The Guardian hit a new low in Amelia Hill’s report on Julian Assange’s appearance at the Oxford Union. Hill moved beyond propaganda to downright lies.
This is easy to show. Read through Hill’s “report”. Then zip to 20 minutes and 55 seconds of the recording of Assange speaking at the event Hill misreports, and simply listen to the applause from the Oxford Union after Assange stops speaking.
Just that hearty applause is sufficient to show that the entire thrust and argument of Amelia Hill’s article moves beyong distortion or misreprentation – in themselves dreadful sins in a journalist – and into the field of outright lies. Her entire piece is intended to give the impression that the event was a failure and the audience were hostile to Assange. That is completely untrue.
Much of what Hill wrote is not journalism at all. What does this actually mean?
“His critics were reasoned, those who queued for over an hour in the snow to hear him speak were thoughtful. It was Julian Assange – the man at the centre of controversy – who refused to be gracious.”
Hill manages to quote five full sentences of the organiser of the anti-Assange demonstration (which I counted at 37 people) while giving us not one single sentence of Assange’s twenty minute address. Nor a single sentence of Tom Fingar, the senior US security official who was receiving the Sam Adams award. Even more remarkably, all three students Hill could find to interview were hostile to Assange. In a hall of 450 students who applauded Assange enthusiastically and many of whom crowded round to shake my hand after the event, Hill was apparently unable to find a single person who did not share the Rusbridger line on Julian Assange.
Hill is not a journalist – she is a pathetic grovelling lickspittle who should be deeply, deeply ashamed.
Here is the answer to the question about cyber-terrorism of which Amelia Hill writes:
“A question about cyber-terrorism was greeted with verbose warmth”
As you can see, Assange’s answer is serious, detailed, thoughtful and not patronising to the student. Hill’s characterisation – again without giving a word of Assange’s actual answer – is not one that could genuinely be maintained. Can anybody – and I mean this as a real question – can anybody look at that answer and believe that “Verbose warmth” is a fair and reasonable way to communicate what had been said to an audience who had not seen it? Or is it just an appalling piece of hostile propaganda by Hill?
The night before Assange’s contribution at the union, John Bolton had been there as guest speaker. John Bolton is a war criminal whose actions deliberately and directly contributed to the launching of an illegal war which killed hundreds of thousands of people. Yet there had not been one single Oxford student picketing the hosting of John Bolton, and Amelia Hill did not turn up to vilify him. My main contribution to the Sam Adams event was to point to this as an example of the way people are manipulated by the mainstream media into adopting seriously warped moral values.
Amelia Hill is one of the warpers, the distorters of reality. The Guardian calls her a “Special Investigative Correspondent.” She is actually a degraded purveyor of lies on behalf of the establishment. Sickening.
Just had a little look at the Wikileaks website – any thoughts as to why it has so few leaks relating to Russia and none at all relating to before 2008? Is it beacuse Russia is well known for being a free and open society led by leaders with a devotion to a free press and freedom of speech?
Just a hint to St Julian try not to upset your current friend and paymaster.
Clark
I’m biting my tongue. If the Brontes can use a dash to separate sentences which are linked – I don’t think that it is the worst grammatical crime in the world, and it actually works quite well in blogs.
I agree that human compassion would be one of the last things which motivate St Mary’s positions and posts. Rather the opposite, I should guess.
This blog is supposed to be the third most popular political blog in the UK, or something like that. That implies that it has a lot of readers. But there is really only a handful of prolific posters – John Goss, Arbed, Villager, Fred, Nevermind, Komodo, Mark Golding, dear old woffly Ben Franklin, St Mary of the Righteous Indignation and the Good News and a couple of others, all busily reinforcing each other and falling into a panic when someone dares to pull them up short.
I often wonder what the silent majority of readers think about the vocal minority of Eminences. They would be forgiven, I think, if they felt that they were listening a play staged by the inmates of the local lunatic asylum.
Res Diss, don’t try to read my mind. Stick to reading your daily newspapers.
I hardly needed to read about JK’s (for a moment i though you were talking about Jiddu Krishnamurti who i’d linked earlier) background, which i’m all too familiar with and happen to know some of her siblings. But thats by-the-by. Be clear that Jemima would have been a nobody if she wasn’t Goldsmith’s daughter. But because she is, she is an opportunist who likes to be seen in the right places at the right time. That is her guiding light, not her confused morals. She is not altogether naive as i had alluded earlier, even though she comes across that way she has her petty diffused society agenda. I commend her to you–go for it.
By the way why do you keep misusing the word cult (The word cult in current popular usage usually refers to a new religious movement or other group whose beliefs or practices are considered abnormal or bizarre by the larger society.)
I see you are deliberately trying to obfuscate the obvious flaws in the legal case which because of your heavy conditioning you are unable to get your head around in an impartial way. Please don’t treat this as an invitation to debate the matter for i have neither the time nor the patience to educate you. At any rate Arbed is far better than me in its articulation. You can read thru the earlier threads and ‘catch-up’. Also read her comments to Jk at the NS.
Bottom line Assange has a right to self-preservation–he might have been naive when he started his project. He surely isn’t now. Despite all your clambering, i can tell you now he is not about to embark for the US via Sweden or otherwise, in the near future. And if Sweden can’t give him that assurance, sleep well knowing Ecuador can and has. Good for them.
So toddle pip again.
Res Diss, And as regards your St Julian jibes i suggested to you y’day that you aim your sights to grow a few inches taller. It undercuts the otherwise decent tone you try to cloak yourself with I’m getting the feeling though that in your senility, its perhaps a little too late.
Villager @ 11:59
Res deftly moved the goal post on Assange/Sweden and thinks Globalists are disorganized. Hope so. Thanks for taking the helm.
Babbler, what would you know about grace, compassion, tactfulness and that sort of thing. You’re here as a failed climber, an empty vessel. I figured you out, it took some time because of your guise of your professorial attitude. But having stripped you, i assure you there is no panic in our reality check. Just a view of a noisy Babbler. I think the silent majority, who need not your forgiveness of readers have amply seen that. In fact you need to ask them for their forgiveness for the rubbish you write here.
Btw, the word is waffly not woffly. I thought with your special Belgian connections you “would happen to know”, Professor Kuku.
Habakuk you wouldn’t recognise human compassio if it hit you between the eyes. I tried to engage you in a deep discussion on the state of wisdom in the world. You were honest enough to confess you were out of your depth and just a simple troll. That self-knowledge would normally be a good place to start, but you are disingenuous to your core. Borne out by the widely held view here that you are here to disrupt. We have nothing, NOT ONE THING, to learn from you–the record is there. This is only the 3rd most popular blog–time for you to move on to the next, don’t you think?
Classifying classified mania Ben and worryingl – $1M fine plus 30yrs in the rack if you SQL inject and download.
Valued indeed Villager and salute – Thank-you
Yes Mary amusing the three trolls coalesced in a band. Here they are reminding us that we are not alone and reassuring us they are here to stay….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5r2KoUJ5mM
—-
Thank you Ben and Mark. Pleasure.
Well there we have it from chief troll himself; this Blog is being targeted because it’s the third most popular political blog in the UK. Please note this Clark, and then you will understand why I fear that your ceaseless, polite, bending over backwards approach, in trying to reason with the unreasonables is always ultimately going to be fruitless; Personally I prefer not to waste my time with such people, however when I do feel that I have to engage, I much prefer to deliver direct home truths in whack-a-mole style !
I know that I shouldn’t be surprised at just how shameless these people are, but for Resident Dissident to have the gall to post again, after exposing himself as cowardly hypocrite by his inability to answer the simple question of whetever if in the same situation as Assange, ie real risk of being shipped to a decades long stay at a US hell hole prison, if it were possible would he not also seek to avoid this by seeking sanctuary/asylum , well even the phrase beyond chutzpah seems inadequate; he, just like all the other anti-Assange hypocrites who demand that Assange should risk this by going to Sweden, are just too shameless for words, but at least it’s now on public display, so everybody here knows their self-righteous “face the music” arguments, are based on nothing more than dishonest cant.
Touching song on compassion. Johnny Cash, a good Christian, like our Babbler, except the latter seems to have a chip on his shoulder, without having carried a guitar…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kR5920Rapds
And another contemporary version by his disciple Kristofferson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCXK3-Hw4bo
Lovely Villager. Have you ever read about Johnny Cash’s poverty stricken childhood and the tragedy of his brother’s death?
I think the choice of avatar used above says a lot and is very appropriate.
http://1.gravatar.com/avatar/fc9ef052fa7d9015c61bd884b63b333f?s=75&d=http%3A%2F%2F1.gravatar.com%2Favatar%2Fad516503a11cd5ca435acc9bb6523536%3Fs%3D75&r=PG
Thanks Villager, a beautiful little song, great in both versions; compassion, an alien anathema concept to the powerful vested interests that dominate our societies, may one day, be the only thing that saves us as a species.
Resident dissident; 7 Feb, 11:05 pm:
I have some thoughts on this, and some related thoughts, too:
(0) Wikileaks don’t break security and take material. Wikileaks is a merely a publisher. They shouldn’t be held responsible for not publishing material that hasn’t been leaked to them. Resident dissident, I’ve seen this fallacy that you’re promoting before, from the crowd that claim that Wikileaks must be an Israeli operation, because they haven’t published enough dirt about Israel. It is a fundamentally flawed criticism, because it requires Wikileaks to disprove a negative.
(1) In light of point (0), Wikileaks was started mostly by speakers of English, but no speakers of Russian that I know of. Most news about Wikileaks has been in English. I don’t know how much publicity there has been in Russian, but it is likely to have been less, especially in Russia itself, considering the tighter, more direct control of news media there. There will also be more fear inhibiting potential whistleblowers in Russia, where people are often simply killed if they upset certain powerful entities. These factors will have reduced Russian public awareness of Wikileaks, so Wikileaks would be less likely to receive leaked Russian material.
(2) Sorry, this is very mundane. The Afghan War leaks, the Iraq leaks, and Cablegate together constitute a huge body of material, utterly unprecedented. The Russian material inevitably looks tiny by comparison. But there is some:
http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Category:Russia
http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Category:Russian_Federation
Resident dissident, why did you feel the need to further smear Assange for appearing on Russia Today? Do you feel that the “Western” corporate media is mostly unbiased? Much of the UK and US media, for instance, supported and even campaigned for the 2003 Iraq war, which was so thorough based upon lies. Would you also criticise public figures for writing for The Guardian, or appearing on the BBC?
The problem with doing publicity is that whoever does it has to go through large media organisations to get widespread coverage, and large media organisations, by virtue of their control over the dissemination of information, are always hubs of power.
Assange did the right thing by going to a variety of media organisations. The Western corporate media distributed Wikileaks material with one slant, the Russian state broadcaster with another. That gives the public the opportunity of a less biased overview, by examining contrasting intermediary sources.
Clark
I think you might also wish to confirm that there is no shortage of Russian hackers. Still doesn’t explain why Wikileaks appears to have stopped publishing stuff from Russia after 2008 – they have a reasonable amount from before then. For some reason they have now have no problem in finding stuff on Sweden.
Assange doesn’t just appear on RT – he is paid by them and presents programmes on their behalf. And if you really want to induce vomit just look at his interview of Nasrallah.
It is important to recognise that Wikileaks is a joint leak-publishing and publicity organisation. It is the publicity that has really incited the anger of the powerful. Other organisations that publish leaks, such as Cryptome, have not been criticised nearly so much.
Consider. Someone publishes, but doesn’t publicise, stuff that powerful parties don’t want widely known. The powerful parties are thus presented with a difficult choice. If they attack the publisher they draw attention to the leaked material, which has almost certainly already been copied elsewhere; they can’t suppress it. If they don’t attack, the material continues to sit there, where it might “go viral” at any time.
I believe that this is why we’re seeing political forces and corporate media escalating and exaggerating any possible criticism of Julian Assange, especially the sexual allegations. It is the best strategy available to them. It simultaneously “shoots the messenger”, and draws attention away from the message.
Resident dissident, yes, there are lots of hackers in Russia. I expect you make the common corporate media error of using “hacker” when you mean “cracker”, but yes, there are a lot crackers, too. But what matters is the number of whistleblowers and leakers, like Daniel Ellsberg and Bradley Manning.
People are poor in Russia. Nearly all Russian cracking, and some of the nastier hacking (such as writing malware) is financially driven. The sort of cracking in order to leak, such as that from Anonymous, for instance, is essentially a luxury available to better-off Westerners. I suspect that Russian crackers are busy earning a crust.
Resident dissident, people who appear in the Western corporate media are also paid.
Sorry, I can’t watch that video at present, unless you can point me to a version in a format other than Adobe Flash.
Do you regard the Western corporate media as essentially unbiased?
Resident dissident, since I can’t see the video, please clarify who you mean by “Nasrallah”. I searched on Wikipedia and ended up on a disambiguation page.
“Dissident to have the gall to post again, after exposing himself as cowardly hypocrite by his inability to answer the simple question of whetever if in the same situation as Assange, ie real risk of being shipped to a decades long stay at a US hell hole prison, if it were possible would he not also seek to avoid this by seeking sanctuary/asylum”
Not answered – (i) because you are incapable of asking politely with ad hominems and (ii) I have have already made it clear that if falsely accused of rape I would want to use the opportunity provided to clear my name. You should also note that whatever you might say it would proably be pretty difficult for the US to get a prosecution of a whistleblower such as Assange in the US – and that view is based on what Greenwald said about the Thomas Drake case.
Are you the cretin that compared the US Prison system to the Russian GULAG or was it another one? Until that difference is understood it is somewhat difficult to have any form of rational debate about the rights and wrongs of the US legal system.
Clark
Hassan NAsrallah the leader of Hezbollah – google Assange Nasrallah – comes up at the top with link to YouTube. Also on the RT website.
resident dissident, 8 Feb, 10:45 am
I agree that Wikileaks have a strong incentive to leak stuff from Sweden at present. It’s known as self-preservation.
But I’m pretty sure that there is also a lot of leaking going on in Sweden; there are certainly a lot of activists making Freedom of Information requests. There is also the Pirate Party and all the people associated with that. And a lot of Swedes are very dissatisfied with their legal system at present. Just go and read some of the articles at Rixstep.
Maybe Wikileaks has some ulterior motive regarding Russia at present. Maybe they just can’t handle the level of threat, what with the pressure on their founder and publicist for the last two years.
If you want better performance from Wikileaks, you could consider helping me and my “cult” to try and get the government / corporate media dogs off Assange.
resident dissident, have you ever seen Hassan Nasrallah interviewed by the Western corporate media?
Clark
Quite a lot of people in Russia – but there is a substantial minority who are very far from being so, which is the real nub of the problem there. That said the general level of education is very far from the Third World and there are plenty who can and are capable of expressing dissent – perhaps you should look up the protests when Putin rigged his election. I would recommend Masha Gessen’s recent book if you want the scales lifted from your eyes.
(Quite a lot of people in Russia) are poor – in last post
(with)out (ad hominems) – in post to Villager
plus probably other typos
Clark
Do you believe any media should give airtime to those who are anti-semitic, continually engage in Holocaust denial and support acts of terrorism ( I acknowledge that Nasrallah has condemned some acts of Terrorism such as 9/11)?
And even if they were to do so, I would expect them to be rather more challenging than Assange in his interview.