Neil Clark - hypocrite - The Jewish Chronicle

You have to hand it to Neil Clark (readers bored by another post about this oaf, please just ignore this). His revolting piece on the importance of Iraqi translators being left in Iraq to be murdered began with a definition of the yiddish word chutzpah. Well, it takes one to know one, as they say.

Clark has complained about anonymous commenters. He also seems to have got it into his head at various times first that I am Joshua, a regularly commenter here and, now, that Oliver Kamm is Joshua. He also seems to think that Oliver is David T, a regular poster atHarry's Place. (I happen to know David T in non-blogging life; and if Oliver is Joshua then I am Mahatma Gandhi).

I happen to agree with the view that, generally, comments should only be left by 'real' people, although sometimes professional requirements force people to adopt an alias. So long as the aliases are consistent I think that's fair enough.

What is not fair enough is total hypocrisy. So I was curious when, on my old site, regular mention of Clark (I have a penchant for giving people who hero worship mass murderers a verbal kicking) often prompted a comment praising him by one GreenGoddess. Strangely, this commenter only ever left comments about Clark, and always praised him to the sky.

Another commenter had an interesting thought. Perhaps the two were in some way related?

It turned out that they were, in one sense, very closely related. It is incredibly easy to track IP addresses left by commenters, and Mr Clark is, as his fabled conversation with a spambot demonstrated, not exactly an IT expert. Mr Clark's computer had an IP address which - who would ever have believed it? - was exactly the same as that of GreenGoddess.

I never bothered printing this information on my site, but took great amusement from it (I know it's not really done to mock the intellectually afflicted but, in Clark's case, I can't help myself).

This information has now been made public by Oliver Kamm, in a thread on Harry's Place (one of my favourite sites).

Here's how he put it:

...GreenGoddess flourished briefly in the comments section of Stephen's old blog. All her comments were devoted to praising the wisdom of Neil Clark, using Neil Clark's own distinctive form of words. It took Stephen and me almost literally no time at all to trace those comments to Neil Clark's computer - a finding that we agreed not to put on our blogs, as we felt that no good purpose would be served by it. (Strange to relate, and as has obviously been superseded by the most recent exchange, we considered the man had suffered enough ridicule already.) As GreenGoddess specifically and vigorously denied being Neil Clark when Stephen raised this possibility, we can conclude with complete certainty that she was in fact Mr and Mrs Clark's au pair. Posted by: Oliver Kamm at August 11, 2007 12:39 AM

Oliver then went on to relate a further story he had discovered (there is a sting in the tail of this post, so do stick with it):

...[T]here is a splendid exchange on Wikipedia between an administrator and the most ardent defender of Clark's reputation. You can read it here, and it is a pearl of great price. The user, called Citylightsgirl, was permanently banned from editing Wikipedia, and the page about Neil Clark that "Citylightsgirl" had so painstakingly edited was deleted on grounds of the subject's non-notability. You'll see from the exchange that, faced with an admirably toughminded administrator, "Citylightsgirl" goes from blustering indignation to whimpering pleas without any intermediate stage. That, coincidentally, is my own experience of the switch in Clark's tone before and after he heard from my libel lawyer in the case of his worthless purported writ.Posted by: Oliver Kamm at August 11, 2007 12:20 PM

This was also fascinating:

...I feel almost a sense of relief, having held it back for so long in deference to the man's feelings, now to share my appreciation of his output with a wider public, even at the end of an HP thread.

See again the splendid altercation between a Wikipedia administrator and "Citylightsgirl" (why does Clark have such a fascination with pretending to be a girl?). The administrator pointed out to Citylightsgirl:

"You've done nothing but cause problems around this article [about Neil Clark]. You've added vanity material; you've vandalized it; you've insulted other living persons on the talk page; you've imported a real-life legal row into Wikipedia; you've removed material that is demonstrably correct; and you've used a sockpuppet or meatpuppet to revert to your version. You seem to have access to unpublished personal details about Clark, and therefore I have to assume you're either Clark himself or someone close to him, which places you in a conflict of interest."

As the entry on Neil Clark was shortly afterwards deleted from Wikipedia on the grounds of its subject's non-notability, the details of the administrator's complaints about Citylightsgirl are no longer available on the site. I can tell you what they are, though.

The vanity material referred to was Citylightsgirl's insistence on including mention of a book authored by Clark about a racehorse. The title of the book, so Citylightsgirl maintained, was Flying Ace, and the publisher was Fresh Ayr Books. You will never have heard of either the book or the publisher. But the administrator valiantly searched for details, and managed to turn up the controlling genius behind the mighty publishing empire of Fresh Ayr Books: if you go to this page and scoll down to the bottom of the left-hand column, you'll find the answer in some rather small print.

The vandalism referred to was Citylightsgirl's continual removal of any critical reference to Neil Clark from any source. The "insults against other living persons" were Citylightsgirl's imprecations against me. Every single Wikipedia editor or administrator who made any amendment to anything written by Citylightsgirl was accused by Citylightsgirl of either being me or of being controlled by me: see here, among numerous other examples.

The information Citylightsgirl removed that was demonstrably correct was that his purported legal action against me had been thrown out as an abuse of process.

The sockpuppet or meatpuppet whom Citylightsgirl had used to revert to his version of the page once he had been banned from the site went under the user name "meenaghml". Martin L. Meenagh is Clark's immediate colleague at Oxford Tutorial College (an institution that, ahem, has no connection with the University of Oxford). He was permanently blocked from editing Wikipedia along with Citylightsgirl.

Through all of this fiasco, Citylightsgirl, like GreenGoddess before him, used identical language to Neil Clark (including even the same mistakes in English usage, such as confusing the words "imply" and "infer") - and repeatedly denied being Neil Clark.

Posted by: Oliver Kamm at August 12, 2007 10:34 PM

So we can see a clear pattern of Clark leaving booster comments about himself on other people's sites, and attempting to remove anything which reveals his own - I'll put it no stronger than this - mistakes.

Given what Clark has said, and how he claims only to reject comments on his site which are libellous, I thought I ought to put this to the test and alert his readers to their host's behaviour. So I left the following comment:

Mr Clark:

Since you choose to quote my words 'I am a warmonger' entirely out of context, might I draw the attention of your readers - entirely in context - to the exposure on Harry's Place by my friend Oliver Kamm of the IP address of GreenGoddess, a regular commenter at my former blog.

The IP address, just to summarise the comments referred to, is exactly the same as that of one...Neil Clark

Not that you'll post this, will you?

To say I am flabbergasted that Clark has not printed my comment is to use that word...wrongly. He has published two other comments timed after I left my comment. But mine remains in the ether somewhere, destined never to see the light of day on Clark's site.

Neil Clark: worshipper of mass murderers; defender of the murder of Iraqi civilians; and utter hypocrite. I wonder what his next trick will be?

UPDATE: This is truly wonderful. I've just had a look at his site to see if the comment is up yet. Of course it isn't. So I had a read of his latest post.

He has written