fallaci and the world’s leading counter jihadists. Hundreds were there. So was DeWinter. So what? Melanie Phillips is now attaching herself to the libels of the execrable Charles Johnson. That tells you everything.
Vlaams Belang? That took me back. I haven’t heard anything about them in a long, long while — it is indeed bizarre for Phillips to dredge all that up. Just look how many terror attacks Vlaams Belang has perpetrated since that conference — clearly they are the real threat.
Anyway, read it all.