tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10131050.post8054594416656428077..comments2024-03-01T08:19:54.547+00:00Comments on BobFromBrockley: The problem with cyber-libertarianismbobhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15439386754907203808noreply@blogger.comBlogger10125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10131050.post-87175162077655025062017-02-22T23:05:46.034+00:002017-02-22T23:05:46.034+00:00Hi Bob,
No, I'm not the same as the other Ano...Hi Bob,<br /><br />No, I'm not the same as the other Anonymous contributor. <br /><br />One needs to be very careful about saying the Shamir allegations came from various sources. No, they don't in fact - they originate entirely from a small clique around David Leigh (whose protege James Ball was) and spread out from there. Perhaps Andrew Brown can be treated separately. He was actually the Guardian's religious correspondent based in Stockholm. Have a look at this report filed, maybe in a rush (see the apology about the lack of translation at the bottom) on the same day as the Guardian went big on its skewed version of the Assange police protocol, stolen by James Ball, then still at WikiLeaks (his employment dates being 23/11/10 to 15/12/10 + 1 further day in January) from the WikiLeaks press server while Assange was in Wandsworth prison. This is what James Ball was rewarded for by his old City University mentor David Leigh with a job at the Guardian. For details of this, see the Annotated Transcript WikiLeaks produced to respond to the Alex Gibney documentary We Steal Secrets.<br /><br />If you look at the Andrew Brown piece, you'll see its focus is less on Shamir himself but more on his son, Johannes Wahlstrom. To me, it's clear its real purpose was to discredit an important defence witness for Assange.<br /><br />https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2010/dec/17/wikileaks-israel-shamir-russia-scandinavia <br /><br />Curiously enough, the same day the Guardian splashed the 10 Days in Sweden article on the Assange protocol and Andrew Brown's piece it had written three stories on the Belarus cables a few hours before and uploaded the redacted cables for publication on WikiLeaks.<br /><br />If you are really interested in following back the whole Assange/Shamir saga back to its roots (including the original Russian source for the story that Shamir "handed WikiLeaks cables to the Belarus regime"), this is a fantastic piece of research:<br /><br />The Guardian and WikiLeaks: The Double-Cross System <br />http://hazelpress.org.uk/redactions-propaganda/4591574522<br /><br />[scroll down to the section A Strawman and Lukashenko. Whole thing is rather long, but it's worth reading in full]<br /><br /><br />Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10131050.post-76045383976849595722017-02-22T17:39:54.317+00:002017-02-22T17:39:54.317+00:00By the way, the first report of a Shamir-Assange c...By the way, the first report of a Shamir-Assange connection was in Moscow Times, which described him as their content aggregator. It was then picked up Michael Moynihan of the liberatarian Reason.com and only much later picked up by the Guardian (not just Ball, but also Andrew Brown, David Leigh and others, who had actually worked closely with Assange), who corroborated the story via sources at Wikileaks, giving details of payments which Wikileaks have not been able to refute, just to deny. <br /><br />As well as this, there is the case of Shamir's son, who is also a Wikileaks employee. I could go on...bobhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15439386754907203808noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10131050.post-24189377892537707232017-02-22T17:31:42.053+00:002017-02-22T17:31:42.053+00:00Anonymous, if you are the same Anonymous as the pr...Anonymous, if you are the same Anonymous as the previous one (would be lovely if you took a consistent pseudonym, to make it easier to follow the threads), then can I assume you are withdrawing the claim that "the anti-Semitic thing was always a nonsense and popular smear" and now just making the claim that Shamir the antisemite has nothing really to do with Assange?<br /><br />I'm a bit unclear exactly what you are claiming Ball made up, as Ball is hardly the only or first source for Assange and Shamir being linked. Are you saying that Shamir was not an accredited Wikileaks journalist, and not the official gatekeeper for Wikileaks in Russia? It seems Russian Reporter (part of the Expert group, as you know very pro-Kremlin) got access to the cables only via Shamir. bobhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15439386754907203808noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10131050.post-46665663436432359152017-02-22T17:12:45.117+00:002017-02-22T17:12:45.117+00:00Julian Assange doesn't have "close links&...Julian Assange doesn't have "close links" to Shamir. That was all the invention of ex-Guardian journalist James Ball. Assange met Shamir a total of two times and, like dozens and dozens of other journalists and media partners, gave some of the Cablegate stash pertinent to their geographic region. Wikileaks' media partner for Russia was the newspaper Russian Reporter.<br /><br />WikiLeaks statement on Israel Shamir<br />https://wlcentral.org/book/export/html/1412<br /><br />The real reason TPTB use Shamir to attack Assange and Wikileaks is because Swedish journalist Johannes Wahlstrom (Shamir's son) gave Swedish police a good eye-witness account of Assange's time in Sweden, making clear (if you read it in conjunction with the other witness reports) that the allegations against Assange were trumped-up at best, and very likely entirely false.<br /><br />Johannes Wahlstrom's police statement:<br />http://rixstep.com/1/20110201,00.shtml<br /><br />I think this is beyond question now that Assange has released the testimony he gave to the Swedish prosecutor in November 2016, especially if you take into account the included date & timestamped women's text messages retrieved by Swedish police from their phones, which were sent around the time of the alleged events.<br /><br />https://justice4assange.com/IMG/pdf/Statement_14-15_Nov_2016.pdf<br /><br />I'll probably get moderated for this post and it'll never see the light of day here, but I'd like to say a couple of things before you do. I'm a woman who has herself reported rape to the police. (No, I didn't get justice because the Crown Prosecution Service was even worse about taking hard-to-prove cases to court back then than it is now.) So, I'm no rape apologist. But I do believe that justice in rape cases should still be possible and, most importantly, that public trust in the legitimacy of genuine verdicts should be maintained. <br /><br />I've looked at this Assange case very closely, and the way it has been politicized in both the mainstream press and on social media. To my horror, I've watched as this case has utterly obliterated the concept of Presumption of Innocence - so especially important in rape trials. If Assange is somehow convicted after this farce of an investigation - or, worse, shipped straight to the US instead - there is a very strong possibility the general public will never believe in the veracity of a rape conviction again. Think of that - and how important to the healing process for rape victims a Guilty verdict is, how important it is to be heard, and believed - the next time you attack Assange (pre-charge, pre-trial, officially deemed a victim of corrupt due process by the UN) on Twitter.<br /> <br /><br />Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10131050.post-82125132675207765352017-02-22T13:29:09.719+00:002017-02-22T13:29:09.719+00:00Anon-
It is absurd to think that single article b...Anon-<br /><br />It is absurd to think that single article by Shamir refutes the dozens of articles which solidly established long ago that he is a vicious antisemite. See e.g http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/67305/his-jewish-problem<br /><br />But if yiu don't trust any secondary sources, it's obvious from his own writings. Take this appalling claim that the Holocaust is a fake narrative used to enforce Jewish supremacy, whose victims are the Anglo saxons http://web.archive.org/web/20170218052521/http://israelshamir.net/English/Who_Needs.htm<br /><br /><br />Or more recently this on Bernie Sanders, soaked through with bizarre manifestations of classical Christian Jew-hate: "the Jewish establishment is as anti-Christian and anti-Church as it was in the Middle Ages... [Israel] is the symbol of Jewish supremacy. By pandering to Israel, American politicians accept this supremacy. And it is translated in their attitude to the banks, which are as Jewish as synagogues, or more so, and to free trade which is good for Jews. <br />Sanders rebelled against these classic Jewish attitude: he called to break up the banks, and he spoke against “free trade” agreements which devastate American industry, impoverish American workers and create more happy kosher billionaires. ... This is defiance of the Jewish tradition of financial priority." http://web.archive.org/web/20161111171640/http://www.israelshamir.net/English/SandersChangesRules.htm<br /><br />Or this on Hillary Clinton which manifests both antisemitism and the deep, deep misogyny that is becoming an increasingly pronounced element in Shamir's rhetoric: "The connection between Jewish activism and violent feminism has been made obvious in this election campaign as never before. In a classic Jewish subterfuge they sent a woman to provoke the man, and then accuse him of lack of chivalry. The Jewish female activists goad Trump and his supporters" http://web.archive.org/web/20161111174042/http://www.israelshamir.net/English/ClintonGenderWars.htm<br /><br />Anyone unable to recognise this as clear antisemitism of the most ideological and eat full time and frankly has no business talking about antisemitism. bobhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15439386754907203808noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10131050.post-67227732116269579382017-02-22T10:54:11.461+00:002017-02-22T10:54:11.461+00:00the anti-Semitic thing was always a nonsense and p...the anti-Semitic thing was always a nonsense and popular smear<br />which Shamir himself adequately dealt with<br /><br />James Ball: a Portrait of the Petty Cheat as a Young Man<br />http://www.israelshamir.net/English/Ball.htm<br />Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10131050.post-34261977755566378632013-12-05T13:40:44.712+00:002013-12-05T13:40:44.712+00:00WS, as (almost) always, you're absolutely righ...WS, as (almost) always, you're absolutely right: ATS is not anarchist as most anarchists would recognise it. Spencer's Public Eye piece on Troy Southgate and "national anarchism", linked to in the original post above, is good on this issue. <br /><br />On "cyber-libertarianism": yes, it is much more heterogeneous than I realise I have given the impression here, and lots would not think in the same way as those named here. Pirate Bay's far right funding was not something (to my knowledge) that the Pirate Party's founders had any connection to, and what the German Pirate Party did should not indict the Swedish one, etc. <br /><br />This is spot on: "I prefer to start from a point where we ask why the left isn't attracting young, idealistic, progressive types, rather then attacking them for our failures."<br /><br />--<br /><br />The share button works for me, but it's true Blogger.com is appalling compared to Wordpress...bobhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15439386754907203808noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10131050.post-65445484169552180132013-12-04T18:51:35.395+00:002013-12-04T18:51:35.395+00:00That's Bob's fault for stubbornly refusing...That's Bob's fault for stubbornly refusing to move to Wordpress, no matter how much we nag him. ;)33Waterloo Sunsetnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10131050.post-90522349422153429012013-12-04T18:14:55.068+00:002013-12-04T18:14:55.068+00:00If I am allowed to make an unrelated point: that ...If I am allowed to make an unrelated point: that new "Share" button totally sucks, unfortunately. <br />I wasn't able to tweet this post...SnoopyTheGoonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00920565522498918323noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10131050.post-7071879595957779212013-12-04T15:24:08.779+00:002013-12-04T15:24:08.779+00:00On Kink.com, read this from Maggie Mayhem-http://m...On Kink.com, read this from Maggie Mayhem-http://missmaggiemayhem.com/2013/02/12/tales-of-kink-com/<br /><br />On Attack the System, I think describing them as "anarchist" without qualification is a bit of a grubby smear. Not only is it an attempt at guilt by association, it ignores the fact that it's primarily anarchists who have opposed and exposed them. Even the onebigtent Infoshop won't have anything to do with them. I accept that this may be down to Nick not knowing much about them as opposed to malice though.<br /><br />On "cyberlibertarianism" I think you're seeing it as a unified movement, when it isn't. It's more of a tactic- think black bloc. Anonymous contains both people who defend child porn and people who take down child porn sites. The Pirate Party is a complicated case- I've certainly met people from it who are generally socialist, don't support Assange and are mainly into e-democracy systems. The fact it has a single name makes the various pirate partieslook way more monolithic then they actually are. I prefer to start from a point where we ask why the left isn't attracting young, idealistic, progressive types, rather then attacking them for our failures.Waterloo Sunsetnoreply@blogger.com