When one thinks of the embodiment of “hate,” modern-day jihadists are perhaps without equal.
They murder those who refuse to submit to their totalitarian theopolitical belief system in the most vile and horrific ways, from stabbings and shootings to beheadings, bombings, and vehicle crashings.
They revile non-believer “infidels,” from Jews and Christians to atheists and gays, and mercilessly persecute all who fall under their clutches.
They engage in sex slavery, mass rape and pillaging.
But when today’s sophist Left thinks of “hate,” it focuses its sights not on jihadists, but on those who forthrightly discuss the jihadist threat, among other advocates of non-leftist views.
That is the sad reality in light of the emerging story of the blacklisting of such individuals and organizations by major technology platforms.
The most notable early casualty is Robert Spencer, who headlines a list of other opponents of the global jihad.
Spencer has dedicated his life to exposing Islamic supremacist ideology and the goals, tactics, and strategies of its peaceful and violent foot soldiers. He has published several bestselling books, and through his Jihad Watch website catalogues daily the global jihad’s advance and the tragic aiding, abetting, and enabling of the movement by Islamophiliac dupes, useful idiots, and fellow travelers.
For his long rap sheet of thought crimes, he’s paid a physical price. In May of 2017, Spencer was poisoned by a leftist while in Iceland to deliver an anti-jihad speech.
Now he is paying an economic one.
The online payment system service PayPal has booted Jihad Watch from its service under the guise of a user agreement violation, meaning that its financial supporters can no longer easily contribute to the site online. These contributions support Spencer’s public appearances and website operations.
This comes on the heels of a campaign in which the purported “independent, non-profit,” but heavily leftist-funded investigative journalism website ProPublica blasted out an email to various groups and individuals – including Spencer — fingered by the Leftist Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and American Defamation League (ADL) as “hate” or “extremist,” asking them to in essence prove their innocence while simultaneously chilling their efforts.
It bears noting that the SPLC has previously lumped in conservative nonprofits of all stripes with neo-Nazis, effectively smearing its ideological adversaries.
The questions posed by ProPublica’s Lauren Kirchner included:
1) Do you disagree with the designation of your website as hate or extremist? Why?
2) We identified several tech companies on your website: PayPal, Amazon, Newsmax, and Revcontent. Can you confirm that you receive funds from your relationship with those tech companies? How would the loss of those funds affect your operations, and how would you be able to replace them?
3) Have you been shut down by other tech companies for being an alleged hate or extremist web site? Which companies?
4) Many people opposed to sites like yours are currently pressuring tech companies to cease their relationships with them – what is your view of this campaign? Why?
Spencer directly challenged the notion that his efforts are hateful, and cut to the heart of ProPublica’s efforts, writing in a public response to Kirchner:
For years, Leftists and Muslim groups with numerous ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood have smeared as “hate” all attempts to speak honestly about the motivating ideology behind jihad terrorism. In reality, it is not hateful, racist or extremist to oppose jihad terror, and the claim that it is [is] not only libelous but insidious: the intent has clearly been to intimidate people into thinking it wrong to oppose jihad terror, and it has worked, as illustrated by the neighbors of the San Bernardino jihad murderers, who saw suspicious activity at their home but didn’t report them for fear of being “racist.”
…The intent of your questions, and no doubt of your forthcoming article, will be to try to compel these sites [Paypal, Amazon, Newsmax and Revcontent] to cut off any connection with us based on our opposition to jihad terror. Are you comfortable with what you’re enabling? Not only are you inhibiting honest analysis of the nature and magnitude of the jihad threat, but you’re aiding the attempt to deny people a platform based on their political views.
What followed was a ProPublica article as Spencer predicted, and the dropping of Jihad Watch from PayPal.
As PJ Media’s Paula Bolyard has detailed in a timely piece titled “Is Google Working with Liberal Groups to Snuff Out Conservative Websites,” Google is partnering with ProPublica, the SPLC and a “who’s who” of left-oriented publications and organizations to document “hate news,” which has unsurprisingly included articles from a plethora of mainstream conservative sources like The Daily Caller, The Washington Times and National Review.
Could it be that there is a connection between these two efforts?
And was “singling out alt-right sites for destruction in the wake of the Charlottesville riots,” by the likes of “Google, GoDaddy, CloudFlare, [and] Apple,” as Bolyard noted, a catalyzing crisis that enabled the left to wage war on legitimate conservative voices, lumped dishonestly as in league with “fascists” on the “right” (identity politics-obsessed national socialists being firmly on the Left notwithstanding)?
There is much more to be written on the broader question of the Left defining anything antithetical to its regressive progressive ideology as “hate,” then using purported civil rights organizations and media outlets that are effectively leftist fronts to legitimize attacks meant to destroy conservative voices. Their actions are nothing less than discriminating against fellow Americans on the basis of ideology, and the Left should be called out for its ideological bigotry. If the market is allowed to function in an unfettered manner, it may ultimately punish the Left for its discrimination, through promulgating parallel services that cater to non-leftist subscribers or operate on a basis independent of ideology. But consider the wasted resources needed to create essentially redundant services. Also, and much more importantly, this will damage our cultural fabric.
On the narrower issue of seeking to figuratively behead counterjihadists by threatening their ability to operate on the internet, it bears noting that the leftist entities leading this charge in league with tech titans are in effect unwittingly achieving the Islamic supremacists’ stated desire.
The muzzling by the Left of those who expose Islamic supremacist ideology and the attempt by its adherents to triumph over Western civilization is the perfect representation of what the Muslim Brotherhood called for in its “Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Brotherhood in America.”
As noted in the memo, the Brotherhood’s aim is “civilization jihad,” a “kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers [Muslims] so that it is eliminated and God’s religion [Islam] is made victorious over all other religions.”
The stifling of voices that seek to counter these efforts – and more broadly the threat to free speech that is growing daily in America – would seem to be a positive development in the eyes of the civilizational jihadists.
From the blacklisting of counterjihadists online, to the purging of counterjihadist literature, lexicon and leaders from law enforcement, to America’s willfully blind national security and foreign policy with respect to Islamic supremacism, we are indeed engaging in sabotage by our own hands.
Presumably, the Muslim Brotherhood — which continues to skirt terror organization designation – would happily agree.
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