James Ball: a Portrait of the Petty Cheat as a Young Man
By Israel Shamir
Cheats and thieves have to prove their moral superiority
over their victims in order to justify their crimes.
This is the case with a petty cheat and thief called
James Ball. This young man was a hired hand in the
Wikileaks; he was offered a bribe of a job by the
Guardian and he gratefully accepted it, betraying
Julian Assange's trust and stealing all he could put his
sweaty hands on. Since then, he is obsessed with
demeaning and debunking Assange: only moral disgrace of
the Australian will reduce the burden of the traitor's
guilt.
One of his favourite routes is attacking Assange for
associating with me, and today he did it again in the Guardian,
responding to my recent piece Unmanning
the Man. His arguments are repetitious, baseless and
lame: I am called "anti-Semite", "H-denier" and "the man
who gave the State Department secrets to Lukashenko"
time and again.
"Shamir asked for access to all cable material
concerning "the Jews", a request which was refused",
says Ball. Oh no, James! That was before your switching
sides, and you dutifully obliged. You did it even twice:
just before my departure you came to me on your own
initiative and kindly handed me "a better file on Jews",
twice as big as the previous one. Apparently lying and
cheating is your second nature by now.
As my readers know, my view on "antisemitism and
H-denial" was expressed many times, and it is available
on my and other websites, namely:
" I wrote hundreds
of pages on the Jewish 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.
As for "giving unredacted files" topic, this is rather
silly claim to be published in the Guardian since this
newspaper published the password to the whole lot.
Moreover, their "redaction" of the cables distorted the
meaning and safeguarded interests of British companies
and American officials.
Nowhere the Guardian responds to my valid observations:
"This is the season for asses to bray at the captive
lion. The Guardian, the newspaper that made
millions on ripping Julian’s information mine and later
turned into the greatest enemy of the Australian
adventurer, published a
sleazy piece by an editor of the slimy Swedish
right-wing tabloid Expressen, a Ms Karin Olsson.
Olsson tells the story of Swedes’ disappointment with
Assange “from Hero to zero”, conveniently omitting her
part in the action. Character assassination of Assange
by media was to a great part her work. The Expressen
obtained the news of two feminists’ visit to a friendly
policewoman in real time, and splashed the headline
“Sought for rape” immediately, before the paperwork
reached the attorney office and before the charges were
made.
It was fitting the Expressen agenda: the tabloid
belongs to Karl Johan Bonnier, a Swedish Murdoch, and
his media empire dutifully supported the right-wing
government coalition, promoted Sweden’s participation in
the US wars, in bombardment of Libya and sending troops
to Afghanistan. Bonnier, a sworn enemy of free
journalism and of the Wikileaks, had commissioned and
published Domshiet-Berg's book against Assange. The
Guardian did not mind ordering the hit piece from
the newspaper editor who published racist pieces calling
for deportation of Arabs from the Swedish paradise.
Despite – or because of that - Olsson frequently refers
to my "antisemitism". For a while I was at loss why does
she, provided there are no Jews in the story, try to
bring them in. Later I understood, that - like her
Nordic neighbour Anders Breivik - Olsson believes that
every sort of racism is permitted as long as one adds
condemnation of anti-Semitism. The Russian critics
would throw in a charge of anti-Sovietism, in similar
circumstances. Probably Olsson and Breivik both believe
that the world is ruled by the Elders of Zion. This
thought is not foreign to David Leigh, a Guardian editor
in charge of Wikileaks defamation, for he always adds
the Jewish angle where none exists."
Anyway, thank you, Mr James Ball, for spreading my views
among the readers of your fine newspaper. Probably I owe
you two pints: one, for the file on Jews, and another,
for your last hatchet piece!
Read the original Shamir's text Unmanning the Man http://www.israelshamir.net/English/Unmanning.htm
Read the Guardian piece
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/nov/08/israel-shamir-julian-assange-cult-machismo
Best responses:
8 November 2011 10:24PM
My God. This is at least the SIXTH
TIME that Teh Grauniad has tried to smear Assange by
association with Israel Shamir. What a vile, demeaning
agenda for a newspaper that purports to hold the Murdoch
media to exposure!
Ball claims that Shamir gave
unredacted US cables to the President of Belarus,
Alexander Lukashenko, who then used that information to
crack down on dissenters. Ball's only proof for this is
that Shamir was "seen leaving the interior ministry of
Belarus". So in fact there is no proof that Israel
Shamir gave cables to anyone, least of all Lukashenko.
In the following days:
- Luvashenko said he wanted to see a
Belarussian version of WikiLeaks.
- a Belarus state-owned media organisation announced
that they would be publishing stories based on the
WikiLeaks cables, and
- Shamir published a bizarre article about how nice life
is in post-Soviet Belarus.
Critics of Assange interpreted all
this as proof that Shamir had given the cables to
Luvashenko, and immediately concluded that Assange's
stewardship of WikiLeaks was therefore suspect. Even the
Index on Censorship jumped on the bandwagon (bizarrely,
their CEO has an anti-WikiLeaks agenda and has been
forced to issue at least one apology to Assange).
Pressured to respond, what could
WikiLeaks say? They
demanded proof that the cables had been handed over.
Of course nobody could supply such proof. The spotlight
fell on Shamir, who
insisted that he never gave anybody the unredacted
cables, and was only working with the Belarus media to
publish his own Cablegate stories. But who is going to
trust the word of a man who has just been widely branded
a notorious "anti-Semite"? This is how the smear game
works.
And now Ball repeats these tired
allegations, throwing in allegations of misogyny? Oh,
please, James. People can think what they like about
Israel Shamir, but he has a basic human right to speak.
And think what you may of Shamir, it's clearly
ridiculous to keep smearing Assange by association.
If that's the best anti-Assange BS
you can come up with, maybe it's time to give this
tired, vile and demeaning Guardian agenda a rest.
8 November 2011 11:12PM
Leaking material to dictators? Surely
you mean the Guardian, whose lame journalist published
the password of the entire wikileaks archive. Dictators
and terrorist have all the leaks they need now thanks to
the graun's ace reporter.
From Ian Buckley:
The Observer led but the Guardian has
followed it into neo-connery..
They should be defending Julian, not cheerleading his
delivery to a Swedish legal-political
establishment which - we may presume - is eager to palm
him off to the US, thus ensuring they don't get 'Palmed'
in the future.