August 18, 2005

The Fulford File, By James Fulford

Guilt By Association (With VDARE.COM!) In Britain

After the London bombings, and because of the British media's response to them, the London Times’ Anthony Browne wrote a piece called Fundamentally, we're useful idiots (August 01, 2005).

In it, Browne attacked the London (formerly Manchester) Guardian as being among worst of the "useful idiots." (Useful to the enemy, that is. The Guardian is not intrinsically useful.)

This immediately brought Browne attacks from the leftist Guardian, which had apparently Googled him and found that he'd written for publication called…VDARE.COM.

Britain On The Brink, January 28, 2003 is in the first ten items you get when you Google "Anthony Browne.” This is a tribute to VDARE.COM's internet presence, since his regular employer, The Times, is a multi-million dollar corporation, employing hundreds, and founded in 1785.

This one was actually an article we commissioned and paid for, the links, et cetera, added by me, and with some editing by Peter Brimelow, as usual.

You can see a copy of it here, on David Horowitz's FrontPagemag.com site. (They didn't pay for it.)

Here's what Scott Burgess of the Daily Ablution blog had to say about the "scandal" (links in original—“Grauniad” is a British media in-joke):

More Humiliation for the Grauniad

Simon Goodley begins today's Diary with a smear-by-association of Times Europe correspondent Anthony Browne. Mr. Browne seems to have angered the former with his excellent recent piece in the Times, which took the Guardian to task for "giv[ing] space to MAB to promote sanitised versions of its Islamist views." Browne writes, referring to events that will be familiar to Ablution readers. [VDARE.COM note: See here and here.]

"Last month it emerged that The Guardian employed a journalist, Dilpazier Aslam, who is a member of the Hizb ut-Tahrir, an Islamist group that wants a global theocracy, and is described by the Home Office as ‘anti-Semitic, anti-Western and homophobic.’ The Guardian used Dilpazier Aslam to report not just on the London bombings, but on Shabina Begum, the Luton schoolgirl who, advised by Hizb ut-Tahrir, won a court case allowing her to wear head-to-toe fundamentalist Islamic clothes.

"The tale illustrates Britain's naivety in many ways. Hizb ut-Tahrir is still legal [VDARE.COM update: It's now been banned by Tony Blair], despite being banned in many European and Muslim countries, and despite President Musharraf of Pakistan pleading with Britain to ban it after it plotted to assassinate him. The useful idiots of the Left insisted that Ms Begum's victory was a victory over Islamophobia, but even the Muslim Parliament of Britain gave warning that it was a ‘victory for fundamentalism bringing Shariah law one step closer.’

The diarist strongly implies racism by association, castigating Mr. Browne for contributing to the American anti-immigration website V-Dare, which (well after Mr. Browne's meager two contributions were posted) ran a piece by a seemingly well-credentialed psychologist claiming that Africans have lower IQs than non-Africans.

Mr. Goodley gleefully quotes the ‘Newshog weblog’—which specifically, and in my view libellously, refers to Mr. Browne as "a known racist" - as his source, and points to another smoking gun of racism, one which irrefutably marks the publication and all who contribute to it as bigots of the very worst sort:

"Browne enters into friendly correspondence with V-Dare, an online journal of the Centre For American Unity," it reveals, "where you will find such gems as 'black men have on average three to 19 percent more testosterone than white men'."

It is unfortunate that Mr. Goodley, in his eagerness to get on with the character assassination, didn't take the trouble to check the V-Dare site, where he would have discovered that the statement is actually a quote—one which originates from another odious racist in the Times' stable; namely, one Andrew Sullivan:

"Several solid studies, published in publications like Journal of the National Cancer Institute, show that black men have on average 3 to 19 percent more testosterone than white men. This is something to consider when we're told that black men dominate certain sports because of white racism or economic class rather than black skill."

The offending passage comes from a well-known KKK propaganda rag called The New York Times. I trust Mr. Goodley will soon be exposing Mr. Sullivan and other NYT contributors as being the vile racists they so obviously are.

Scott Burgess has demolished the original guilt by association thing, but I need to make some points here.

Or as Peter Brimelow put it in 1995: "Because the term "racist" is now so debased, I usually shrug off such smears by pointing to its new definition: anyone who is winning an argument with a liberal."

VDARE.COM is journal of opinion, like, say, Commentary, First Things, or The National Interest. We're not a political organization like the NEA, or even a group dedicated to the promotion of a particular race, like the NAACP or the National Council of La Raza.

As such, we don't really have one form of orthodox opinion that everyone has to believe in, and we publish writers with different opinions.

Browne isn't responsible for every opinion written by every other writer here. We're not responsible for each other's columns. I think that it's only in this specific context, immigration and race reporting and commentary, that it's even suggested that a writer is responsible for the opinions of all the other writers on a journal that he may not have read.

When Peter Brimelow wrote a piece for Commentary, no one suggested that he was responsible for its foreign policy prescriptions, for example. 

But why does the Guardian think that it refutes criticism by shouting "Unclean, unclean?"

Browne said that the Guardian regularly gives space to the Muslim Association of Britain "to promote sanitised versions of its Islamist views."

It does. See its website, where you can see for example, one man saying,  "Don't take us for granted. The Muslim vote could be decisive in 40 constituencies," and a guy named Osama saying that "It is wrong to put the onus on British Muslims to defeat terror."

All of these include the tagline saying that the writer is a spokesman "for the Muslim Association of Britain."  That last one, refusing to help against terrorists, was published after the bombings.