Louis Proyect remains Unrepentant

I could have called this Here Lies Louis Proyect but he's lied in so many places it would be misleading.

I've already posted on this so just briefly, it all began when I got my subscriber email for Louis Proyect's then latest post titled, The Jewish Voice for Peace Attack on Alison Weir: JVP Loses Its Balance. Following the link to the post I found that it was broken but googling some words I found the post on Louis's Marxmail site. I assumed that Louis had posted the piece in error because whatever else one can say about the post the main point of it was to defend an antisemite, Alison Weir.  Now since I've already posted on this, I will just copy and paste the emails from me to Louis and back and between Louis's guest poster, Amith Gupta and me.  Here goes:

Dear Louis

I was dismayed to see an email of a post from your blog defending Alison Weir and attacking some of her detractors.  I followed the link because I wanted to comment on the piece.  Off the top of my head I was going to mention her organisation, The Council for the National Interest (which your guest poster fails to mention presumably because the name alone should set alarm bells ringing) and I was going to dig up her article in Counterpunch in which she linked Israel's harvesting of Palestinian organs to the blood libel of yore even misrepresenting Israel Shahak to make her point.

I hope you've either deleted the post or decided not to run it because I was just doing a post criticising a David Aaronovitch article where said:

 many left-wingers and sympathisers with the Palestinian cause in this country and elsewhere can no longer tell the difference between progressive thinking and "essentialist" bigotry that used to be the preserve of the anti-democratic and racist right.

I'd hate you of all people to prove Aaronovitch right.

I've been googling for the defence of Alison Weir post and it isn't in the google cache of Unrepentant Marxist but it is on marxmail.  If you have deleted it from UM then perhaps you could also delete it from marxmail.

Regards

And here's how Louis responded:

It was taken down because I have to work on the formatting. You will have an opportunity to comment on it tomorrow. I am cc'ing the author.

Not quite the response I was hoping for so I quickly replied:

I emailed you in good faith assuming you had rectified an honest mistake but if you're knowingly promoting racism further comment is pointless.

but it gets worse.  Here's Louis's guest to me:

There is nothing beyond the pale in the article you cited. Weir discusses a Swedish report of a medical scandal involving Israeli soldiers accused of mutilating the bodies of their victims and engaging in organ trafficking. The Knesset itself investigated some of these charges and admitted that some of them were true: http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2009/12/2009122315425789179.html

As far as Toaff and Shahak, the only reason Weir brings them up at all is because the Israeli officials who categorically denied the accusations in the Swedish report cited the blood libel myths against Jews. So Weir cites Toaff's controversial work in which he documented and continues to maintain that in some small, exceptional cases, there may have actually been some small number of unrepresentative deviants who actually engaged in such practices. For this, Toaff was condemned. 

I do not see how this can be seen by anyone as an attempt by Toaff or Weir for that matter to validate the blood libel. Only to show how accusations of blood libel can be used mask and defend deviant behavior, in this case, a serious war crime by Israeli troops. 

I do not know why you think any of this somehow validates Aaronovitch's claim. In my experience, to the extent that it is true, it is that lefties do not take the dignity of Arabs and Muslims seriously.

It was clear to me that I was dealing with a racist and I had only written to Louis to help him spare his blushes but here's me back to Gupta:

The reason Weir mentions Toaff and misrepresents Shahak is not to say that shit happens but to make out that such things have been done by Jews since time immemorial as part and parcel of the Jewish identity.  It's true that zionists use the blood libel libel (sic) as a smokescreen but Weir uses it as "evidence".

Your last paragraph is utterly nonsensical. I had no idea you or Alison Weir were claiming to speak for Arabs and/or Muslims and if you're not a leftist yourself, Aaronovitch wasn't referring to you.  He could certainly have a lot of fun using Louis Proyect's stupidity and lack of integrity against the whole of the left in future, only in future he won't have to make anything up.

I notice you haven't mentioned Weir's leadership of the Council for the National Interest presumably because if you did you might find yourself owning up to the fact that Alison Weir doesn't seem to take Arabs and Muslims particularly seriously unless they serve what she sees as the national interest.

Anyway, I told Louis Proyect that I emailed him in good faith because I assumed he had made an honest mistake. It appears I was wrong.  I never assumed you were being honest in the first place and on that, I was right.

I hope this correspondence is over now.

But back comes this Gupta chap again:

Hi,

That is not why she cited Toaff at all. The rest of your strange criticisms, including Arab/Muslim representation are addressed in the original piece.

Are you the only person behind JSF? I have always liked that blog. Never meet your heroes, they say.

As it turned out I did spend more time than is good for a person trying to reason with Louis on twitter, on his blog and here on JSF but to no avail. He got worse and worse and was happy to get the support of a couple of trolls supporting the racist post though, like Louis, neither seemed to have read it or the thread properly.  I actually think Louis probably did make a mistake in the first instance and that my email to him made him realise he couldn't simply walk away from it. He'd dug a hole for himself and decided to keep digging.  So here, there and in lots of other places lies Louis Proyect but he remains unrepentant.