Royal Hunt of Julian Assange

Israel Shamir replies to the Guardian…

Andrew Brown shrilled thus about me: “WikiLeaks’s spokesperson and conduit in Russia … Israel Shamir, a Jew who has converted to Orthodox Christianity and passionate antisemitism… has been exposed in the Swedish media as an anti-semite and Holocaust denier”.

The Alexandrian Greek poet Cavafy wrote that “For some people the day comes, When they must say the great Yes Or the great No.” When I chose the great Yes, I ceased to be a Jew. I knew that I would never be left in peace by the Christ deniers and their henchmen, the likes of Brown. I don’t mean to complain: in Maimonides’ day, renegades like me were quickly and permanently silenced; in our more enlightened circumstances, I am merely smeared and misquoted. If my desire to come to Christ is “antisemitism” for Brown, so be it.

It is enough to mention that this notorious Church-hater Andrew Brown is the man who luridlyinsinuated the Pope is gay. Andrew Brown has been described as “The Guardian’s resident moron”, and with good reason. Only a moron would reduce my metaphysical rejection of Golgotha/Auschwitz equation to a blanket denial of the horrors of war. I always enjoy discussing my views, but not with people who completely ignore the subtleties and nuances of my writings.

I do not delude myself that my reputation merits this kind of attention from such an important English newspaper. I realize that it is just another attempt to smear Julian Assange, this time by association with me. For the record, I am not a member of Wikileaks, not a spokesman, just a friend.

The “Swedish media” to which Brown refers is the notorious Expressen, the Swedish version of British Sun, and it just happens to be the newspaper that triggered the Assange witch-hunt. Normally you’d look for a more legitimate news source, but when the game is afoot perhaps passion overrides prudence. Thus begins The Guardian’s Royal Hunt of Julian Assange.

I have never seen simple facts more twisted and distorted than in the article published byThe Guardian on December 18^th – and I’ve seen some beauties. This is trial by media in the best tradition of Pravda 1937. The article’s author Nick Davies wrote years ago in his Flat Earth News that the practice of journalism in the UK is “bent”; now he has proven it beyond a doubt by his own writing.

His bias is as subtle as a blow to the head. There is no room for doubt: Assange never committed rape. The day after the alleged rape, the alleged victim boasted to her friends in a twitter that she had a wonderful time with the alleged rapist. The complete story has all beenpublished and is available with a simple Internet search. Nick Davies clearly performed a cruel hatchet job. But was publishing the article a simple case of bad judgement by TheGuardian, or the beginning of a smear campaign?

Two days later, we noted The Guardian’s second attack. So, Mr Assange, why won’t you go back to Sweden now? The answer is not so very hard to find. As Ms. Bennett surmises, Julian has nothing to fear from Sweden. Here is a question for Ms. Bennett. If Swedish authorities were primarily concerned about prosecuting Julian for rape, why have they attached a special condition to their demands of extradition, specifically reserving the right to pass him on to US authorities? You see Ms. Bennett, the US has invented a special treat called Extraordinary Rendition, and this is not something I would wish upon even Andrew Brown.

I’ll count the Brown attempt to smear Julian by association with me as a third attack. “Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action”, as James Bond inGoldfinger put it neatly.

Has American patriotism infected the trenches of The Guardian, or are these reporters simply following orders? The answer can found be on amazon.co.uk. It seems that TheGuardian has decided to destroy Wikileaks once it is has been squeezed dry. The Moor has done his work, the Moor may go. Understanding full well that the Wikileaks crew cannot be tamed or subverted, The Guardian is accepting pre-orders for a book called . It’s not quite released yet; they have still to arrange for the fall.

Suddenly the smear campaign acquires a rude economic logic. But it doesn’t end there.

The Guardian has accepted the US State Department cables. They have agreed to analyze and publish them. Yet they have turned their Wikileaks-based reports into a source of misinformation. The headlines often declare that Wikileaks is the source of the rumour! For instance, one of the headlines, published on December 18, 2010 said:

“WikiLeaks: Lukashenka’s fortune estimated at 9 billion USD”.

This is a very misleading headline. Wikileaks never made an estimate of Lukashenko’s wealth. Read the entire article, and you will find that it was nothing more than a US embassy employee who had heard a rumour and transmitted it to the State Department, and that “the embassy employee couldn’t verify the sources (sic!) or accuracy of the information”. A corrected headline would read:

“Wikileaks reveals: US diplomats spread unverifiable rumors about Lukashenko’s personal wealth.”

The Guardian prefers to make it appear as if it was Wikileaks that made the claim, and leaves it to our imagination to supply the secret bank statements that would verify the headline.

Let us suppose that one day Wikileaks will publish cables transmitted from the Russian Embassy in Washington to Moscow Centre. Shall we expect to see published in The Guardian this screaming headline?

WikiLeaks: The Mossad behind 9/11!!

Isn’t it more likely we would be soberly told that “Wikileaks reveals that Russian diplomats in Washington report the persistent rumors on Israeli involvement in 9/11”?

Because of this careful sabotage, more and more people are saying that Wikileaks is just a tool of the State Department, or CIA, or Mossad. Perhaps that is what The Guardian wants. Perhaps The Guardian thinks it has outclassed, outmanoeuvred, and outsmarted the Wikileaks crew. I would rather place my bet on Julian Assange. He is smart, and he has a mind of a first-class chess player. He has many surprises up his sleeve. It is possible thatThe Guardian will have to rename their book The Rise and Rise of Wikileaks.