http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2013/03/cpac-blog-award-update-john-hawkins-of-right-wing-news-does-damage-control-for-norquist-and-cpac-throws-spencer-under-the-b.html
Friday, March 08, 2013
WHEN
BLOGGERS ATTACK: JOHN HAWKINS TAKES A DIVE FOR GROVER NORQUIST
Robert
Spencer called me last Monday, right after he got off the phone with
John Hawkins, and told me the whole story about how John Hawkins had told him
that unnamed people had said that he must not criticize Grover Norquist
and Suhail Khan when he got the award. I thought Robert could have told John
sure, he wouldn't talk about GroverNorquist and Suhail Khan, and then say
whatever he wanted at the awards ceremony.
But Spencer said to me that he couldn't do that,
and told John Hawkins so. And now Hawkins is accusing Spencer of "lying to
get his 5 minutes of PR"? Spencer is an honorable guy -- he wouldn't lie
privately to Hawkins, and now we are supposed to believe that he lied publicly
to get publicity?
What makes this so disheartening is that I
always liked John. He says below that he "helped Pamela get the room she
used at CPAC last year." And it's true. He's been very good to me over the
years. So imagine my shock when the time came for him to stand up, and he came
tumbling down.
I thought John Hawkins was a standup guy. He was
one of the few on the right who didn't throw in with the rest of the lemmings.
Or so I thought. I was wrong. As soon as his principles and his integrity were
put to the test, he completely caved and became someone I don't recognize.
Also note that in Robert's initial post, he never named Hawkins. It was
about Grover and Suhail Khan. And now it isn't about them, it is
about bloggers attacking their allies. Now Hawkins is in league with Loonwatch
and the other Islamic supremacist sites. He even sounds like them in his
attacks on Spencer. He has really thrown in with the butchers.
And the pity is, John doesn't realize that he
played right into their hands. This is their MO -- they divide and conquer.
This issue is not about Geller and Spencer. By targeting every person who
speaks about the jihad and Islamic supremacism, the subject becomes forbidden.
No one will talk about it, because everyone who would talk about it has been
eliminated.
This is how great evils happen: people make a
small accommodation here and a small accommodation there, until finally they
are completely compromised. John should have stood up; instead, he went down in
a tantrum to protect his job and his paycheck. Hawkins picks up
the projection tactics of the Left and the Islamic supremacists: he is the onemaking
money and he accuses Spencer of trying to
get money and publicity. Spencer and I never raised a dime
at CPAC. Hawkins is the one protecting a paycheck. He is going down in a
blaze of blustering feigned outrage. He knows he's lying. John Hawkins
knows.
John Hawkins sold his soul for a paycheck.
That's why he's squirming and shouting. John, thou dost protest too much.
Whatever they're paying you, John, it ain't enough.
Hawkins is writing to Salon now. What's next?
Will he contact Anwar al-Awlaki's brother?
CPAC blog award update: John Hawkins of Right Wing News does damage
control for Norquist and CPAC, throws Spencer under the bus Robert
Spencer at Jihadwatch
...And at
the Right Scoop he writes even more strongly:
I’m John Hawkins and I’m the one who spoke to Robert on the phone.
Just to give you some background, I helped
Pamela get the room she used at CPAC last year. TheTeaParty.net, the group
that’s co-sponsoring the blogger awards this year, provided that space. Pamela
and Robert were both at the blogger award ceremony last year and Pamela won an
award. I’ve also interviewed both Robert and Pamela at
http://www.rightwingnews.com, linked them from my blog and I considered Pamela
a friend and Robert a friendly acquaintance before this happened.
I asked Robert, as a personal favor, to just
pick up his award without ranting about the ACU. Some people may disagree, but
I don’t think asking someone not to pull a Kanye West at an award ceremony is a
big imposition. The awards are supposed to be about awarding unappreciated
bloggers for the good work they’re doing, not about Robert Spencer airing his
personal grievances with the ACU. When Robert refused to agree to that, it was
the end of the conversation because there was nothing else to say. Let me note
that I absolutely, unconditionally did not tell him that he was “barred from
receiving his award.” In fact, I thought he was going to be at the ceremony
until his post claiming he was “barred from receiving his award” came out.
Additionally, Robert did win the award, I
personally had the plaque made for him and as late as yesterday he was even
going to have someone receive it on his behalf, although I’ve been told he
changed his mind about that. Either way, he will have a plaque and I promise to
put up a picture of it when the pictures of the award ceremony come
out if he doesn’t want to have someone pick it up for him.
Last but not least, if anybody has a problem
with this, they can feel free to blame me for it. I’m the one who talked to
Robert Spencer and I’m the one who’s saying that I think demanding the right to
throw a tantrum as a condition of accepting an award is unacceptable.
All I can say beyond that is that I hope lying to get his 5 minutes of PR was
worth burning people who’ve been supportive of him, because he is dead to me.
Note that in neither of his responses does he
address the central question and say that I can receive the award and say
anything I like. Clearly the prohibition on my talking about Norquist and Khan
is still in place and very much real. Anyway, I wrote this response to the Right Scoop, which published it, and sent it also to the
American Thinker:
John Hawkins’ account below is highly tendentious to the point of
being outright dishonest.
John represents his telling me not to speak
about Norquist and Khan’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamic
supremacists as a “personal favor” he was asking of me, not to “rant” and
“throw a tantrum.” The ties that Norquist and Khan have to islamic supremacists
are not a matter of a rant or tantrum, but a serious issue that is causing
immense damage to the conservative movement and the Republican Party’s ability
to oppose Barack Obama’s consistent enabling of Islamic supremacism
domestically and internationally. It needs to be raised, yet as I told John
when we spoke, I had no intention of doing so at the awards ceremony until he
conveyed to me the order not to do so — which order only impressed upon me anew
the need to call attention to this problem.
Also, John never represented this to me as a
“personal favor.” He stressed to me repeatedly that he was conveying an order
from higher ups which he told me he was further ordered not to name to me. And
while he did make clear that I was welcome to come and accept the award, he
also made it quite clear that I was not to say anything about Norquist and Khan
(the ACU was actually never discussed), and that one was conditional on the
other.
I ask in the interests of fairness and accuracy that
if you print his highly misleading and disingenuous remarks below,
that you also print these.
And there is more. Let's take Hawkins' claims
one by one:
I am the
one who talked to Robert Spencer. I told him that I didn't care what he said
about the ACU to bloggers, in interviews outside the door, on
radio row or anywhere else at CPAC, but I've known Robert for years and I asked
him as a personal favor not to rant about his feud with the ACU when he
received his award.
Actually we never discussed the ACU. We
discussed Norquist and Khan, whom he is careful not to mention in these messages.
He never said anything about not caring what I said in interviews, or on
radio row, etc. He never asked me not to speak about them as a personal favor,
but repeatedly conveyed the prohibition on my saying anything about Norquist
and Khan as coming from higher ups whom he was not at liberty to name. And I do
not have a "feud with the ACU." I am one of the people who has raised
questions about Norquist's and Khan's unsavory ties to Islamic supremacists.
For that, as Suhail Khan has boasted to me, I am banned from speaking
at CPAC.
He said
he couldn't do that. If he got his award, he absolutely had to trash the ACU
after he received it.
Remember: this wouldn't have come up at all if
he had not raised it, at the behest of his employers. I didn't call John
and tell him I could only receive the award if I spoke about Norquist and Khan
-- he brought them up.
That was
basically the end of the conversation because there was just nothing left to
say after that.
Actually he said he would talk to his superiors
and get back to me, but he never did. Apparently he can't acknowledge that now
because they seem to have required him to take the hit for them by claiming
that he did this all on his own initiative.
But, it's
extremely important to note that at no point did I tell him not to come or say
he wouldn't be allowed in the room.
Straw man. I never claimed that he told me not
to come or said that I wouldn't be allowed in the room.
Ultimately,
I thought the blogger awards should be about bloggers being recognized for the
great work they're doing. Robert apparently thought it should be about the
problem he has with the ACU. I'm very sorry he feels that way and I'm extremely
disappointed that he went so far as to falsely claim that he was barred from
getting his award to drum up PR for himself.
Again, remember: none of this would have
happened if he hadn't informed me that his bosses told him to tell me not to
talk about Norquist and Khan. They raised the issue. I am a free speech
activist -- what else was I going to say in the face of a gag order but that I
would defy it? And this business about doing this for PR -- in this Hawkins is
beginning to ape the Islamic supremacists and their enablers for whom he is
carrying water, in making this an ad hominem attack rather than dealing with
the issues at hand.
I am dead to him, eh? So also is his integrity.
Big Fur Hat spoke to John Hawkins and one of his
principal colleagues, and weighs in here:
Last
night I was read the riot act on the phone in regards to the Robert
Spencer/John Hawkins “he said/he said.” The person on the other end of the
phone is not my enemy, we consider each other friends, but they took offense to
my posting of the article Congratulations
Politichicks For Winning the CPAC Peephole’s Choice Award!!!!
(This was my sarcastic take on the Robert
Spencer article about how he won a People’s Choice Award at CPAC but was later
told that the win came with some restrictions, restrictions that were decreed
from “on high.” I chose to simply ignore the results of the poll, as if Robert
didn’t exist, and congratulated the runner-up as the winner.)
The caller said by merely linking, and not doing
any homework, I revealed myself to be a “non-journalist who couldn’t resist the
opportunity to run a story that seemed sexy, all for blog hits, without knowing
the real story.”
The phone call was to be, I guess, my education.
Bottom line – Robert Spencer is a liar and a guy who does what he does, run
roughshod over people, for PR. (Where have I heard that before? Oh, ya, CAIR
says that.)
I spent a great deal of time yesterday going
back and forth with John Hawkins via e-mail to try and understand his side of
the argument. Bottom line – Robert Spencer is a liar and a guy who does what he
does, run roughshod over people, for PR. (Where have I heard that before? Oh,
ya, the paragraph above.)
I guess that’s how the evil pr*ck won the
People’s Choice Award with over 50% of the vote in a field of 15, right?
If there are two world’s, the blogging world,
where people may see Spencer in a different light, and the reader world, which
obviously sees Spencer as a dedicated warrior, it’s no wonder that I always characterize
myself as an outsider. I don’t want to know about the politics of politics. I’m
voting for Robert and his work, and I really don’t want to hear about how
Robert is causing trouble because he reacted badly to being told his particular
award “is a problem.” That’s ridiculous, and it should have been dealt with
properly. Robert should have never been told, at all, that winning this award
had a taint. He was obviously told because the hope was that Robert would make
everything alright without John having to do anything that made life difficult
for him.
I tried to impress upon John Hawkins that his
instincts in this imbroglio were running counter to the results of his own
poll. Later in the evening, during the heated exchange on the phone, I was told
that Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller are becoming “less and less popular with
each passing year and it’s because of their loutish ways.”
At this rate, in 2020, Spencer might barely be
able to squeak out a 15% margin of victory among the people who matter most –
the voting public.
Now, before we get too deep into the wrong
swamp, let me say that this is a much larger story than Robert Spencer, John
Hawkins and the 9 dollar plaque from Balloons R’ Us. I think Spencer agrees.
Spencer said he was honored and flattered to receive such an overwhelming show
of support from the people, but now a much more important issue has poked its
rotten head out of the subtext – CPAC is obviously under the control of Suhail
Khan and Grover Norquist and both of these people are facilitators in the
advancement of Islamic influence in American government.
For 364 days of the year Robert Spencer is a
free speech advocate that writes about Islamic infiltration, and writes about
the shady tentacles of Suhail Khan and Grover Norquist, but is told “not to
rant and throw a tantrum” (John Hawkins’ words) on the day he receives an award
for precisely this work.
Robert Spencer was expected to go along with
this. I was told straight out that Robert’s past speeches are “tantamount to
being invited to a party and sh*tting on the host’s rug.” When I pointed out
that this is a house that needs to be sh*t in I received no cogent counter
opinion other than, “You don’t do this because this is a revenue source.”
And there we have it.
Either you believe in the work being done by
Robert Spencer or you don’t. Obviously the people polled overwhelmingly agree
that Robert’s work is not only important, it belongs at CPAC....
Finally, here is a reminder for John Hawkins of
what integrity looks like. The Tea Party Fort Lauderdale wrote this to the
TeaParty.net, one of the co-sponsors of the CPAC Blog Awards and CPAC itself:
HERE'S ANOTHER REASON TO REMOVE US FROM YOUR LIST.
NORQUIST & KHAN, AND YOU CALL YOURSELVES 'TEA PARTY?"
"Spencer was told that one of the
co-sponsors of the award, TheTeaParty.net, didn’t want to allow him to receive
the award at CPAC next week unless he promised not to criticize two board
members of CPAC’s hosting organization, the American Conservative Union: Grover
Norquist and Suhail Khan."
In years past at CPAC, Robert Spencer and Pam
Geller have held panels warning of the dangers of radical Islam. Looks like
Grover and Tea Party.net are running things now.
How absurd! Blogs have soared in popularity
because they report what the MSM doesn't! Now we have Grover Norquist and Tea
Party.net effectively SILENCING an American's freedom to speak about the very
subject matter he won the award for.
It looks as though the CPAC Gestapo, Grover
Norquist and Tea Party.net, have effectively silenced free speech!
It is my hope Robert Spencer and Pam Geller
attend CPAC. The majority of CPAC attendees support them! Norquist and Tea
party.net do not speak for us!
The Band of Mothers will be at CPAC to collect
Post Cards For Soldiers. The folks need to be reminded of the dangers among us
and the noble Heroes who keep us safe!
Beverly
Perlson
The Band of Mothers
The Band of Mothers
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