John Joseph Jay and AFDI/SIOA
Posted Aug 8, 2013

John Joseph Jay and AFDI/SIOA

by Sheila Musaji

Spencer and Geller recently cross posted Hate Stalker on the loose .... again.  This installment of their diatribe includes this “defense” by Spencer of a few other points raised by Nathan Lean in an article titled Kolbe should rescind invitation to controversial speaker:

... Lean claims that a board member of our organization once “recommended burning all mosques and sending Muslim immigrants ‘back to their countries,’” trying to give the impression that these are positions of our organization. They are not, and no board member has advocated such positions.

Does the name John Joseph Jay ring a bell Mr. Spencer?

   As Richard Bartholomew has reported, Jay was a co-founder of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), and according to Spencer (in a statement he has since retracted) he was also a board member of Stop Islamization of America (SIOA).  Further:

...  Jay is referring to the controversy which has followed a recent post on his blog in which he called for the killing of “talking head media”, of “every self avowed socialist and communist in congress”, and of “the faculty senates at harvard, yale, columbia, nyu and university of california at santa barbara”. This was of wider interest due his formal association with Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer: he was a co-founder of their American Freedom Defense Initiative, and according to Spencer (in a statement he has since retracted) he was also a board member of Stop Islamization of America.

Geller and Spencer have known about Jay’s sanguinary views for some time: in 2008, Jay left a comment on Geller’s blog on the need for “old fashion war with wholesale slaughter including indiscriminate death of innocents and babes. down to the last muslim, if necessary.” In 2010, a statement about the need to kill liberals and Muslims came to general attention thanks to the Daily Kos - Spencer’s response was to claim that Jay had been misrepresented in some unspecified way by “Hamas-linked CAIR and dhimmi Leftist jihad-enablers”.

That, though, was before the Anders Brevik massacre; Geller and Spencer are today rather more circumspect about being linked to someone who fantasises publicly about mass killings. Think Progress has a new quote from Geller:

Jay helped me out so I could get the incorporation papers filed, but was never a Board member or a part of the organizational structure in any way. He was gone almost as soon as he was there, and is not a member of AFDI.

This contrasts with a 2010 reference made by Geller to “my associate, the attorney John Jay”.

Spencer, meanwhile, has backtracked from the claim that Jay was ever a SIOA board member:

“He was never a board member. I don’t recall saying he was, but if I did, it was in error.” That was “was a mistake on my part,” Spencer wrote in another email after ThinkProgress provided a link to his post.

This belated cutting of ties following bad publicity fits a pattern – Spencer and Geller formerly worked with the Christian Action Network, and broke with the group only when its anti-gay rhetoric caused political embarrassment to Gert Wilders. ...

After Spencer and Jay wrote responses to Bartholomew’s article, Richard Bartholomew posted an update John Joseph Jay and Robert Spencer Respond on SIOA Links

Alex Seitz-Wald also reported on the connections between AFDI and John Jay (with lots of links to documentation)  Pam Geller Linked Anti-Muslim Activist Calls For Mass Murder Of Congressmen, Muslims, Liberals And Journalists

The anti-Muslim activist John Joseph Jay has issued a call for the mass murder of the leadership of both parties in Congress, the governors of seven states, and prominent academics, along with a demand to “burn all mosques. period.”

Jay helped in the founding of anti-Muslim activist Pam Geller’s group American Freedom Defense Initiative. AFDI is the umbrella organization of the prominent Stop the Islamization Of America (SOIA). Jay’s signature can be seen below those of Geller and fellow arch anti-Muslim activist Robert Spencer on AFDI’s incorporation document (PDF), as Charles Johnson at LGF pointed out. The P.O. Box listed for Jay is also the same as Geller’s.

But while those organizations have stopped short of calls for violence, Jay crossed way over that line in a rambling post on his blog called “start the revolution,” which fantasizes about the painful medieval deaths of perceived enemies (screenshot here, cached version here):

1.)take out the talking head media, and burn the new york times, the los angeles times and the washington post to the ground.  draw and quarter the media, and shoot their remains from canons in the four directions of the prevailing winds.

rinse, lather, repeat as needed.

2.)take out all the incumbent leadership of both parties in the congress, and every self avowed socialist and communist in congress.  give them all proper muslim burials at sea, just like osama bin laden.

eliminate pensions for congressional service.  rinse, lather, repeat as needed.

3.)eliminate the faculty senates at harvard, yale, columbia, nyu and university of california at santa barbara.  boil bill ayers, bernie dorhn and angela davis in canola oil, and feed their remains to the fishes.

they are all physical cowards.  they should fall into line pretty quickly.  repeat every ten years as a prophylactic, on general principle. 

and,

4.)now that the “arab spring” has brought enlightenment to the middle east, send all of the muslim immigrants back to their native countries, in boxes or tourist, their choice.

burn all the mosques.  period.

In a post script, he adds that he wants to “burn the editors and contributors” to the Daily Kos, throw “the living governors of new york, california, ohio, illinois, washington, florida and massachusetts into the fiery pits… from which there is no escape,” and writes, “i’ll think of something suitable for hilary clinton.”

In an update to the post, Jay responds to LGF’s Johnson “breathlessly announcing that i am advocating mass murder.” Jay makes no denial of advocating mass murder, and writes of Johnson’s charge, “even the blind hog finds an occasional acorn.”

According to the organization’s website, Geller is the executive director of American Freedom Defense Initiative, which seems to be an umbrella organization for SIOA and other anti-Muslim groups. In a post on the American Thinker from the August of last year, Geller refers to, “my associate, the attorney John Jay.”

When Jay got in trouble last summer for a separate blog post advocating the mass murder of Muslims and liberals, Robert Spencer wrote of “John Jay, a member of the SIOA Board.” Still, Spencer wrote that Jay is “not a founder or co-founder of SIOA. He has no role in the running of the organization.”

As ThinkProgress reported, Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik was influenced by American anti-Muslim activists. He cited Spencer and his blog 162 times, and Pam Geller and her blog 12 times. The two play are key players in a network of Islamophpbia, explored our recent report, Fear Inc.

Alex Seitz-Wald did a follow up article Spencer And Geller Disavow Anti-Muslim Activist’s Call For Violence, Say He Was Never A Board Member with more documentation after the dynamic duo of hate attempted to weasel out of their connections with Jay.

In 2011 Ryan Lenz on SPLC’s Hatewatch site published Anti-Muslim Activist Delivers Call to ‘Burn All the Mosques’ which included this information:

Few are as capable of such venomous anti-Muslim sentiment as John Joseph Jay, a comrade in arms with Pamela Geller and a board member of the anti-Muslim group Stop the Islamization of America (SIOA). Where others stop short of calling for violence, Jay bounds ever forward.

That was the case last week as Jay, who does not use capital letters or common punctuation in his writings, used his blog “summer patriot, winter soldier” to post a miniature manifesto ominously titled “start the revolution.” In stark and bombastic terms, Jay assailed the left for its multicultural tolerance of Muslims and proposed a host of violent solutions.

He called for the burning of every mosque in America and “tak[ing] out incumbent leadership of both parties in the congress.” He also endorsed immediately deporting every Muslim in America and burning the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post.

...  When not running his website, Jay is an SIOA board member and one of the founding members of the American Freedom Defense Initiative, an SIO sister organization. Geller and Jay were both profiled in the Summer 2011 issue of the Intelligence Report as two of the country’s leading purveyors of anti-Muslim sentiment.

In recent months, Jay’s writings have largely focused on defending Geller from attacks. In the days after posting his manifesto, for example, Jay accused those who have tried to “tar pamela geller [sic] by her association with me” as being “utterly transparent.” Geller, he wrote, “speaks and writes the truth, and she advocate [sic] it without apology or concession (to this sort of hysterical pap), and advocates to benefit those who do good in this evil old world.”

Such worries about how some might see Geller are understandable. Geller was among the American Islamophobes admired by the terrorist Anders Breivik, who on July 22 killed 77 people, mostly teens, during a violent rampage in Norway. In his 1,500-page manifesto, titled “2083: A European Declaration of independence,” Breivik cited the writings of Geller and Robert Spencer, who runs SOIA with her, dozens of times.

Instead of distancing himself from such associations, Jay seems to have embraced the violence in his own rhetoric. “the secret is out. this is what this blog has always been about,” he wrote just days after his Sept. 26 post. “my efforts have been to establish a coherent theory in support of the individual’s right to exercise self defense against the aggressions and attacks of islam.”

Self-defense? As a post-script to his original manifesto, Jay called for a brutal end to many, many more:

“burn the editors and contributors to ‘the daily kos’ at the stake. i’ll think of something suitable for hilary [sic] clinton,” he wrote. “and, throw all the living governors of new york, california, ohio, illinois, washington, florida and massachusetts into the fiery pits, from which there is no escape.”

Hyperbole? Maybe. But after this summer’s bloodbath in Norway, the most rabid Islamophobes should be careful about suggestions of violence.

Here is the entry on John Joseph Jay from the SPLC report The Anti-Muslim Inner Circle:

JOHN JOSEPH JAY - ORGANIZATION summer patriot, winter soldier (a website; Jay doesn’t use capital letters in his website’s name or in his writings). Board member, SIOA. Listed as one of the founders of American Freedom Defense Initiative, SIOA’s umbrella group (see also Pam Geller, above).

CREDENTIALS Jay worked for 25 years as a prosecutor and criminal defense attorney in Washington, D.C. Geller’s Atlas Shrugs blog describes him as a constitutional scholar. In addition to his anti-Muslim commentary, Jay blogs prolifically on the right to bear arms.

SUMMARY Jay is remarkable for his unreconstructed hatred of all Muslims. He believes attacks by Muslim terrorists justify any violence directed at any Muslim, adding that, as he sees it, the Koran itself justifies such blind retaliation.

IN HIS OWN WORDS “every person in islam, from man to woman to child may be our executioner. … there are no innocents in islam. … there is no innocence in islam. all of islam is at war with us, and … all of islam is/are combatant[s.] … islam has established without intellectual doubt that there are no innocent muslims, that the myth of the ‘moderate muslim’ is precisely that, and that muslims are no more entitled to exemption or protection from retaliation that [sic] any of the other ‘non-innocent’ combatants in the world. … there are no innocent muslims.  islam is subject to killing on grounds of political expediency on the same basis as islam kills its victims, and islam cannot ethically and morally claim otherwise.”
— From his website, July 14, 2010

“in short, dear muslims, g_d in his infinite wisdom saw in advance this struggle between men and religions to win his favor, and the only thing that is foreordained, is that the strong and the resolute shall win his favor, and so far, it has been amply demonstrated that he has chosen the jews as his people, and favored christianity with science, technology, culture and military power. to islam, he has given the hind and dry tit, and the sewers and the deserts of the world in which to inhabit, and in which to fester.”
— From his website, June 27, 2010

A CAIR profile on SIOA noted://  “In an Internet profile he created for isrealinsider.net, AFDI founder John Joseph Jay named “rabbi meir kahna” [sic] as one of his “heroes and inspirations in life.” This is an obvious reference to Rabbi Meir Kahane, the founder of the groups Kach and Kahane Chai, which have been listed as designated foreign terrorist organizations by the U.S. Department of State.”

In 2010, Daisy Cutter at the Daily Kos published SIOA co-founder: kill your liberal relatives and all Muslims which contains a great deal of information including screenshots, and other inflammatory quotes by Jay. 

All of this follows a familiar pattern.  When Islamophobes like Geller and Spencer are caught in the act of making up or distorting claims they engage in devious methods to attempt to conceal the evidence.  The articles Islamophobes Spencer & Geller are confused about who are the “brownshirts”, and AFDI/SION’s Leadership: Arrests & Scandals have more information on other unsavory individuals associated with AFDI/SIOA.