It’s becoming almost impossible to keep up with the twists and turns of Pamela Geller’s relationship with former English Defence League leader Stephen Lennon (“Tommy Robinson”).
When Lennon announced his break with the EDL in October, Geller immediately issued a statement enthusiastically welcoming that development and declared that she looked forward to working with him in the future. But within days she was angrily denouncing Lennon for selling out to the Quilliam Foundation and publicly repudiated him in the harshest possible language. “It has become painfully obvious that the enemies of freedom have broken Tommy Robinson …”, a furious Geller wrote. “Now he is the poster boy for the stealth jihad.”
You’d have thought that would mark the end of any further co-operation between Geller and Lennon, at least for the foreseeable future. How wrong you’d be. At the end of October, Geller performed another U-turn and announced that she had misjudged poor “Tommy”. She and her friend Robert Spencer wrote:
A few weeks ago we issued a statement expressing our disenchantment with Tommy Robinson’s new course. We applauded his decision to dissociate himself from the racists, neo-Nazis and antisemites who persisted in trying to gain control of the English Defence League, but were extremely suspicious of his association with the pseudo-moderate and extremely disingenuous Quilliam Foundation.
However, events have been unfolding rapidly. Tommy Robinson has written to us emphasizing that he has not changed his positions, and the unfolding events have borne that out. The documentary When Tommy Met Mo shows that Tommy was not fooled by the smooth deceptiveness of the dishonest Islamic supremacist Mo Ansar, and in numerous interviews Tommy has acquitted himself admirably, demonstrating that his commitment to resisting Sharia oppression and Islamic supremacism is as strong as ever.
His association with the Quilliam Foundation was and is problematic. The Quilliam Foundation’s anti-Israel stance and its unjustified attacks on counter-jihadists such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Geert Wilders abundantly establish that it is not what it claims to be. But we understand that Tommy has been under enormous pressure. It is impossible to hold him accountable for Quilliam’s disingenuousness when he has not repeated it himself. Tommy is planning to start a new organization that is as free from Quilliam as it is from the EDL, and in that, and in his ongoing efforts to defend the British freedom and the vision of human rights that Judeo-Christian civilization has given to the world, we wholeheartedly and unhesitatingly support him.
But that wasn’t the end of it. This article has now disappeared from Geller’s Atlas Shrugs website (there is a screenshot here) – and, judging by her latest article for the Daily Caller, Lennon has been restored to his former status as an instrument of the stealth jihad. Geller writes
EDL leader Tommy Robinson has now jumped ship and rushed to condemn his former friends and allies. I didn’t hurry to condemn him, but gave him ample opportunity to clarify his new position; unfortunately, it is clear now that he is a traitor and a liar. I understand that he faces jail time for tax-related crimes, but to throw the EDL in its entirety and every other brave counter-jihadist under the bus makes him the worst kind of turncoat.
This must surely be the final episode of the whole sorry saga, you would think. But who knows? In a couple of weeks’ time Geller may change her mind again, and “Tommy” will be hailed once more as a vital ally in the battle to defend Judeo-Christian civilisation against Sharia oppression and Islamic supremacism.
Even among Geller’s supporters in the “counterjihad” movement, there must be not a few people wondering how she could possibly have made such a total idiot of herself.