Saturday 12 July 2008

Administrative Notes 7


To The Barricades, Comrades - A Rallying Cry In Defence of
Harry's Place

Arise, muscular liberals, for the enemy is at the gates in the form of Mohammed Sawalha, President of the British Muslim Initiative and his dastardly legal threats against Harry's Place.

Having been caught red-handed promulgating anti-semitic smears, this supporter of and fund-raiser for Hamas has launched a doomed legal action against that esteemed internet outlet for its reporting of quotes attributed to him by an entirely separate website in an attempt to intimidate the near-defenceless corporate lawyer David T. into silence.

These bullying tactics are a disgusting abuse of the legal process and English defamation laws, which should be reserved for only the most serious breaches, such as those occurring when Guardian writer David Edgar points out that Nick Cohen is full of shit or Some Guy With a Website says something nasty about Oliver Kamm.

Rest assured that this chilling suit is merely the tip of the iceberg. If Harry's Place is silenced for reporting the truth and backing it up with solid evidence, then the era of the Will-You-Condemn-a-Thon is officially over and, with it, muscular liberalism itself.

A movement which bases its worldview upon quotes ripped out of context, wild and highly defamatory speculation over the motives of its enemies, dubious anecdotes, Decent Telepathy, viscious two-minute hates and baseless, hysterical accusations of proto-fascism will surely shrivel up and die the instant it is dragged under the microscope of the judicial process.

Just think - all that good work poured into dissecting Ken Livingstone's public statements and extrapolating near-Hitlerian levels of fascism... Gone in a firestorm of white-hot litigation!

Those extended hate-harshes against academic unions attempting to boycott Israel, and all of those maniacal insinuations about their outright jew-hatred... Blasted into smithereens by bewigged legal assassins!

Those countless celebrities, columnists, politicians, journalists, writers, thinkers, film-makers, bloggers, broadcasters, and religious figures constantly depicted as jack-booted fascists, hankering ravenously to devour democracy itself... Why, any one of them could stand up and insist that any and all muscular liberals take full legal responsibility for their actions.

Unthinkable! If I choose to defame a minor public figure as a genocidal fascist with exterminationist tendencies who propagandises for terrorists, then it's up to that person to refute my arguments, and also the mendacious counter-arguments I'll deploy ad infinitum thereafter.

So I urge all of you to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Harry's Place on this issue. Remember, these are the same courts that refused to find against George Galloway, on the pitiful grounds that his accusers couldn't produce any reliable evidence against him.

Liberty, if it means anything, is the right to disparage whoever one likes in a consequence-free environment, and that applies just as much to known anti-semitic scum like Sawalha as it does to thousands of random political opponents we don't like.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Harry and the gang got very upset when I posted a link to Decentpedia. So they banned me (well put my subquetent posts in a special moderator queue, which amounts to the same thing I suspect).

Anyway...

The “Support Harry’s Place Blogroll” which is doing the rounds, is absolutely fucking hilarious.

The first blog on the roll is a wild eyed Zionist nutbar site.

QUOTE: “In an age of rogue nations armed with WMD, a worldwide Islamic jihad… how long before someone will successfully enact Hitler’s ‘final solution’?”
http://adeeperlookweblog.blogspot.com/

The second is, well, an anti-Muslim conspiracy site.

QUOTE: “Muslims can earn goodwill by helping to stop the crescent plot… Al Qaeda’s 9/11 sneak attack cast suspicion on all Muslims. After the hijackers hid amongst us, pretending to be trustworthy friends while plotting acts of war, how can we know that other Muslims are not doing the same? …American Muslims could undo much of this suspicion by helping to expose the terrorist memorial mosque that architect Paul Murdoch is trying to plant on the Flight 93 crash site… loyalty to America is what is what the rest of America wants to see. Is it what our Muslim countrymen want?”
http://newdefender.wordpress.com/

Well, is it? Our towell-headed friends really ought to say.

The third blog is simply bizarre.

QUOTE: “What’s significant now is the increasingly deep documentation of Obama’s early affinity and indoctrination to Marxist-Leninist ideology. For more, see “What Barack Obama Learned From the Communist Party.””
http://americanpowerblog.blogspot.com/

The blogger describes himself as a “pro-victory Associate Professor” who loves his country, “fully supports current US military operations”, “despises hard-left radical agenda and discourse”…

…and “abhors irrationalism in argumentation”

As we can see.

The fourth blog is, if anything, even further to the right.

Quote: “PRO LIFE, PRO GUN, RIGHT WING CHRISTIAN. ANY QUESTIONS?”
http://olbroad.com/

I didn’t have any, so I took one last look at the charming little flashing icon “Reject the UN, Reject the UN”, and logged off.

The firth blog is a climate-change-denying nest of extremist loonies. Apparently Iran wants Israel to nuke the Middle East to dust! I kid you not.

QUOTE: “So the world is deluding itself and refuses to acknowledge the possibility Iran will destroy the Jewish state with one or two nukes? NO, my theory is they want the Jewish state destroyed knowing that in the process Israel will fire off nukes taking out the hubs of Islamic jihad (and optimistically the holy shrines of Islam as well). How happy would the world be to rid itself of the half of the world’s Jewish population (echos of last time - then and now) and have the Jews in the throes of annihilation mop up their mess remove the Islamic knife at their collective thoat. But at that point Islam could not be stopped ……….. next stop the Islamic Republic of Europe.”
http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/

Or maybe just the Strand, eh Mr T?

Well folks, that’s just the first five on the list. What delights will the other fifty reveal?

SAVE HARRY’S PLACE!
DOWN WITH THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF EUROPE!
STOP THE MARXIST-LENINIST SEIZING THE WHITE HOUSE!
HITLER IS A BAD MAN!
JUST LIKE CHAVEZ!

Anonymous said...

"Atlas Shrugs" is - and you might not believe that - a fairly well-known right-wing blog here in the US of A. Yes, compared to the stuff we have to deal with, HP is positively benign.

Anonymous said...

ah don't forget Harry's Place's very own David T doing a post accusing the leader of the British branch of Christian CND of being an anti-Semite (playing to the usual hate-filled HP gallery)...and then being forced to take the post down and grovel humbly in the dust, having realised that the subject of the Will You Condemn-a-Thon that day in fact was not the person named, but rather someone who merely shared his name.

What a bunch of utter cunts they are

Anonymous said...

Far be it from me to compare and contrast apologies when wrong to your oh-so witty legend on this page. Prick.

Anonymous said...

i'm upset to see you're yet to post an entry for Nando's...

Anonymous said...

Liberty, if it is to mean anything, is the right to tell people what they don't want to hear.

Except if those people are HP readers, of course. Hence my banning.

But I think we should play Condemnathon

Will Harry's Place condemn the racist anti-Muslim conspiracy-theorists who have flocked to their defence?

Will you condenm? Will you? Will YOU?

Zin

Anonymous said...

The headline in the 'American Power' blog which writes from "a neoconservative perspective" is instructive:

British Neocon Blog Being Sued by Hamas

Ideological soulmates have to stick together and all that.

Zin

Malky Muscular said...

The “Support Harry’s Place Blogroll” is absolutely fucking hilarious.

That's because it's on the internet, and internet=lunatics.

HP are in the right here, and best of luck to them. They're just extremely lucky that the person who finally sued them actually is an Islamist whackjob, and that he doesn't seem to have a legal leg to stand on, because they've spent a lot of time throwing shit indiscriminately at people who disagree with them.

...compared to the stuff we have to deal with, HP is positively benign.

Agreed. Atlas Pam is utterly insane.

Far be it from me to compare and contrast apologies when wrong to your oh-so witty legend on this page. Prick.

Settle down, Beavis - that commenter didn't write the legend, I did. As for your web address there - "knob" is spelt with a "b". Would you like me to fix that for you?

i'm upset to see you're yet to post an entry for Nando's...

I'll save it for a day when I'm really in the mood.