Mother of all smears
By Israel Shamir
BBC Panorama prepares a ‘mother of all
smears’ against Wikileaks and against Israel Shamir, following
the Guardian’s preparation softening of the target, says Shamir
The campaign by the establishment press
against Julian Assange is intensifying. CBS’s 60 Minutes tried
to trash him last Sunday, but Assange left CBS’ interviewer,
Steve Kroft, floundering. Last Sunday also saw New York Times
editor Bill Keller consume several thousand words in the NYT’s
Magazine abusing Assange with disgraceful lack of scruple,
Assange being a man who gave the New York Times some actual news
scoops, instead of its regular staple of gastroporn from Sam
Sifton. Here Israel Shamir reports, with some personal
involvement, on the impending slurring of Assange on the BBC,
and the attacks on him in The Guardian.
Alexander
Cockburn/JStClair
I picked up the phone on the third ring, and a melodious British
voice informed me that the BBC wanted to include me in its
Panorama programme. The BBC wanted to hear my views
on the world, and was especially interested in Wikileaks. Oh
what a glorious moment! I felt myself puff with pride. There is
something about “the Beeb” that makes my heart flutter! I have
always been partial to their style, and I considered it an
honour to have the BBC listed on my CV, even though it was over
thirty years ago. When I worked in the Bush House on the Strand,
the BBC’s Panorama was one of the best investigative
programmes anywhere - and suddenly here they are, soliciting
my comments! Eager to build a relationship of trust, I
answered all their preparatory questions with an unvarnished
honesty. I thought I had done well; they offered to fly me to
London, or if that were inconvenient they would fly out and
speak to me in Moscow – civil chaps, aren’t they?
Looking back, the signs of danger are easy to see. They were
producing a programme about Wikileaks, but they had no plans to
interview Julian Assange. Perhaps he is too busy? Furthermore,
the questions began to take on a sinister tone. I shrugged off
the feeling as a by-product of all the dirty politics we were
discussing, but a few telephone conversations
later my
ill feelings finally seeped into my swelled head and it dawned
on me what was going on. These nice chaps from the BBC were
actually collecting dirt to use against Wikileaks! I was
being played for a sucker. Suddenly I felt like Julian Assange,
face to face with the honey trap.
The clincher was a letter I just received from producer John
Sweeney, outlining the substance of the broadcast. It does not
read like a television show, it reads like a criminal
indictment. Every wild accusation is listed, and those without a
shred of evidence are given pride of place. Most amazing of all,
the Sweeney letter includes some lines lifted from a missive I
had sent to Julian some time ago. The words were taken out of
context and they were a misquotation of the original, but I
recognise my prose. Some questions immediately spring to mind.
How did the BBC get their hands on my private correspondence?
Does the BBC actually steal private mail, or do they hire out?
Ominously, this is not the first time this has happened to me.
Another private letter of mine was (mis)quoted by The
Guardian’s investigative editor David Leigh. Is it too
conspiratorial of me to recognise a disturbing pattern? Could it
be that
three stolen laptops of Julian Assange found their last
resting place at Leigh&Sweeney after a brief sojourn at Langley?
John Sweeney and David Leigh are cut from different cloth, but
they both know how to play the journalism game. Leigh smoulders
with jealousy. He plays the Salieri to Assange’s Mozart, but he
thinks of himself as the
unsung hero of Wikileaks. A hero? Rather, a villain. As Bill
Keller of the New York Times
admitted it was Leigh who “concluded that these rogue leaks
(he engineered them) released The Guardian from any
pledge”. Since then, he’s started his own private war against
Wikileaks. His liaison with Sweeney was a convenient one.
Sweeney is a pit bull; he’s the sort of guy you assign to smear
Mother Theresa. He has skated along thus far because only the
very rich might contemplate suing the BBC, but he has been
found by a court to be a criminal libeller at least one
time. Sweeney’s lunatic outbursts of fury are calculated to
intimidate interviewees and have been preserved for
posterity. It is all too plain to me now why Assange and
company refused to have anything to do with Panorama and
its pre-planned outcome. It is all too obvious to me now why
they came hunting for your humble narrator.
The Panorama programme on Wikileaks will run on February
7, 2011, the very day that the trial of Julian Assange will be
reopened. The result of the trial is unpredictable, not so the
programme. Assange has more than a chance before the British
courts, but if this Sweeney letter is anything to judge by,
Panorama will leave no survivors. This is the British
version of The Empire Strikes Back, the ultimate response
to those who try to challenge mainstream corporate media’s hold
over the public mind. In the meantime, the FBI and Scotland Yard
have been keeping busy, making as many as 45 raids on various
premises connected with Wikileaks, so that the alliance between
the BBC and The Guardian is an ethereal mirror of some
very earthy, if not subterranean, activity.
I doubt we will see the BBC’s Panorama make any attempt
to examine what was disclosed by Wikileaks. I’m sure they will
neglect to include Julian Assange’s
philosophy of clarity as the people’s weapon against
conspiracies of powerful; nor will they discuss the wilful
redacting of the cables by The Guardian, or their
arbitrary use of misleading headlines. I do not think they
will investigate The Guardian’s journalistic attempts to
destroy Julian Assange, including publishing an anticipatory
book about the fall of Wikileaks. I wonder if they will inquire
into OpenLeaks, the Guardian-sponsored alternative to Wikileaks,
and how their version of “transparency” might be used to unmask
whistleblowers and deliver their leaks back to their masters.
The one thing I do expect to see: smears! Some of these
smears will deal with the alleged rape. I am no prophet, but I
am willing to bet they will not mention these salient facts: the
fact that the alleged victim was seen enjoying the company of
the alleged rapist the day after the alleged crime, and the
breathless twitters sent by the alleged victim after the
alleged crime about how “amazing” it was to hang out with Julian
and the Wikileaks crew. They will certainly not bring up
Karl Rove’s involvement in the entrapment, nor will they list
the complainant’s connections to the CIA. I suspect they will
not bother to interview the eminent Swedish judge
Brita Sundberg-Weitman about why
she thinks the extradition request is illegal, and why she
thinks that the people behind the request are pursuing their own
agenda. I doubt the programme will quote Swedish attorney
Marianne Ny, who said that it is better to keep a man in jail
even if he turns out to be innocent.
Judging by Sweeney’s letter, there will be more than smears;
there will be megasmears! Israel Shamir (that’s me) is a
veritable lightning rod for smear jobs. Some folks can’t take
the heat, and frankly, I don’t blame them. The Sweeney letter
accuses me of being an “anti-Semite” and a “Holocaust denier”.
Presumably it will be repeated in the broadcast.
To ensure their case is fireproof, the BBC has hired expert
“anti-Semitism fighter” Professor Richard Evans – the BBC spares
no expense when the game is afoot. Evans was an expert witness
in the David Irving libel trial, and walked away with
seventy thousand pounds ($110,000) from the court and a
grand total of
a quarter of a million pounds ($400,000) altogether for
“fighting” anti-Semitism.
This windfall overexcited the Professor and, eager to repeat the
coup, he
tried to frame a feminist scholar Diane Purkiss for
Holocaust denial as she expressed some unusual thoughts about…
no, not Jews but witches in medieval England. This was a bridge
too far, and he was forced to apologise grudgingly.
Evans is no stranger to perjury: under cross examination, Evans,
under oath, stated that he would not publish a book and thereby
gain further profit from his participation in the trial. Yet of
course he did publish a book, and yes, he profited from it. His
enthusiasm is not hard to understand – he’s found a real gold
mine! Without his reputation as an “anti-Semitism fighter”, his
“glumly unimaginative style … [that] makes Evans’s account
like a long draft of flat beer” (as Walden said in
Bloomberg) would leave him on the margins of life. I’ll be
glad to refute Professor Evans’s insights, but let’s maintain a
proper historical perspective. I’d reserve my comments until
after the BBC hires Evans to analyse the anti-Semitism of
George VI, Shakespeare, Eliot and Marx.
I wrote
hundreds of pages on the topic, but for the benefit of the
reader I’ll sum it up. Naturally, as a son of Jewish parents and
a man living in the Jewish state and deeply and intimately
involved with Jewish culture, I harbour no hate to a Jew because
he is a Jew. I doubt many people do. However I did and do
criticise various aspects of Jewish Weltanschauung like
so many Jewish and Christian thinkers before me, or even more so
for I witnessed crimes of the Jewish state that originated in
this worldview.
As for the accusation of “Holocaust denial”, my family lost too
many of its sons and daughters for me to deny the facts of
Jewish tragedy, but I do deny its religious salvific
significance implied in the very term ‘Holocaust’; I do deny its
metaphysical uniqueness, I do deny the morbid cult of Holocaust
and I think every God-fearing man, a Jew, a Christian or a
Muslim should reject it as Abraham rejected and smashed idols. I
deny that it is good to remember or immortalise such traumatic
events, and I wrote many articles against modern obsession with
massacres, be it Jewish holocaust of 1940s, Armenian massacre of
1915, Ukrainian “holodomor”, Polish Katyn, Khmer Rouge etc.
Poles, Armenians, Ukrainians understood me, so did Jews –
otherwise I would be charged with the crime of factual denial
which is known to the Israeli law. It took Evans and Sweeney to
feint indignation.
I am not offended easily by morons. However, this ‘denier’
rhetoric keeps many of my erstwhile associates at arm’s length;
no one likes being labelled, and I do not wish these labels to
be rubbed off onto my friends, especially those like Julian
Assange who never were interested in the subject. My Zionist
opponents are obsessed with race and holocausts; I am not.
Moreover, now I take time off my long involvement with the
Jewish topic, involvement that began with translating the works
of the Modern Hebrew writer S Y Agnon, moved on to translating
the Medieval Hebrew works of
Samuel Zacuto, and then finally had a go at undoing the
crimes of Zionism. I do not renounce anything I’ve said or
wrote, but there is life outside this subject. Wikileaks is the
best example of this. Wikileaks has changed the face of the
Middle East more radically than my ramblings ever could. Without
Wikileaks, Al-Jazeera would never have published its Palestine
Papers, and Tunisia and Egypt would not have begun their battle
away from dictatorship and towards freedom.
These attacks on me have two reasons: one, to undermine
Wikileaks and Julian Assange by association with me, “antisemite
and denier”; two, to undermine my efforts to give you, readers,
the cables unfiltered by the embedded media. This was confirmed
by a new piece in the
Guardian that provided foretaste of the forthcoming
Panorama, like a 0.5" tracer precedes payload. It repeats the
same points - how anyone can have a view on Belarus that differs
from that of Mr Leigh? The piece concludes: "while the
newspapers hammered out a deal to handle the cables in a
responsible fashion, Shamir's backstairs antics certainly made
WikiLeaks look rather less so". Dear Guardian editors, your
"responsible fashion" was analysed in the
Counterpunch and found wanting. Moreover, Bill Keller
admitted that every publication of the cables was screened and
vetted by "unsmiling men" from CIA and State Department. I have
tried to free the cables from the cage you locked them in. I am
responsible too - but to people, not to officialdom.
I was mainly involved with the post-Soviet space, and there I
delivered cables to very different media outlets, to the
mainstream Russkiy Reporter, the mass-circulation
Komsomolskaya Pravda, to opposition Novaya Gazeta, to
the Naviny, an independent site in Belarus because I did
not like The Guardian’s arrangement of keeping embedded
media in full control. If it worked in the East, it may work in
the West: we may free ourselves from their mind control.
I believe the viewers of Panorama are too smart to be
misled by ad hominem attacks. I believe you will judge me
and Julian Assange by what we do: breaking the conspiracy of the
powerful against the powerless. This is what the BBC is trying
to make us forget. We have spent too much time and space dealing
with their indictments of the messengers. Instead, we should
indict them for trying to distract us from the message.
Responses:
From Paul de Rooij
I just read Israel Shamir's article, and can confirm that John
Sweeney has a
history of dubious smearing or otherwise denigrating people like
Hugo Chavez
etc. And he will appear on Panorama, a program that ran a
recent smear job
against the activists on board the Mavi Marmara, the ship that
was stormed
by the Israeli commandos... Jane Corbin, the director of that
Panorama
program, happens to be the wife of Lord Maples, the president of
the
Conservative Friends of Israel...
From Ian Buckley
Panorama,
like the BBC and indeed like Britain itself, is not what is was.
Viewing figures have been on the slide for years now. John
Sweeney has followed much the same career path as Nick Cohen;
from investigative reporter sympathising with the underdog to
cheerleading for establishment causes.
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