It’s odd reading all these articles about me, all of a sudden, and even odder to read the blog posts. Kind of like seeing movies about yourself written from hundreds of different viewpoints, some of them taking the angle that you’re the most despicable creature to walk the earth since fish grew legs.

Today Aziz Poonawalla has a positive review at BeliefNet that I really appreciate (among the deluge of antipathy from the right): Charles Johnson’s jihad.

(Aziz still can’t resist seeing if I knee-jerk at the word “jihad.” Heh.)

His article makes some good points, and in some ways comes closer than the MSM versions to the way I see LGF’s history, specifically this part:

Johnson’s original blogging focus was the post 9/11 threat of Islamic terrorism, and also a fanatical defender of Israel. Where he went astray in those days was in using the latter as a litmus test for the former; as a result he earned quite a reputation as an Islamophobe which (in my opinion, unfairly) persists, to this day. But what makes Johnson noteworthy is how he has stood by his principles and now left the conservative blog movement which he semi-founded. And he has paid a price for doing so, noting that

“The kinds of hate mail and the kinds of attacks I am getting from the right wing are way beyond anything I got when I was criticizing the left or even radical Islam.”

I think this observation speaks volumes about our political atmosphere today. Not to mention being a pretty accurate proxy for assessing the relative threat. The right wing would love nothing more than to see Johnson silenced, rather than have him speaking out in defense of global warming, against Creationism, and domestic right-wing terrorism. Of course, Johnson remains a devoted fan of Israel, and a severe critic of Islamists and extremism. After all, in a way Johnson has never changed. It’s just that the world has - and he reacts accordingly.

It’s noteworthy that Aziz has also reappraised a few things, including a blog encounter he and I had in 2003 over his post about a bit of nasty anti-Israel propaganda:

Now, I’ve my own history with Johnson - he accused me of “blood libel” against the Jewish people for a monumentally stupid post I wrote as a newbie blogger back in 2003, where I accepted at face value a now-discredited report in the UK’s Sunday Times accusing Israel of developing biological weapons. I’m not proud of how gullible I was back then (for the record, the idea of Israeli bioweapons is paranoid nonsense, but falls far short of being a blood libel). However, though I’d only been blogging for a few years at that point, I had a record of being critical of Israeli policy but supportive of Israel overall. I’ve also always been a ferocious critic of violent Islamic extremism (ie, hirabah) and Palestinian terrorism in particular, but unfortunately it only took one gullible post to erase that credibility and undermined everything I’d written in defense of Islam to that point.

I learned a lot of valuable lessons about blogging and the blogsphere from that episode, especially about how dangerous it is to outsource your critical thinking to the mass media. By the time Johnson led the crusade against Dan Rather with incontrovertible proof of forgery, I was able to be convinced depite my partisan preferences. So to an extent I credit my thrashing at Johnson’s hands for this.

This is the LGF post to which Aziz is referring, for the record: Poonawalla Spreads Blood Libel.