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Whether or not you think Julian “WikiLeaks” Assange is guilty of heinous crimes or the successor to Barack Obama’s saviour-of-mankind crown – in my view the jury is still out – it seems he’s been keeping some interesting company.
As reported by Reason magazine, the author of the article that first suggested the CIA might have had something to do with the Swedish rape accusation against him, was none other than Israel Shamir – an activist who also uses the aliases Adam Ermash and Jöran Jermas.
Michael C Moynihan, the magazine’s senior editor, writes “Israel Shamir, when he is not accusing Assange’s accusers of setting CIA honey traps, works with WikiLeaks in an official capacity.”
According to the article, Mr Shamir is the man who “selects and distributes” which WikiLeaks documents go to which Russian media organisations.
Mr Moynihan adds: “Yulia Latynina, a reporter at the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta…also found that the Kremlin-friendly paper working with Shamir to promote the WikiLeaks material had already published “outright lies” Shamir claimed were supported by leaks.
“According to Latynina, Shamir faked a cable related to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s speech to the United Nations, which supposedly showed collusion amongst those who walked out of the talk in protest.
“That he would invent such a cable is perhaps unsurprising, considering Shamir has previously written an encomium to the “brave and charismatic leader” of Iran.”
So who is Mr Shamir? Well, for those unaware, he is no friend to the country that bears his name or to the Jewish community in general. Moynihan describes him as “an antisemite and semi-literate Holocaust denier with ties to both the extreme right and left and a well-documented penchant for lying”.
Elsewhere, The Times columnist David Aaronovitch has noted that he is a “believer in the blood libel”.
Mr Shamir has also spoken of those age-old Jewish conspiracies, stating that the Middle East policy of the United States and Britain was driven by “the same old fight for ensuring Jewish supremacy,” and that “Jews indeed own, control and edit a big share of mass media.” (This at a reception in the House of Lords in 2005 organised by Labour peer Lord Ahmed).
At one point he allegedly praised the BNP leader Nick Griffin as an “anti-bourgeois nationalist,” and at another he suggested the Jews had been warned in an advance to escape the Twin Towers before the September 11 attacks.
What a lovely fellow. Positively Wiki-ed, if you ask me.
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