A number of pro Iraq War bloogers have started commenting more or less full time on this blog for the last few weeks. If you look through a number of comments threads, you will see that angrysoba and Larry from St Louis, for example, have actually spent more time on this blog in the last couple of weeks than I have.
When they first appeared, I made a point of saying that free speech is the basic rule of this blog, and they were welcome.
But increasingly angrysoba, Larry from St Louis, and alan campbell are not putting any rational argument about the whole string of vital, evidential posts on Iraq that prompted their appearance. Instead they seek to provoke commenters into discussing, 9/11, and attempt to provoke anti-semitic commenters to inhabit the blog.
For example, in the post about Lord Goldsmith below, at 11.47am Alan Campbell posted:
“And not only is he not an expert in international law, he’s looking particularly Jewish, ‘eh lads?”
Nothing in my post or in any of the comments had made any inference at all about Goldsmith’s ethnic origin, of which I know nothing and which is in any case completely irrelevant.
Similarly Larry from St Louis at 8.56pm on the thread “Government Ban Protest Outside Blair Iraq Hearing” posted
Still waiting on Craig to delete references to the Protocols …
on a thread where the only nutter wittering on about the Protocols of Zion was Larry.
The object of these interventions is to provoke anti-semites and others to comment on this blogsite. On other sites around the blogosphere, the same individuals then post entries and comments saying
“Ignore Craig Murray’s articles, his site is inhabited by 9/11 truthers, green lizards and anti-semites”, with an inference, or sometimes direct accusation, that I hold those views myself.
The objective of the exercise is to reduce public belief in my evidential postings on extraordinary rendition, Iraq and Afghanistan.
I am not positing that the individuals involved are anything other than individuals with an amazing amount of time on their hands and a fervent attachment to the “War on Terror”.
I remain fundamentally committed to free speech. Contrary comments from all angles remain welcome here. I don’t read all comments – it would be a full time job – but I will knock out racism where I come across it. You can bring it to my attention by email. The only views which are mine are those I post myself.
We have some regular commenters who regularly take an opposite view to me, and who remain welcome – Eddie for one is a good example. Eddie does argue about the posting in question and does not routinely try to provoke strange views. But I will be much more ruthless in deleting off topic comment.
Larry, I for one do not think you are a secret agent.
Secret agents get time off, while you are here all the time.
What I think you are is an over weight stay at home with too much time on your hands. There are many rightwing/Zionist organisations full of people like you. They are told to post of forums like this to do exactly what you and angry have been doing. And you are doing a very good job of it, because you too have diverted nearly every thread off topic.
Eddie,
there’s another reason that there were so many marching that day, who hadn’t marched for the other atrocities you mention. It was OUR GOVERNMENT that we were trying to influence. We were saying, “Not in our name!”, because we were voters who were ignored. You malign many people if you claim that they don’t care.
You often tell people to get involved. But by that, you mean “join the Labour Party”, don’t you?
Arsalan,
you make me laugh more and more. But be fair to Larry, this time he was getting us back ON topic! He’s slow to respond because he’s filling out the on-line PsiOps application form. If he sites his former posts, he may get back-pay!
Arsalan, I’m quite physically fit, thanks.
Clark, those PDFs don’t say what you think they say! But – seriously – thanks for the advice! Work has been a bit slow for me, but there’s nothing I could offer in respect of that application.
TonyOpmoc,
I not only dismissed it, I deleted it.
A few years ago I attended a concert given in Glasgow by Inti Illimani. This folk group were unable to return to Chile after the CIA sponsored coup which removed Allende (are we allowed to mention that 9/11?). The concert was in memory of Victor Jara, the singer/songwriter abducted, tortured and murdered by the Pinochet regime. It was a attended by a number of bigwigs from New Labour – Donald Dewar was there, at that time Scottish First Minister – and sundry Labour luvvies such as Robbie Coltrane.
At the interval a lady appeared on the platform to read a message from, of all people, Gordon Brown. He wished to claim credit for sheltering Inti during their exile (they were in fact supported by guitarists Paco Pe?a and John Williamson).
There was a degree of heckling from the audience, and some very blank looks from Inti: understandably, as this was only a few days after Jack Straw had refused to extradite Pinochet to Spain to stand trial for crimes against humanity. In the circumstances, Brown’s chutzpah was quite staggering. Handed the microphone to make a reply, a member of Inti said simply ‘Democracy has missed an opporunity – there will be other opportunities.’ But there were no other opportunities – Pinochet lived out his remaining days in comfort and died in bed.
The point of all that being – I really cannot see Blair, Brown, Hoon, Straw or anyone else facing a jury for war crimes. If Pinochet can walk, anyone can.
Larry,
I’m having a little trouble with my brain here, you’d best tell me what I think the PDFs say.
writerman you have the wrong Powell. The one referred to above is Jonathan Powell, not Colin Powell. Saddam did not get the bulk of his weapons from the West I assure you. That is another canard.
Clark our government had influence in the other countries I mentioned but no one marched although some protested that we should not intervene and allow people like Milosevic do whatever he wanted to the Muslims of Bosnia. Major, Rifkind and Hurd and the FCO have a lot to answer for. In the long term, I think it was right to stand up to Milosevic, don’t you?
Eddie,
I don’t want anyone to swing from trees. Not even Blair or Straw. That is one reason I am not like them. They caused a huge number of people to die.
Please read the Catholic Orangemen of Togo for an alternative view of Sierra Leone from someone who was in the middle of it.
Clark, perhaps I missed something (I just looked at the PDFs very quickly), but this program seems to merely be a matter of setting up “two and no more than twelve websites” to support U.S./perhaps NATO policy.
This does creep me out a bit. However, did this come to any fruition.
What I don’t see is the suggestion that the U.S. gov’t is paying people to inhabit other websites. Isn’t that what you’re suggesting? Where is that in the document?
Eddie,
I’m sorry, that was before I started to follow events as closely as I do now.
Saddam got SOME of his weapons from the west. You mentioned the Dutch yourself, though I suppose they’re less “western”.
Craig,
That is fair enough. It’s your blog, and that is exactly what I expected you to do. I will post it somewhere else instead.
It wasn’t racist though, and neither was it off-topic.
If it had been on another thread, then I would have considered your action completely appropriate.
I am glad you have made such a rapid recovery. We went to see an old Jewish friend today. He had a massive breakdown at the age of 69, and it has taken him nearly a year to make a full recovery.
He is a manic depressive.
Tony
Larry,
I haven’t read the PDFs yet. But the budget is over ten million dollars (Register article), and there’s the Sunstein article, so it doesn’t seem that much of a stretch. Really, though, I was just having a joke.
Craig
Maybe you just need to change your blogger software stuff so nutcases get no responses.
DtP
Craig did you delete one of my fish posts or did I forget to press post?
Eddie you keep bringing up Bosnia. What I remember from that war was the arms embargo. And Embargo placed only on the Muslims. What else I remember was the safe havens. In which Muslims were told to lay down what few weapons they had, and then the UN not only invited the Serbs in, but also helped the Serbs seprate males 15 and above to kill.
That is what I remember from your so called good intervention.
And finally when the Muslims started winning, the west said, game over, so as to let the Serbs keep all they had obtained from the genocide.
Oh yes, And I also remember all the tanks the British gave to the Serbs everytime with the excuse that the Serbs had captured them.
Clark, Sunstein was an academic when that program was put in place by the Pentagon, so you really must be just having a joke.
Dick the Prick,
The most effective way of getting rid of nutcases like myself, is not to delete their posts completely, but only make them visible to themselves on their own IP address (or geographical area of IP addresses)
Then they can quite happily talk to themselves, thinking that the entire World is reading their comments, when in fact they can only read it themselves.
This is actually very easy to do, by various techniques.
Of course it prevents free speech, but what the hell. If you are running a blog, the chances are you only want to read and promote the views of people who agree with your point of view.
Just like Newspaper editors do.
Tony
Anno
The only solution that will work is the reunification of Muslim lands. The re-establishment of the Khilafah.
Unlike Craig I wouldn’t mind if Jack and Blair were tried for treason and hung. But I don’t think it would make any difference because they would be replaced by men just like themselves.
Even if the UK and America suddenly just vanished, or disintegrated in to their individual states. If they suddenly embarrassed pacifism or declared that they will never send their troops outside of their boarders.
None of it will make difference, because other nations will continue where they left off.
The cause of the invasions, isn’t Blair, Bush Straw and their evil, it is our own weakness and disunity. It is the pathetic puppet states that the Muslims world has been carved in to. So the only way to stop these invasions is reunification.
Message from Craig:
“Ramp back on the bollocks tungsten!”
Seriously though I agree with you, tungsten.Craig has allowed himself to be cowed by the prevailing structure of taboos around race.
The idea that a peculiarly successful ethnic group over centuries might have a lot to teach us re-group evolutionary strategy is taboo evidently.To even draw attention to their success across the professions is to court the prospect of professional suicide at the hands of the cultural establishment.
Who can blame Craig for being intimidated? He understandably doesn’t want to dump several status points down the toilet by encouraging the suspicion that the blog endorses any incorrect positions on race.
Without wanting to ingratiate myself with the bloke,I feel a deal of sympathy for his position.I’m probably not doing him any favours whatever by saying so,though!
Still at the risk of Craig being ultimately devoured by the defamers and disinformationists who will accuse him of allowing anti-semites to infest his blog I think it’s important as you say that we approach the whole topic of race in a far more honest and grown-up fashion.
In a recent piece at jewcycom. John Derbyshire noted how ethnic identification becomes salient according to the situation in which individuals finds themselves.
My white English ethnic identification would not be particularly salient were I in a bar full of white English soccer hooligans.I would be less aware of this group membership than my membership in the group called,”bookish types who dislike physical violence and have little interest in sport!”
It’s the same with Sir Goldsmith.As Derbyshire puts it,membership in the group,”Jewish people” must be something every Jew is aware of at least some of the time,even if it is only rarely his salient group identification.Jewishness is,after all as group identifications go-contra “white English” for example-exceptionally well defined and historically rooted.
Assimilated Jews in Germany likewise de-Judaized themselves to the point of converting to Christianity in large numbers during the 1820s.In a number of cases this was a cryptic assimilative strategy to gain advancement in the professions.Continued practice of Judaism may,as in the case of the Sephardi from Iberia,have followed the “dry baptisms” that often took place.
Again the Russian Jews who de-Judaized themselves as they moved from the Pale into metropolitan Russia to become key group players in the Bolshevik Revolution and Soviet system rediscovered the Jewishness they’d sloughed off when Hitler invaded in 1941!
What Craig and the cultural establishment peddle is the notion that all these racial identifications with their varying degrees of situationally-based salience are but figments of the imagination.Relics of a former barbarous era made entirely anachronistic in current circumstances.
The discussion would be better informed if we looked at humanity as it is rather than at what we’d like it to be.Utter indifference to group identity is not something we should expect of all humans in all situations.
The denial of human nature in the case of Goldsmith at the time he decided the Iraq was “legal” in international law advances our understanding of why he made his decision not one jot.
The human affinity for group allegiance does not suddenly disappear when one decides on such matters as war.Goldsmith did not,I would submit become entirely,as if by magic,disinterested in the perceived interests of his group affiliation.We may indeed hazard that such a situation would render his group identification all the more salient.
The bloodless,deracinated,group-indifferent tabula rasa,omnisympathetic creature promoted by the PC brigade is not even recognisably human it’s a figment of their imagination.
As Derbyshire sums it up,the PC brigade are-for all their pretensions otherwise-human!Their lofty pretensions to have risen high above us group-identifying lesser beings when they decide whether millions of people should live or die are just,a particularly obnoxious form of in-group status-striving.
Derbyshire’s adult evaluation of the question of group affiliation is @jewcy.com.
The piece is titled:Be Nice Or We’ll Crush You:Criticizing Jews Is Professional Suicide.
Haven’t angri,Larry and the gamers warned Craig about that too?
Arsalan you are right that we did nothing to protect the muslims of Bosnia under a Tory government. Srebrenica was in 1995, Blair was elected in 1997. It was only Blair who stood up to Milosevic after 1997, the tories appeased him.
For Heavens sake, Craig was just making a case for staying on topic and being reasonable, not espousing some ultra-PC nonsense. But of course a few people saw that as an opportunity to associate him with a radical view, and repost more despicable propaganda.
These rhetorical distortions are more conspicuous than the authors realise. You may not be agents provocateurs, but you’re every bit as disruptive. Please stop wrecking the discussions for those us trying to follow the political issues.
Apostate,
I don’t know whether or not I agree with what you have just posted, but as it probably took you around 10 minutes to write it, I thought I would copy and paste it to my own PC, so I can read it at my leisure.
What I posted mentioned the words jews and eskimos. It was in no way racist, but it explored the possibility that racism may in fact exist in powerful groups. It took me 20 minutes to write it, and it was deleted within what I thought was a very few minutes.
I was impressed at the speed, but not in the tolerance of the expression of an alternative point of view.
I am in no way convinced that your views are wrong or even tribal, let alone racist, but I would like a chance to read them before they are deleted.
But as you point out, some groups have far too much influence and power, such that if you even point it out, you are liable to be vociferously attacked, and even worse.
Some people complain so much that it is obvious they are trying to suppress some evil from within their own tribal grouping.
Tony
Eddie,
as I said, I know next to nothing of this. But I do know that back at the beginning with Labour, we had Robin Cook, and his “Ethical Foreign Policy”; did this make a difference?
As a general principle, I find that “first terms” of a new political party tend to be the best. As time goes on, the entrenched party seems to become arrogant and dangerous.
@ Rob Lewis
Regarding the chemical attack on Iraqi Kurds at Halabja in March 1988, are you aware of this piece of research from (sorely missed) Ed Teague (Postman Patel):http://www.kurdi.dk/artikler/edward%20teague.htm ?
Seeing mention of slashdot software above, I remember suggesting the same course of action to Craig a while back. I have now changed my mind. Slashdot permits all posts, but allows readers to weight them. Over time people who are clearly trolls can see that their ratings are so low that few people are reading their posts, and their game loses its charm.
So Slashdot allows the reader to filter out noise, but part of the agenda of the trollers here is to accuse Craig of running a blog containing anti-semitism, extreme rightism, extreme leftism and telling-the-truth-ism (the last apparently the worst of all). They ensure that these allegations will stick by the simple expedient of placing such material on the blog themselves. Slashdot will excuse us from reading it, but it is still there, and so their slanders will continue.
I now think that the better option is moderation – vetting posts before publishing them. Of course this is an admin overhead, but the work can be shared – I am one of a number of moderators on another blog and I rarely have much to do. Those who post should be supplying a valid email address and where posts are declined an explanation can be given. If Craig has enough volunteers whom he trusts, all he need do himself is make an occasional check to ensure that he agrees with the modding taking place, or he can supply an email address where anyone refused a posting can appeal.
Arsalan, lucky you! Give my regards to the Admiral! And the fish.
Eddie,
have you ever played with the bit of maths called “The Logistic Difference Equation”?
new x=rx(1-x) …and iterate
Start with a value of x between 0 and 1. You’ll find the most interesting values of r lie between 3 and 4. Don’t let it get above 4…
Let us not forget…
http://tinyurl.com/yuv62m
logos,
The title of this thread is Agents Provocateurs.
Are you suggesting that such people are completely independent individuals?
If the title of this thread was for example
Lord Goldsmith’s Demeanour
or
Government Ban Protest Outside Blair Iraq Hearing
Then posting a view that Agents Provocateurs may in fact be tribal and racial, would not be relevent.
Here I believe it is.
To imply that anyone who is prepared to write about such issues is necessarily racist or tribal is incredibly ignorant. They may be tribal or racial, or they maybe attempting to discuss the issue totally objectively.
I completely understand Craig’s point of view of Agents Provocateurs dragging the important issues of this week off topic, so if he wants to avoid off topic issues and just concentrate on the issues of this week, then maybe he should delete this entire thread.
Its his blog.
Tony