**WARNING DARK TOPIC** A sick/dark new twist to Assange losing his internet connection.

[Ran]

3 hours ago, Ariadne23 said:

Like WikiLeaks said "Tribalist symbol for establishment climbers? Most of our critics have 3 (((brackets around their names))) and have black-rimmed glasses. Bizarre."

But yeah, generally speaking, that's probably true.

Which, actually looked at in context, makes a lot more sense when Assange was calling out "neo-liberal castle creepers" who he claims have taken an anti-semitic tag ironically appropriated by anti-racists and used it, as he said, as a way to mark themselves out to fellow "establishment climbers"; it's not only Jews who have adopted the "echo" symbol thing in solidarity, and while I (being näive!) would guess the people Assange was slighting it did it out of genuine feeling, surely the cynics in this thread would admit that it's possible some of them really were just signalling how hip they are to their clique (or the people they'd like to be in a clique with)?

So the sum total of the alleged anti-semitism is ... mentioning that the closeness of the friendship of a person (who incidentally is a Rothschild-by-marriage) to Clinton might have influenced the magazine she has a controlling interest in its reportage, a tweet since deleted when it was misconstrued (both by critics... and by neo-nazis who assumed Wikileaks was embracing them), and -- so far as I can tell -- a 2011 article by Ian Hislop regarding an unverified, unrecorded conversation he had with Assange the chief points of which (namely that suggestion or implication there was a "Jewish conspiracy") he has denied; Hislop edited Private Eye and became known as the most sued man in Britain for the many libel suits brought against him over the years (a number which he lost), so he's not exactly 100% trustworthy.

Is there some genuine smoking gun I'm unaware of? Or are we to take two or three  "contentious" remarks in a decade of public life to be proof of anti-semitism?

Pretty sure if I dig around I can find people calling Bernie Sanders an anti-semite with as much cause.

(Also, given this conversation, I find this rather amusing.)

ETA: And since this fortuitously came across my Twitter feed, a former colleague of Assange's has some relevant thoughts. Yes, Buzzfeed, I know, but it seems plausibly insightful as to Assange's character.

 

[Ariadne23]

I've never looked into it before today, so I couldn't say for sure. There's some other stuff published by a former employee about the holocaust denier associate of Assange's - I think he's Swedish? A couple of his speeches I mentioned about the global shadow government of bankers seemed the most relevant to me. They're available on YouTube. But I don't think it is really possible to say for sure.

For my part, I suspect he holds some fairly alt-right opinions about Jewish people. But I don't think there is any inarguable smoking gun, no. (I'm not even sure what constitutes a smoking gun anymore in our post-Trump era.)

I have never heard of non-Jewish people using the ((())) in solidarity, FWIW. I think I agree with the Slate article I posted and other major media interpretations of that now-deleted tweet. But, yeah, YMMV.

[mormont]

5 hours ago, Ran said:

Hislop edited Private Eye and became known as the most sued man in Britain for the many libel suits brought against him over the years (a number which he lost), so he's not exactly 100% trustworthy.

As editor of Private Eye, Hislop has indeed been in court many times over libel actions, though not so much in recent years. Some of those he famously lost... and some of those judgments, of course, famously turned out to be wrong (Robert Maxwell, anyone?)

However, the claim that he's the 'most sued man in Britain' is one that is bandied around by people who dislike him, but not substantiated. And no court judgment, win or lose, has suggested that Ian Hislop personally is a liar or untrustworthy, or of inventing conversations in the way that Assange alleges. Hislop stands by his version of that conversation, and has at least as good a claim to being 100% trustworthy as Assange does.

[Ran]

Hislop stands by his version of that conversation, and has at least as good a claim to being 100% trustworthy as Assange does.

I agree with you on that -- I don't consider either of them to be 100% trustworthy.

Could Assange be an anti-semite? He could be. If he were outted as such by something verifiable and clear, the two tweets and phone discussion report would be seen as fitting a pattern. But on the face of it, given that there are alternative explanations, and given that they are tiny slivers of the body of Assange's public statements (or alleged public statements, in the Hislop conversation case) over a decade, those few items simply aren't sufficient.

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

 

[Ruhail]

On 24/10/2016 at 3:42 PM, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

 

Whats your point? The emails got released in big dumps which get sorted through as a batch each day they're not tweeted about the moment they're released. Other people can go through them themselves before they say anything. It happened with the Sony emails.

[Squab]

"Truth is treason in an empire of lies" is as relevant as ever.