June 26, 2006

Alf Green and Engage's Alexandra Simonon, are they by any chance related?

I'm really sorry to do yet another post on Engage but there's a funny old business going on involving one or two of their people. I had a couple of posts yesterday from someone calling themselves Alf Green. See the post below for the links. I used to get lots of comments from the same person round about the same time I felt I had to start moderating because of harrassment. Sure enough after a while I stopped this Alf Green's comments coming through. They were usually either insulting or misrepresented the comments or posts they purported to be responding to. Anyway, when I went to approve a response of mine I noticed that Alf Green has the same IP address as the Engage Managing Editor, Alexandra Simonon. Now it's possible that they live together but when I googled their names together, only one site came up. The site was the Euston Manifesto which both names, Alf Green and Alexandra Simonon are signed up for. Alf actually left a blurb:
I think that totalitarian and antisemitic thought is common on the left - and this problem will get worse. So we have to organise against it - in order to save the left - and to save ourselves.
Pretty strong stuff.

Googling just Alf, well googling - "Alf Green" Israel - over one hundred sites come up, mostly comment sections. I looked at four and I think they were all anti-boycott and made the most strident allegations of anti-semitism against pro-boycotters and anti-zionists. Some were in threads including comments from David Hirsh, agreeing with him totally of course.

Checking the Engage Forum we find Alf Green in action attacking this Dov chap. Maybe you remember my post, Complaint to Engage. In that I quoted an Engage supporter who complained about the antics of some of the Engage commentors thus:
Is it just me, but I am finding some of the comments distateful. I am also getting pretty fed up with having to wade through a load of juvenile insults. If some of the contributors wish to chat amongst themselves and call others names, then I would rather they did not use Engage as a forum for so doing.

I have little sympathy for Elf's views and disagree on many occassions with Deborah Fink's and Deborak Maccoby's. Yet, I think it right to grant them the respect that we should expect from them. Either engage with their arguments, ignore them or refute them, but please do not reduce this forum to the level of a school playground.

I really don't have time for all of this!
In the same thread, I didn't notice at the time, Alf Green has a comment containing this little gem:
Elf feels that the people who are out to kill Israelis have a certain justice on their side. So his opinion is really quite out of place on an anti-racist website like Engage.
Now if this is really Alexandra Simonon then she has the power, as far as I know, to ban comments from the site and yet here s/he was effectively calling for me to be banned. In a later post Alf delivers a rebuke to Dov too.

But the most curious and, if Alf and Alexandra are the same person, damning of the Alf posts are those to the Alexandra Simonon article, Don't boycott World Pride Jerusalem on the Guardian's Comment is free space. There we see AlfGreen (sic) making three comments to criticise Simonon's detractors and to support and even explain Simonon's article.

No, using a false ID to support your own article wouldn't be the worst thing would it? The use of two IDs to bump up the Euston Manifesto signatories would be worse wouldn't it?

I have written to both Alf Green and Alexandra Simonon for an explanation and neither have replied. It could all be innocent of course. It could even be a hoax at my expense. I mean the Managing Editor of Engage leaving comments from the same IP address but with two different identities. Could they be so stupid? Perhaps Alf and Alexandra share a computer. I won't know until I get a reply, and even then, how could I be sure?

Finally, again I apologise for this focus on Engage contributors. I know they have become a complete joke in many people's eyes but they are quite persistent in their false allegations of dishonesty and antisemitism and they have a tendency to harrass me from time to time. Perhaps I'm wrong to retaliate but I can't resist it sometimes.

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