Wednesday, January 18, 2006

How the Enemies of Free Speech Operate

How the Enemies of Free Speech Operate
Kurt Nimmo


As pointed out by a member of this list, the hate campaign directed against me -- or the "Joe Job" aspect of this scurrilous and hateful campaign (posting nasty articles, primarily on IndyMedia's open and unmoderated forums, using my name and that of my wife) -- can likely, in part, be traced back to an article I wrote early last year about one Dr. David Bukay, who teaches at the School of Political Science at the University of Haifa, Israel. It was posted on an IndyMedia site in the Netherlands:

Zionistische professor zaait haat
Kurt Nimmo - 03.02.2005 17:29

Volgens een Israelische professor moeten arabieren per definitie in het hoofd worden geschoten, wordt beweerd door zijn studenten.

"I received an interesting email this afternoon from an American Jewish woman. She claims that David Bukay of the Political Science department at Haifa University in Israel is using his post to advocate “racist expressions” directed against Arabs and Muslims. According to a student in the Philosophy Department at the university, Bukay supports “the killing Arabs only for being Arabs, claiming that they are criminals by their nature and recommending to humiliate Palestinians in front of cameras, spreading those pictures—and all this in a seminar, which is being classified by the University as a duty [compulsory] in their studies toward fulfillment of bachelor’s degree in the Department of Political Science.”

Bukay is not only a university professor, but also an author, editor, public speaker, and “his fields of specialization are,” according to the Ariel Center for Policy Research (ACPR), “the Arab-Israeli conflict; inter-Arab relations and the Palestinian question; international terrorism and fundamental Islam; theoretical issues and political applications in the Middle-East; Asad’s foreign policy towards Israel and Lebanon; the culture approach to understanding the Middle-East.” It should be noted that the ACPR counts as “Israel's Friends” several Congress critters, including Jim Saxon, Bill McCollum, and Tom DeLay. “Contributing Experts” include the Strausscons Frank J. Gaffney and Meyrav Wurmser, wife of David Wurmser, who is Principal Deputy Assistant to the Vice President for National Security Affairs in the Office of Vice President Dick Cheney.

Burkay, who teaches his students that Arabs must be “shot in their heads by a gun,” according to student mentioned above, hosted a round table discussion at the latest Jerusalem Summit, where Rep. Bob Beauprez (R-CO) and the Islamophobe Daniel Pipes also gave speeches. “Over 150 leading thinkers and statesmen from the US, Europe, Asia and Israel have convened at the 3-day Jerusalem Summit, (Nov 27-30th, 2004), at Jerusalem’s King David Hotel,” notes the Michael Cherney Foundation, a “humanitarian” organization founded after “the night of the heinous terrorist bombing outside the Dolphinarium Disco in Tel Aviv,” on June 1, 2001 (no mention here of the “heinous” terrorist bombings of Gaza by the IDF, killing far more than died outside of the Dolphinarium Disco).

Ironically—and appropriately, considering the agenda and philosophy of the people attending the Jerusalem Summit—the King David Hotel was the site of another terrorist bombing. On July 22, 1946, Irgun Tsvai-Leumi, a Zionist terrorist group, bombed the hotel, killing 92 Britons, Arabs, and Jews.

Irgun adopted the revisionist views of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the philosophical godfather of the Likud Party. Sort of a Zionist version of Hamas, Irgun bombed the British embassy in Rome, bombed a police station in Haifa, tossed grenades into a cafe in Jerusalem, killing dozens of people. Apparently unsatisfied with random terror attacks, Irgun joined up with another Zionist terror organization, the Stern gang, and attacked the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin, killing at least 107 civilians. “Neither Jewish morality nor Jewish tradition can negate the use of terror as a means of battle,” was the operating motto of the Stern gang—an assertion Osama bin Laden would likely agree with, if he were alive."

I was careful to attribute the accusation to an unnamed "American Jewish woman" and a "student in the Philosophy Department at the university" and then, as was my habit on the ADE blog, added commentary. The article also appeared on the Israeli IndyMedia site with the following prefatory comment I did not write: "If you listen to Zionists repeatedly putting their feet in their mouths, you gain a truly horrifying view of just how hateful the racist ideology called ZIONISM truly is."

Obviously, the accusation (and the incendiary prefatory comment) upset Mr. Bukay (or Bukai) and he accused me of libel. In his "The Image of Evil: On the Hideous Slander of Arab Students, Anti-Zionist Jews and the Scoop-Chasing Media," posted on the NATIV Online site, Bukay wrote the following:

[Bukay believes the "attack" against him] began with an article on the “Nana” website whose headline was: “Lecturer in Haifa University: Shoot All of the Arabs in the Head”, and continued with the same quotes, more or less, from the article in KolBo, continued a week later in a similar article on the Netvision website, which was translated into English several times on various websites, under the same headline, including two “investigative reports” by a known left-wing person, residing in the United States, named Kurt Nimmo, who characterizes Israel, “the outlaw state of Israel”. He is the cooperative friend of David Merhav, the same student who passed on the information and perhaps translated it into English. In addition, he published articles on various Internet sites: For example, , in which he analyzes phenomena of visions of colonialism and publicized a special investigative report about: Arabs “Must Be Shot in their Heads”, and recycles the slander again.

In fact, this is an issue Bukay should take up with Mr. Merhav, who wrote in a message following my article (an article I did not post) on the Dutch IndyMedia site:

"According to students, Bukay told, "The Arabs must be caught and shot in their heads by a gun. A building in which there are Arabs and Palestinians, must be exterminated".

Bukay wrote a research of the "threats" of the radical Islam and recommended to the Israeli Army soldiers to "humiliate the wanted [Arabs], to photo and humiliate them and afterwards to show the photos to their families who`ll see that their sons are cowards".

A student who tried to discuss this racist incitement during his classes by claiming that history knew Arab mathematics and intellectuals, was answered, "You don't know what are you talking about. The Arabs did not invent anything! They are stupid and did not contribute anything to the humanity. The calculations you claimed that were invented by them, were copied [from others]. The Arabs are big liars and you should not believe to their history!""

en

"The University was asked to deal with this shameful affair. Dr. Asad Ganem, a senior lecturer in the Department, asked Bukay to respond the accusations of the students. "Bukay broke the University`s regulations and the Education Law, and committed a criminal act. If he will not respond properly, we will take severe steps against him", he told Nana News. An appeal was also made to the Head of the Department, Dr. Gabriel Ben Dor.

The University`s spokesperson reported that the University's authorities are handling the case and a clear response will be delivered within two weeks. Dr. Bukay refused to respond.

Many academics sent letters of protest to the University`s officials, and Roman Bronfman MK, from the liberal Democratic Choice party, asked the University`s rector to investigate the case and judge severely the racist lecturer."

In fact, making an "appeal" to Dr. Gabriel Ben Dor would have been less than useless. "Dr. David Bukay is a person of some standing at the University of Haifa. He teaches in the Department of Political Science in the Social Sciences Faculty and is considered close to the department head, Prof. Gabriel Ben Dor. My meeting with Bukay was held in Prof. Ben Dor's office; Ben Dor and Bukay share the same secretary," Ha'aretz reported in April, 2005.

In response to my story -- taken from my blog and posted on the IndyMedia site without my knowledge -- it appears Bukay elicited (or inspired) the vicious behavior of one Dr. Steven Plaut, a former American, now Israeli settler and also an academic at the University of Haifa. "My own home university, the University of Haifa, has been the scene in recent days of a saga of leftist campus McCarthyism. It all began when a professor of Middle East political science, David Bukay, was accused by an Arab student activist, who was not even formally registered in Bukay's class, a student active in a student communist organization, of making derogatory comments in class about Arabs," Plaut wrote, and then made a reference me, making sure to include a lethal dose of slander that is typical of his modus operandi:

The allegations were then planted in a local newspaper, and reported in the Arab press. Then one of the Cockburn Cockroaches, a regular columnist on Counterpunch with views about Jews resembling those of neonazis, started spreading the allegations about the internet. Kurt Nimmo is an unemployed New Mexico photographer-wannabe who writes crackpot articles for Counterpunch and also for the neonazi web site Rense.com. Nimmo routinely refers to all Jews as "Zionists", such as the new director of the World Bank, and Nimmo makes it clear all "Zionists" need to be shipped
off in cattle cars to nice camps.

I wrote the good professor and asked him to document where I have claimed "all 'Zionists' need to be shipped off in cattle cars to nice camps," but naturally he did not respond. I consider this libel -- but as we know, the laws are sketchy at best when it comes to the internet.

Juan Cole commented on this sort of libelous smear campaign last March: "Recently Steven Plaut, an Israeli defender, at the University of Haifa, of the terrorist groups around the late extremist Rabbi Meir Kahane, was commissioned by [David] Horowitz (and probably others of that circle) to do yet another hatchet job on me, the second in just a few months.... Plaut cited the earlier smears and rightwing bloggers as authorities. (One smear now becomes a "citation" for the next one!).... The GoogleSmear references a body of falsehoods. It creates a nexus of links that increase the chance that the smear will come to the top of a google search."

Plaut also posted a "false allegation to a bulletin board under an assumed name" about Cole, behavior he has engaged in previously. "Writing under assumed names," notes an entry in the UCC Palestine Solidarity Campaign database, "Plaut has a long history of attacking, labeling, and targeting left-wing scholars in Israel. One anonymous article appeared under the name of Socrates in the Middle East Review of 2001."

Moreover, Plaut was accused in 2004 of "spoofing and spamming activities" in order to slander his enemies:

Messages posted on 13 April 2004 to the ALEF electronic discussion forum (which is based at the University of Haifa) seem to indicate something about Plaut's mentality. These messages, which were posted to ALEF by somebody else and which seem to report on an email conversation that Plaut had with someone who was banned from the ALEF forum for excessive spamming, seem to indicate that Plaut boasted about stealing the ALEF membership list so that messages could be sent to ALEF members without being passed through the ALEF system. Specifically, Plaut seems to have written the following. The typographical errors appeared in the original:

I stoll their membership list. If you want to sen dthings to the whole list,
use any email and send to: (via BCC so they do not know what you are doing):
...

Put the alef address in the header and write (alef) before
subject and they will think it is coming thru their list!

He also seemed to be connected with somebody called Rocky who, pretending to be a pro-Zionism Palestinian living in the West Bank, used the pseudonym "Yusuf" to plague the ALEF list with racist emails until he was excluded from the forum.

Paul de Rooij comments on the Counterpunch site:

"Rocky" proceeded to send hateful emails to the forum posing as someone called Yusuf, a "Zionist Palestinian", who also was "your token Arab who adores Israel". "Rocky" then made the mistake of using CC instead of BCC to forward one of his diatribes. The ensuing email exchange between "Rocky" and Plaut discussing the faux pas was revealed when "Rocky" repeated the mistake by sending it to the entire distribution list! It would make amusing reading were it not for such a sordid attempt at deception, the smearing of others, and interfering in a discussion of Israeli academics on how to obtain a modicum of justice for the Palestinians.

Here is a sampling of Mr. Plaut's libelous tirades. In addition, he posted numerous slanders on the Moonbat Central weblog, however the neocon David Horowitz took the site down about a month ago and the posts are unavailable.

Cockburns's Cockroaches
Walmart Cockroach
The Neonazi Ties of the Leftist Lunabrits
Another Scholarly Associate of Prof. Cole

However, the real culprit in this ceaseless campaign seems to be 1st Lt. Kevin Mumaw, 33, of the 101st Airborne Division, "camped at one of Saddam's lesser palaces in Mosul," as of 2003, according to Stars and Stripes. Mumaw "is the online troll harassing Kurt Nimmo," reports several IndyMedia sites. Although I have no direct evidence of this, I believe Mumaw is Plaut's latest "Rocky." I also believe he is responsible for hijacking my wife's name and using it to post slanderous posts and also responsible for posting my address and telephone numbers. Here is Mumaw's blog, charmingly entitled "Mumaw Quadaffi.".

Finally, Plaut has posted a gloating piece on Rocco DiPippo's blog (a former Moonbat blog regular):

http://antiprotester.blogspot.com/2006/01/neonazi-poet-of-posterior-kurt-nimmo.html

Sunday, January 15, 2006

Gorilla Radio for Monday, January 16th, 2006



PEJ News - C. L. Cook - This Week on Gorilla Radio: Author, Mike Palecek and Looking for Bigfoot.

Jack Etkin on Canadian media in the run-up to the federal election.

And; Janine Bandcroft bringing us up to speed with all that's good to do in and around Victoria this week.


Chris Cook hosts Gorilla Radio, airing live every Monday, 5-6pm Pacific Time. In Victoria at 101.9FM, 104.3 cable, and on the internet at: http://cfuv.uvic.ca He also serves as a contributing editor at the progressive web news site: http://www.pej.org.

You can check out the GR blog at: http://GorillaRadioBlog.blogspot.com

www.pej.org




As the bombs burst over village markets, as bodies writhe on dusty, chemical strewn streets, burning, melting from the inside out, as tortured screams echo down the chambers of hidden prisons, America goes about its daily business. The good citizens shop for automobiles and groceries, chatting in line about the exploits of movie stars and more minor celebrities. While forests fall and a million fires scorch the planet, the good citizens of America make dental appointments, and try to decide what colour to paint the kitchen.

This is the waking nightmare of Jack Robert King’s America. Broadcasting his internet radio program, ‘Bigfoot Radio’ from the heart of America, not a dark heart, but the open country of Iowa, where big skies throw few shadows.

Mike Palecek is an America novelist whose seventh book, ‘Looking for Bigfoot’ examines the maddening banality of evil that is his creation, Jack Robert King’s America. Mike Palecek and hunting for the mythical in America in the first half.

And; The mainstream, corporate news has had a free ride for far too long in this country. Canada is already home to one of the world’s most highly concentrated media, and the trend is quickening. But how to break the strangle-hold?

Victoria-based media critic and activist, Jack Etkin on a people’s media in the second half.

And; Janine Bandcroft will be here at the bottom of the hour to bring us up to speed with all the good things to do in and around Victoria this week.

But first, Mike Palecek and getting to Yeti.



G-Radio is dedicated to social justice, the environment, community, and providing a forum for people and issues not covered in the mainstream media.

Some past guests include: M. Junaid Alam, Joel Bakan, Maude Barlow, David Barsamian, William Blum, Luciana Bohne, Vincent Bugliosi, Helen Caldicott, Noam Chomsky, Michel Chossudovsky, Diane Christian, Juan Cole, David Cromwell, Murray Dobbin, Jon Elmer, Reese Erlich, Anthony Fenton, Jim Fetzer, Laura Flanders, Chris Floyd, Susan George, Stan Goff, Robert Greenwald, Denis Halliday, Chris Hedges, Sander Hicks, Julia Butterfly Hill, Robert Jensen, Dahr Jamail, Diana Johnstone, Kathy Kelly, Naomi Klein, Anthony Lappe, Frances Moore Lappe, Dave Lindorff, Jim Lobe, Jennifer Loewenstein, Wayne Madsen, Stephen Marshall, Linda McQuaig, George Monbiot, Loretta Napoleoni, John Nichols, Kurt Nimmo, Greg Palast, Michael Parenti, William Rivers Pitt, Sheldon Rampton, Paul Craig Roberts, Paul de Rooij, John Ross, Danny Schechter, Vandana Shiva, Norman Solomon, Starhawk, Grant Wakefield, Paul Watson, Bernard Weiner, Mickey Z., Dave Zirin, and many others.




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