Harry’s Place have had the last laugh in the Jenna Delich saga. After reporting that the Sheffield academic had linked to David Duke’s website on the UCU activist list, they were threatened with a vexatious lawsuit and had their site taken down for a couple of days. The threat of a libel case evidently failed when she admitted to actually posting to the website. That numerous blogs from across the spectrum jumped all over the the case and disseminated the information far further than it would otherwise have gone may have helped as well (and it’s quite nice to read something saying “Even the Tory, Benjamin Gray, gets it”). The Samizdat is alive and well.
After its restoration other activists jumped to her defence claiming that while the article itself was indeed hosted on the website of a former KKK leader, the article itself was not racist. Having been rather discredited on that front, pointing out that the article claimed that Jews control the media and was penned by someone who thought 9/11 was perpetrated by Mossad, the UCU activists retreated to the next barricade. Jenna Delich, we were told, was not someone who happened to dabble in anti-semitic conspiracy theories, but a rather credulous individual who had no idea what she was linking to and did not have a racist bone in her body.
This, I argued at the time, does not really stand up to criticism. A lecturer on education management ought to have some basic understanding of checking sources for reliability. The idea however that this was a failure to perform some academic due diligence on a source further diminishes upon Harry’s latest story. Delich did not simply post to a single conspiracy theorist’s article absent-mindedly, she in fact has prior form on this issue. In May this year she posted a link to another article, on another website, by another author, which claims “the initiating 9/11 atrocity was actually committed by the US CIA and Israeli Mossad in the interests of US and Zionist hegemony”.
Can we please stop pretending that she made an innocent mistake? To, on two separate occasions, link to articles with broadly similar anti-semitic conspiracy theorist views is not negligence or absent-mindedness.
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