Why is Olbermann Linking to an Anti-Semite?
Michael C. Moynihan reports:
Here’s how an evidence-free, innuendo-filled personal attack on a rape accuser trespasses the mainstream political debate. On his Twitter feed, MSNBC host Keith Olbermann (162,000 followers) links to a rambling blog post arguing that Anna Ardin, the Swedish feminist who accused Assange of rape, is an anti-Castro activist with connections to CIA front groups. Elsewhere on the Internet, NYU professor Mark Crispin Miller, the popular liberal website em>FireDogLake<, Bianca Jagger, and em>The First Post<(a British news website “brought to you by em>The Week<”) all circulated the charges without an ounce of skepticism.
I have previously written that, knowing what we know about the charges Assange faces (which is admittedly not that much), it seems likely that he’s a victim of both an overzealous Swedish prosecutor and a culture that embraces an exceptionally broad definition of sexual assault. But this isn’t enough for the conspiracists and paranoiacs, who see Assange as the torchbearer for transparency, the world’s only hope for crippling American power. If American intelligence could dream up COINTELPRO, they could surely convince a pair of left-wing political activists to lure Assange into a “honey trap,” right?
So what’s this evidence of CIA perfidy that Olbermann finds so convincing? A few clicks in and one comes to an article posted on Alexander Cockburn’s far-left websiteCounterpunch by the writers Israel Shamir and Paul Bennett (more on them in a moment) positing that because Ardin, who wrote a master’s thesis on the Cuban opposition movement, visited the "Ladies in White"—a group comprised of female relatives of jailed Cuban dissidents—while conducting research in Havana, and the vile extremist Cuban exile Luis Posada Carriles (who was once employed by the CIA) went to a Miami protest on behalf of the Ladies in White, it follows that Ardin is therefore connected to the CIA. Got that? In 2007, the Ladies in White were presented with the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought from the European Parliament, raising the tantalizing possibly that Ardin is also an agent of Brussels.
Olbermann is sufficiently convinced that this connection merits your attention. This odious type of guilt-by-six-degrees-of-separation is so strained, so unbelievably lunk-headed, that normally I would suggest that it best be ignored. But when Olbermann spreads this poison, and when a mainstream liberal website like FireDogLake gets in on the act, it’s worth forcefully debunking.
Shamir scoffs at the idea that Ardin “is often described by the media as a ‘leftist,’” suggesting her mildly critical remarks about the Castro dictatorship expose her as a reactionary (I previously outlined her politics here). But reading her writings on Cuba, it’s clear that while she isn’t a Castro hagiographer (how could one be, especially a self-identified feminist?) ,Ardin persists with some fairly conventional left-wing views of the regime. “Since the 1959 revolution and communist takeover,” she has written, “healthcare and education are free, there are few or no starving or living on the street, and largely needn’t worry about violence or robbery. But salaries are extremely low.” Indeed, she sees a moral equivalence between the United States and the Cuban dictatorship, sighing that “The social democratic opposition—Corriente Socialista Democrática Cubana—is trying to show that there is an alternative between the only two clearly presented, extreme alternatives: either Castro and his gang govern Cuba or the USA does.”
So who is Israel Shamir, Counterpunch's resident intelligence correspondent? Alternately known as Jöran Jermas and Adam Ermash, Shamir is a fringe writer who has devoted his professional life to exposing the supposed criminality of “Jewish power," a paranoid anti-Semite who curates a website full of links to Holocaust denial and neo-Nazi sites, defenses of blood libel myths, and references to the em>Protocols of the Elders of Zion<. Ali Abunimah, Hussein Ibish, and Nigel Parry have warned their fellow Palestinian activists to avoid contact with Shamir, citing his frequent forays into the sewers of Jew-hatred. The British anti-fascist magazine Searchlight (along with its Swedish sister magazine Expo) showed that Shamir is a “Swedish anti-Semite” who has repeatedly lied about his past, not a truth-telling Israeli dissident.
Spend a few minutes on Shamir’s website and here's some of what you'll learn: Imprisoned neo-Nazi Ernst Zundel is a “German political prisoner of Zion”; Maria Poumier, a French Holocaust denier whose work Shamir publishes, claims that the “Nazi-jewish H[olocaust] was just a civil war between European brothers”; Shamir himself believes that the Holocaust “narrative is Jewish, it belongs to Jews, and it has no meaning but as manifestation of Jewish supremacy.” Shamir also asserts that the pro-Nazi historian David Irving “was sentenced [to prison] for denial of Jewish superiority,” warning his readers of “Jewish mind-control on a world scale.” On the Auschwitz death camp, Shamir says that “The camp was an internment facility, attended by the Red Cross (as opposed to the US internment centre in Guantanamo).”
