I think I speak for the other Harry Placers when I say I’m grateful for the most of the support we’ve received from the blogosphere after we reported the threatened lawsuit against us by Mohammed Sawalha, the Hamas supporter who is president of the British Muslim Initiative.
Much of the backing comes as a result of an item posted by Glenn Reynolds at the very popular right-of-center blog Instapundit, who linked to a “Support Harry’s Place Blogburst” set up by the conservative blog NeoConstant. Although I haven’t done a thorough review of all the blogs that have signed up, at a glance they appear to be overwhelmingly on the political right. In most cases, I have no problem with this– for the most part I welcome the support of anyone who opposes the BMI’s dishonest efforts to suggest that we deliberately misconstrued the meaning of what Al-Jazeera originally reported Sawalha as saying about the Jews in London celebrating Israel’s 60th anniversary. (I hope they would all be equally supportive if, for some reason, we were being unfairly sued by Mark Steyn or Rush Limbaugh, but I live in the real world.)
However there appear to be some anti-Muslim hate sites on this list– this one, for example– whose support we can easily manage without. In fact I would be quite pleased if those blogs would remove themselves from our list of supporters. We have no more use for their support than we would for support from racist or antisemitic sites.
Although the support from leftwing blogs has been a good deal less intense, I welcome it too– especially from our comrades at Shiraz Socialist who, despite their frequent disagreements with us, responded by telling the BMI to “Sue us too, you anti-semitic scum!”
What’s interesting, however, is (aside from the usual nonsense by Seumas Milne) the absence of support on the web for the BMI’s position– at least as far as I’ve seen. Part of the reason for this, I suppose, is that the BMI hasn’t even mentioned it on their own website, which still prominently promotes last month’s demonstration against George Bush’s London visit. Another reason, perhaps, is that even the most dogged HP-bashers are clear-eyed enough to see this threatened lawsuit for what it is– even if they’ll never admit it.
Update: In the course of offering Harry’s Place his unwanted and unneeded support, Robert at Dhimmi Watch calls us “clueless dhimmis.” Is that a bad thing?