Victory 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.
Sphere: Related ContentAcademics Against Free Speech?
The bloggers over at Harry’s Place have been forced offline after a threatened libel lawsuit.
If you don’t know already, Britain has some of the most outmoded and ridiculous libel laws in the world. They apply to anything that could possibly have been read by a British citizen, and work on the presumption of guilt. There isn’t even a protection against public-interest criticism. They have been used for years to silence and intimidate critics, and they’re frequently used against the careless blogger. As a result, Britain has a booming industry in “libel tourism” where non-British citizens use British courts to sue non-British citizens.
You would think that an academic would consider themselves above such methods, but apparently not in the form of Jenna Delich, who posted a link to the website of former KKK leader David Duke, and is now apparently suing Harry’s Place for reporting it.
Here’s what Harry’s Place have to say.
Harry’s Place may be removed (or rather have it’s DNS disabled) after a ‘complaint’ to the company that our domain name is registered with.
We assume after threats were made on the weekend that this ‘complaint’ originates from Jenna Delich or her supporters.
Though we have not yet seen the complaint submitted, we assume it runs along the lines that pointing out that Ms Delich linked to the website of a known neo-Nazi figure and former Ku Klux Klan leader is defamatory.
This is extraordinary since Ms Delich has not denied that she circulated links to David Dukes website. There would be no point since the evidence is in the public domain.
Nevertheless, a malicious complaint has been made to the company hosting our DNS.
We would like to assure readers of Harry’s Place that we are doing everything we can to prevent a disruption, but that - of course - we will not concede any ground. We have posted nothing defamatory, and we stand by the information we have supplied.
ISPs often run scared of UK libel law and malicious complaints are thus common. Sadly, it is a well known - and usually successful - way of censoring websites which publish truths that they’d rather not be generally known.
We ask our readers and supporters in the meantime to publish this information as widely as possible. The disgraceful tactic of dishonest and malicious complaining should not be allowed to succeed.
Those on the UCU list, please also make this know there.
Please spread the word.
If we go down, email us at harryblog at gee mail dot com for updates.
I haven’t linked to the material myself as I don’t have the inclination to fight a libel case. You can find the original post here.
Sphere: Related Content
