Delich Further Discredited
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.
Sphere: Related ContentVictory of Sorts
Harry’s Place is back up and Jenna Delich has been removed from the UCU activist list.
This is obviously a step in the right direction, but to read some of the responses you start to realise just how ingrained the anti-semitic attitude of some of the boycott campaigners is. Here are some prize picks:
Diarmuid Fogarty
the fact that the link was actually to a webpage whereupon was published an article that was not at all racist
Sue Blackwell
Jenna did not post a racist article nor even a link to one. She posted a link to a perfectly reasonable article
This being an article that insists that Jews control the media and are psychopathic oligarchs who have no qualms killing unarmed women and children. The author himself believe that the Madrid Bombings were a Mossad Plot.
“Yet the Israeli government does a very good job of convincing the whole world that it is the victim in the conflict. How can this be? Israeli control of the press? Could that ubiquitous “conspiracy theory” actually be closer to a conspiracy fact?”
If that statement is “perfectly reasonable” then either you haven’t read it, or you are an anti-Semite. The person on Engage who defended its author started ranting about Jews poisoning wells.
The Right knows perfectly well that we have had to contend with the racists in our ranks, as the likes of UCU and the NUS will never fail to remind us. It is however absolutely galling for the Left to do this while burying its head in the sand about the racism on their side. Racism is not an issue of where you lie on the political spectrum, but your attitudes towards other people. It’s one thing to criticise the policies of the Israeli government, quite another to extrapolate such attitudes to an entire country and the demographic upon which it is based despite having no allegiance.
At least this episode has forced UCU to acknowledge that some of their activists are racists. This is not the last we will hear of this business, and hopefully it will gather enough momentum for UCU to take the issue seriously. I fear however that that may just be wishful thinking.
Sphere: Related ContentUpdate on Harry’s Place
It seems that Jenna Delich has actually admitted to posting the link to David Duke’s website, but denies having any knowledge of what the site was about. Any libel suit she cares to fight will be utterly nuts and counterproductive. If Harry’s Place’s lawyers use disclosure properly, some very nasty things about the UCU could come out. The theory now is that her supporters may have caught Harry’s Place out by pointing out their reporting of the post linked to a far-right site, which is often against a host’s Terms of Service.
For Delich to claim that she had no knowledge of the far-right links in this article, or to have not a shred of anti-semitic tendencies, is beyond belief.
First, she is of an academic background. According to her LinkedIn profile she went to a good university and teaches education management. It ought to follow that she understands the concept of checking a source for authenticity and reliability. A quick perusal of David Duke’s website is more than enough to see that the guy is a racist nutjob. There’s a prominent link to a book called “Jewish Supremacism” in the article, if that was not enough. If you google search him his Wikipedia page appears before his website, where it clearly states in its first sentence that he is a former KKK member. One would think that Delich’s chosen career of teaching how to teach would involve a basic understanding of checking a source. If she claims she did not then she is either incompetent or a liar.
More importantly however is her failure to even question the contents of the article. That she claims “No comment necessary. The facts are speaking for themselves”, means that she would have accepted the contents of the article without demur. That the article repeatedly refers to a Jewish conspiracy to control and manipulate the media ought to set off alarm bells. That it did not suggests that Delich’s supposed “anti-Zionism” is in fact rather closer to anti-Semitism than she has led herself to believe.
In her admittance of linking to the site, she goes on to write that “none are saying that Joe Quinn (the author of the article) is a racist or anti-semitist [sic], and the article is quite interesting”. The only way you can draw that conclusion is if you close your eyes, cover your ears and shout very loudly. In various articles, Joe Quinn claims that Mossad perpetrated 9/11 and that Jews are “psychopaths” with a predisposition to bloodlust. If she does not consider this racist or anti-semitic, then you have that wonderful phrase “I’m not a racist, but….“.
I suppose she’ll claim that some of her best friends are Jews next.
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