More information has come out about Robert Spencer’s association with the extremist bigots of the Christian Action Network, and the aborted meeting with the English Defense League from which he’s now desperate to distance himself: The EDL Dines Alone.

I recently posted a couple of blog entries (here and here) about what happened when members of the English Defence League showed up at a restaurant in London where Robert Spencer was preparing to dine with some British conservative “anti-Jihadi” types, in particular Adrian Morgan and Douglas Murray. Spencer was in town with a couple of members of the Virginia-based Christian Action Network; the day before, CAN director Michael Mawyer had conducted an interview with three balaclava-wearing EDL leaders, and his associate Jason Campbell (with whom Spencer had taken “strolls into a few mosques”) decided to invite them along.

However, Spencer’s British contacts were not pleased to discover at the restaurant that they were about to share a table with the EDL, and, as Adrian Morgan delicately put it, “Tensions between some of the anti-jihadist factions who had all been kindly invited by Jason to a meal caused splitting of the groups and confusion”. Extrication was eased, though, because, according to Spencer, the restaurant management had asked the party to leave anyway just before the EDL showed up , on account of the subject matter of their conversation.

This is part of Robert Spencer’s latest rant against me, to which I will not link. Skipping his usual personal insults, let’s just get to the meat of it.

I did not go to England planning to meet with the EDL, I did not make such plans there, and I did not meet with them.

Please note that I never accused Spencer of any of those things. It’s another very typical Spencer misdirection — he vehemently denies things no one accused him of doing. Here’s what I wrote:

“Spencer claims he never met with the English Defense League (although he obviously can’t deny meeting with the extremists of the Christian Action Network), and it’s actually true — as far as it goes. But in reality, the only reason he didn’t meet with them is because he and the leaders of CAN were thrown out of the restaurant before the meeting could occur.”

Not a word of that is false. And now we learn that the other people Spencer was meeting with that night were very upset about the planned attendance of the English Defense League. Not a word from Spencer about that little tidbit.

More Spencer:

...I will not work with racists, fascists, neo-Nazis, etc.

But raving homophobic religious fanatics like the Christian Action Network — no problem working with them! After all, they hate Muslims almost as much as they hate gay people, so they can’t be all bad.