Cheats and thieves have to prove their moral superiority over their victims in order to justify their crimes. This is the case with a petty cheat and thief called James Ball. This young man was a hired hand in the Wikileaks; he was offered a bribe of a job by the Guardian and he gratefully accepted it, betraying Julian Assange’s trust and stealing all he could put his sweaty hands on. Since then, he is obsessed with demeaning and debunking Assange: only moral disgrace of the Australian will reduce the burden of the traitor’s guilt.

One of his favourite routes is attacking Assange for associating with me, and today he did it again in the Guardian, responding to my recent piece Unmanning the Man. His arguments are repetitious, baseless and lame: I am called “anti-Semite”, “H-denier” and “the man who gave the State Department secrets to Lukashenko” time and again.

“Shamir asked for access to all cable material concerning “the Jews”, a request which was refused”, says Ball. Oh no, James! That was before your switching sides, and you dutifully obliged. You did it even twice: just before my departure you came to me on your own initiative and kindly handed me “a better file on Jews”, twice as big as the previous one. Apparently lying and cheating is your second nature by now.

As my readers know, my view on “anti semitism and H-denial” was expressed many times, and it is available on my and other websites, namely:

“I wrote hundreds of pages on the Jewish topic, but for the benefit of the reader I’ll sum it up. Naturally, as a son of Jewish parents and a man living in the Jewish state and deeply and intimately involved with Jewish culture, I harbour no hate to a Jew because he is a Jew. I doubt many people do. However I did and do criticise various aspects of Jewish Weltanschauung like so many Jewish and Christian thinkers before me, or even more so for I witnessed crimes of the Jewish state that originated in this worldview.

As for the accusation of “Holocaust denial”, my family lost too many of its sons and daughters for me to deny the facts of Jewish tragedy, but I do deny its religious salvific significance implied in the very term ‘Holocaust’; I do deny its metaphysical uniqueness, I do deny the morbid cult of Holocaust and I think every God-fearing man, a Jew, a Christian or a Muslim should reject it as Abraham rejected and smashed idols. I deny that it is good to remember or immortalise such traumatic events, and I wrote many articles against modern obsession with massacres, be it Jewish holocaust of 1940s, Armenian massacre of 1915, Ukrainian “holodomor”, Polish Katyn, Khmer Rouge etc. Poles, Armenians, Ukrainians understood me, so did Jews – otherwise I would be charged with the crime of factual denial which is known to the Israeli law.

[Smashing idols has resonance only among Abrahamic peoples – Editor]

As for “giving unredacted files” topic, this is rather silly claim to be published in the Guardian since this newspaper published the password to the whole lot. Moreover, their “redaction” of the cables distorted the meaning and safeguarded interests of British companies and American officials.

Nowhere the Guardian responds to my valid observations:

“This is the season for asses to bray at the captive lion. The Guardian, the newspaper that made millions on ripping Julian’s information mine and later turned into the greatest enemy of the Australian adventurer, published a sleazy piece by an editor of the slimy Swedish right-wing tabloid Expressen, a Ms Karin Olsson. Olsson tells the story of Swedes’ disappointment with Assange “from Hero to zero”, conveniently omitting her part in the action. Character assassination of Assange by media was to a great part her work. The Expressen obtained the news of two feminists’ visit to a friendly policewoman in real time, and splashed the headline “Sought for rape” immediately, before the paperwork reached the attorney office and before the charges were made.

It was fitting the Expressen agenda: the tabloid belongs to Karl Johan Bonnier, a Swedish Murdoch, and his media empire dutifully supported the right-wing government coalition, promoted Sweden’s participation in the US wars, in bombardment of Libya and sending troops to Afghanistan. Bonnier, a sworn enemy of free journalism and of the Wikileaks, had commissioned and published Domshiet-Berg’s book against Assange.

The Guardian did not mind ordering the hit piece from the newspaper editor who published racist pieces calling for deportation of Arabs from the Swedish paradise. Despite – or because of that - Olsson frequently refers to my “anti semitism”. For a while I was at loss why does she, provided there are no Jews in the story, try to bring them in. Later I understood, that - like her Nordic neighbour Anders Breivik - Olsson believes that every sort of racism is permitted as long as one adds condemnation of anti-Semitism. The Russian critics would throw in a charge of anti-Sovietism in similar circumstances. Probably Olsson and Breivik both believe that the world is ruled by the Elders of Zion. This thought is not foreign to David Leigh, a Guardian editor in charge of Wikileaks defamation, for he always adds the Jewish angle where none exists.”

Anyway, thank you, Mr James Ball, for spreading my views among the readers of your fine newspaper. Probably I owe you two pints: one, for the file on Jews, and another, for your last hatchet piece!

Read the original Shamir’s text Unmanning the Man

http://www.israelshamir.net/English/Unmanning.htm

Read the Guardian piece

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/nov/08/israel-shamir-julian-assange-cult-machismo

[Courtesy shamireaders]