Fact checking our arses, how are ye
Update: Self correcting blogosphere, how are ya. Aaro has put up a correction and removed the original JC piece. I must say I hope this doesn't mean the end of the JC pieces going on the blog because I liked them. Anyway, a fast correction was made and credit for that.
Good spot award and thanks very much to Matthew in the comments for this one ...
Harry's Place have made a bit of an error and got the wrong Neil Berry; the writer of anti-Semitic articles[1] and the treasurer of Christian CND are different people. This matters to Aaro because he repeated the Harry's Place claim in his latest bit for the Jewish Chronicle. As Matthew says in comments to the post below, HP is almost certainly Aaro's (uncredited) source because the accusation of anti-Semitism aimed at treasurer Berry hasn't appeared anywhere else that we can find. I suspect that the reason Aaro didn't check it is that he was already aware of journalist Berry who has feuded with Nick Cohen in the last couple of years, and it didn't occur to him that there were two Neil Berries (three if you count the bloke who was in Heartbeat, although he is actually Nick Berry).
This one looked a bit too Decent to be true to me too at the time (a rabid anti-Semite as chairman of Christian CND? does this really make a lick of sense outside the Decent world in which the sandal-wearing middle class are the true heirs of Julius Streicher?), though I can't really claim any moral superiority as I actually suspected that the claims of anti-Semitism had been exaggerated rather than it being a case of mistaken identity:
This Neil Berry character certainly seems a bit slimy if everything Aaro says about him is true and there is no mitigating context, but I have no reason to believe that is the case (see comments by Mark below) and so I reserve judgement.
I guess Aaro will be putting the wheels in motion to sort out a correction when he reads it on HP, but if it doesn't happen in the next few days I suppose one of us ought to give Christian CND the heads-up that it's appeared in the Jewish Chronicle too, because once this sort of thing starts to spread it is the very devil of a job to stop it and obviously an accusation of anti-Semitism appearing in the JC is about the most damaging place for it to appear.
Well done Matthew, who wins an Aaronovitch-related prize of his choosing. Which reminds me I need to sort out that "Seals of Dacre" competition too so if you have any last suggestions to make, make 'em.
[1] I suppose that should read "allegedly anti-Semitic articles"; I have not read them myself and in the circumstances probably should not take it on trust. The excerpts that "David T" and Aaro printed were certainly quite dodgy but there might have been some context missing.
Good spot award and thanks very much to Matthew in the comments for this one ...
Harry's Place have made a bit of an error and got the wrong Neil Berry; the writer of anti-Semitic articles[1] and the treasurer of Christian CND are different people. This matters to Aaro because he repeated the Harry's Place claim in his latest bit for the Jewish Chronicle. As Matthew says in comments to the post below, HP is almost certainly Aaro's (uncredited) source because the accusation of anti-Semitism aimed at treasurer Berry hasn't appeared anywhere else that we can find. I suspect that the reason Aaro didn't check it is that he was already aware of journalist Berry who has feuded with Nick Cohen in the last couple of years, and it didn't occur to him that there were two Neil Berries (three if you count the bloke who was in Heartbeat, although he is actually Nick Berry).
This one looked a bit too Decent to be true to me too at the time (a rabid anti-Semite as chairman of Christian CND? does this really make a lick of sense outside the Decent world in which the sandal-wearing middle class are the true heirs of Julius Streicher?), though I can't really claim any moral superiority as I actually suspected that the claims of anti-Semitism had been exaggerated rather than it being a case of mistaken identity:
This Neil Berry character certainly seems a bit slimy if everything Aaro says about him is true and there is no mitigating context, but I have no reason to believe that is the case (see comments by Mark below) and so I reserve judgement.
I guess Aaro will be putting the wheels in motion to sort out a correction when he reads it on HP, but if it doesn't happen in the next few days I suppose one of us ought to give Christian CND the heads-up that it's appeared in the Jewish Chronicle too, because once this sort of thing starts to spread it is the very devil of a job to stop it and obviously an accusation of anti-Semitism appearing in the JC is about the most damaging place for it to appear.
Well done Matthew, who wins an Aaronovitch-related prize of his choosing. Which reminds me I need to sort out that "Seals of Dacre" competition too so if you have any last suggestions to make, make 'em.
[1] I suppose that should read "allegedly anti-Semitic articles"; I have not read them myself and in the circumstances probably should not take it on trust. The excerpts that "David T" and Aaro printed were certainly quite dodgy but there might have been some context missing.
posted by The Rioja Kid at 3/01/2006 03:47:00 PM
9 Comments:
I think this is pretty bad for Aaro. He's just outed the Treasurer of Christian CND wrongly as an anti-semitic conspiracy theory madman.
Presumably the editor of the JC will ask him where he got this information of which he was so certain, and he'll have to tell him, "Well I read it in a blog post written by a person who writes under the pseudonym, "David T", which was good enough for me"
It's hardly compelling, is it? The fallibility...
Was Berry the guy who said that Nick Cohen's 'support for Israel' was due to the fact that he was Jewish? Or was that Neil Clark? I do recall Aaronovitch writing about that. Regardless, mistakenly naming an innocent party as an anti-semite is appalling. Perhaps it will teach Aaronovitch a lesson with regard to getting your information from Harry's Place.
On the subject of alleged anti-semites, it seems that Aaronovitch has reappeared on the David Icke page on Wikipedia and has been there for some time, under a much longer and more comprehensive list of lizards which includes the invaluble information that William F. Buckley Jr. trains psychic assasins in Brussels, that Tony Blair is a 'mind-controlled multiple' and that George H.W Bush is a 'serial killer, drug runner, pedophile, Satanist - nice man.' Don't put those horrible lizard photos back on the front page though.
Berry was the one who had the run-in with Nick C. Clark is more known for partisanship of the Bosnian Serbs IIRC.
"William F. Buckley Jr. trains psychic assasins in Brussels, that Tony Blair is a 'mind-controlled multiple' and that George H.W Bush is a 'serial killer, drug runner, pedophile, Satanist"
Makes sense to me.
Well, Bush Senior is widely accused of being a drug runner because of certain CIA operations while he was CIA head and also while he was Vice-President, so that particular allegation is quite plausible if not very original. As for him being a "Satanist" and "Pedophile", as well as a reptoid shape-shifter, I'm not sure what evidence Icke has uncovered which led him to believe this.
The main evidence for "pedophile" and "satanist" is the book "Trance-Formation of America" by Mark Philips and Cathy O'Brien - you can find it on google if you like but basically it is a rather outlandish account of Cathy O'Brien's involvement in the MK-ULTRA program, which seems to rather closely resemble the raw material of Satanic abuse panics. Icke believes that this book is literally true in every detail (the only detail of it I believe is that there was a program called MK-ULTRA).
I am less sure of the evidence for "shapeshifter" other than that he does look a bit like a lizard (don't worry I will not post photographs to prove this)
re: "paedophile" - look for information on the background of Jeff Ganon (Talon News) and the alleged p-ring in the Bush I White House.
Jeff Wells' Rigorous Intuition conspiracy theory site may be of some help in this as well. I've not got the URL handy, but just give it a google.
I have heard of Cathy O'Brien though I have never read the book. I have read a fairly detailed critique of the book and it seems certain to me that she is a conscious fraud. She may have been involved in MK-Ultra, but the claims she makes about Bush Senior, Clinton and Cheney have been pretty throughly debunked, and she has contradicted herself and changed her story several times over the years. There certainly was an MK-Ultra program which really did do a lot of damage to many innocent people - including one US army guy, if I remember rightly, who ended up apparently falling to his death from a window after being spiked (although his family maintain he was murdered). Congress outlawed such schemes in the mid 70s after they found out what was going on but supposedly a scaled-down MK-Ultra still exists under another name though it probably dosen't involve some of the more extreme activities that the CIA got involved in back in the 50s and 60s.
I have heard of an alleged pedophile ring connected to the Reagan and Bush Administrations involving some millonaire Republican donor from Nebraska. Certainly this seems genuine, I remember a guy was awarded substantial damages over the abuse he suffered and the Bush I White House successfully blocked the showing of a British documentary on the subject on Discovery, but I wasn't aware that George H.W Bush was alleged to be involved personally in the pedophile ring itself.
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