Showing posts with label David Aaronovitch. Show all posts
Showing posts with label David Aaronovitch. Show all posts

June 15, 2016

Zios with Attitude?

I'm trying to establish when the word or abbreviation, Zio, became a thing.  Obviously Zionists are falsely accusing Israel's critics, opponents and victims of antisemitism all the time but I hadn't noticed anyone try to make an issue out of the abbreviation Zio before that former BICOM intern, Alex Chalmers, mentioned it on his Facebook resignation as a co-chair of the Oxford University Labour Club:
It is with the greatest regret that I have decided to resign as Co-Chair of the Oxford University Labour Club. This comes in the light of OULC's decision at this evening's general meeting to endorse Israel Apartheid Week.
I originally ran for the position of Co-Chair back in Trinity, after our crushing defeat at the general election, because I was increasingly worried about the state of OULC. The club I had invested an extraordinary amount of time, energy, and emotion in during my first two terms at Oxford, which had given me a network of close friends, was becoming increasingly riven by factional splits, and despite its avowed committment to liberation, the attitudes of certain members of the club towards certain disadvantaged groups was becoming posionous.
Whether it be members of the Executive throwing around the term 'Zio' (a term for Jews usually confined to websites run by the Ku Klux Klan) with casual abandon, senior members of the club expressing their 'solidarity' with Hamas and explitictly defending their tactics of indiscriminately murdering civilians, or a former Co-Chair claiming that 'most accusations of antisemitism are just the Zionists crying wolf’, a large proportion of both OULC and the student left in Oxford more generally have some kind of problem with Jews. The decision of the club to endorse a movement with a history of targetting and harassing Jewish students and inviting antisemitic speakers to campuses, despite the concerns of Jewish students, illustrates how uneven and insincere much of the active membership is when it comes to liberation. [emphasis added]
For the orchestrated smear campaign against Labour's left and Palestine solidarity supporters this utterly bogus statement marks the kick-off.  Shortly after that I did a little post noting:
It all looks very strawman. Let's break it down a bit:
 members of the Executive throwing around the term ‘Zio’ (a term for Jews usually confined to websites run by the Ku Klux Klan) with casual abandon.
The term, "Zio" is simply short for Zionist and is not confined to sites run by the Klan.
That could and should have been that but the Oxford University Labour Club seems to have decided that supporting the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians and other forms of racist oppression against them is a price worth paying for, well, I'm not sure what for.

They submitted themselves to an inquiry by Baroness Royall which she then reported on to the so-called Jewish Labour Movement.  JLM used to be called Poale Zion or Workers of Zion.  They are active within the World Zionist Organisation.

Something Zionists do when they dare not make a direct allegation of antisemitism is accuse an organisation of "institutional antisemitism".  This is how the Zionists exploit the Stephen Lawrence murder and subsequent inquiry but that's another story.

Where was I?  Oh yes.  Baroness Royall in her investigation of Oxford University Labour Club couldn't find any specific instances of antisemitism and couldn't even report that she found evidence of institutional antisemitism:
I know that you will share my disappointment and frustration that the main headline coming out of my inquiry is that there is no institutional Antisemitism in Oxford University Labour Club.  That is true, but it is only part of the story.  I am clear that in the OULC there is a cultural problem which means that Jewish students do not always feel welcome.

This is downright weird.  Unable to find specific instances of antisemitism she looked for "institutional" and couldn't even find that.  So she fell back on "cultural" which looks deliberately meaningless to me.  But what else?
Words like ‘Zio’ and tropes such as ‘blood libel’ are obviously anti-Semitic but there are other words in which the context in which they are used is critical so guidance is necessary.  
How anyone can seriously liken a simple abbreviation like Zio to the idea that Jews killed Christian children to use their blood for unleavened bread for the Passover is beyond me.  I'm going to have to ignore the fact that Baroness Royall has implied here that Oxford Uni students actually promote the blood libel without her giving any examples or evidence but what's she on about Zio being "obviously antisemitic"?   Apart from Alex Chalmers, I never saw it being raised as an issue and the use of Zio has been around ever since we all started typing more than talking.

Now this bogus allegation definitely starts with Alex Chalmers.  Since he made an issue of it David Aaronovitch and the Community Security Trust's Dave Rich have both weighed in on Twitter but never before February this year.

Here's Dave Rich:
And here's Aaro:
Clearly Aaro and Rich have never heard of Avi Mayer, a leading Twitter voice of hasbara:

Avi Mayer's no slouch when it comes to bogus allegations of antisemitism.

Off the top of my head I could remember hasbara blogger Bob from Brockley using the expression "Zio"  in comments in both his and my blog so I googled "Zio Bob from Brockley".  I found this post from 2010:
Izzy/Pal and Zio/Anti-Zio: Ignoblus has been reading some of the same things as me (Linda Grant, Tony Judt, Ralph Seliger), and has interesting things to say.
Note how he says "Izzy/Pal" for Israel/Palestine.  Kind of chumsy and casual.  And straight after that, "Zio/Anti-Zio".  Now in real life Bob from Brockley is Ben Gidley, a Zionist academic.  He even did a sub-report for the All Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Antisemitism.  Search the report.  Not a mention of "Zio".  Why not?  It wasn't and isn't a thing, that's why not.  And if it was, Ben Gidley could hardly denounce his alter-ego.  That would be like Clark Kent denouncing Superman.

What about Wikipedia?  Here is the current Wikipedia entry disambiguating Zio:
Zio can refer to the following:

 It's interesting that the Zionist thing only comes up at the bottom.  What decides the order? I wonder.  Let's check the edits.  The penultimate edit was back in March 2015.  Here are the details:
This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Discospinster (talk | contribs) at 12:44, 23 March 2015 (not sourced). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.
Zio can refer to the following:
I don't know what the editor changed from previously but that was the last edit before a later one added in the Zio as an abbreviation for Zionist but here's the latest:
This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Sammy1339 (talk | contribs) at 14:57, 15 March 2016. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.
Zio can refer to the following:
Now this is actually wrong.  Remember hasbaristas, Ben Gidley and Avi Mayer?  They are hardly Zios With Attitude.  Zio isn't necessarily pejorative, it's descriptive.  And as for "often regarded as antisemitic", how about "recently claimed to be antisemitic".

The involvement of David Aaronovitch and some huckster from Gerald Ronson's private army. Sorry, did I say Gerald Ronson's private army?  I meant the Community Security Trust, in promoting this bogus allegation suggests to me that the Zios are going to dig in on this one.   I would further guess that they'll press on with this without providing any evidence for their claim that the word Zio is only or even mostly or often found on far-right websites and in defiance of evidence that no one considered "Zio" problematic before a wannabe Israel lobbyist couldn't find anything else to throw at the Oxford University Labour Club when it voted to support Israeli Apartheid Week.

Now my big worry over all this is that it seems like a small part of what is a very big smear campaign by the Zionist movement against Israel's detractors.  Using the word "Zio" doesn't seem like an issue worth fighting for and maybe we shouldn't fight over it, we should just use it as casually as we (and they) have done in the past.

The significance of this is that it is yet another false allegation of antisemitism and that false allegation is being used to bar honest anti-racists from political activity and to even incite violence against them.  It's only a small word, not a whole word even, but if a senior antisemitism hunter can bring it up in the same sentence as the "blood libel" then it ought to signal that it means a lot to the Zionists to use it as yet another way of victimising Israel's critics.

Some people might avoid using the word Zio in future so as not to give the Zios another thing to whinge about but to accept it was ever a real issue would be bad faith; a bad faith acceptance of a demonstrably bad faith allegation of antisemitism.
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May 18, 2016

Who sneers at "AsaJews" and says Jews have "big noses and loud behaviour"?

Well search the internet for examples of the usual suspects like certain Islamists and neo-Nazis and if you turn up anything at all it will probably be quotes from the various Zionist sites I linked in my previous post.

But I remembered writing to the Jewish Chronicle in response to a libelous article by David Aaronovitch.  I've been published there before, at least twice in response to pieces by Aaro but the time I had in mine proved beyond question that he is a bare faced liar and so they wouldn't publish. My letter's here and I remembered roughly the last bit:
Still, in these ecumenical times I think it's nice that a non-Jew such as David Aaronovitch can write for the Jewish Chronicle but when he invokes stereotypes like "big noses and loud behaviour" I'd say he's crossed a line. Surely in the JC a Jew's anti-Zionism is preferable to a gentile's anti-Semitism.
I actually found my old post whilst looking for the David Aaronovitch article that prompted it.  What I couldn't find was the article by Aaro.  It could be that the JC smartly disappeared it.  But not to worry. I smartly pasted a copy (together with a running critique) here.  Here's the bit I was referring to at the end of my letter:
Ah yes, say some readers, we are way ahead of you. Mr Elf and Mr Greenstein are archetypal “self-haters”. They are typical Jews who hate Jews (an organisation, come to think of it, which would complete the long, self-indulgent list of Jews For or Against This or That). They wish somehow to lose their unwanted Jewishness by currying favour with the goyische welt. They like the Nobel prizes and the comedy, but they don’t want to be associated with the big noses and loud behaviour in Waitrose
He actually goes on to say:
The boycotters, and especially the Jews for Boycotts, are not self-hating Jews — they’re adolescents. It isn’t themselves they hate, but Daddy and Mummy. In fact, they’re so vain they probably think this piece is about them.
Clever huh?  So according to Aaro, Jews have big noses, are loud and Jewish parents are Zionists?  In case you think he missed an antisemitic stereotype like say the money thing, here's how he started the piece:
It has long been one of the perverse talents of British middle-class activists
So there we are, according to David Aaronovitch, Jews have big noses, are loud, Jewish parents are Zionists and we are all middle class too.  I must remember that when I spend 12 hours in a minicab I don't even own.

Now why couldn't I find Aaro's masterpiece on Google except on my own blog?  Maybe he got the right to be forgotten.  Dodgy characters can do that when they've been rehabilitated out of their dodginess but Aaro hasn't.  He hasn't changed at all.

And that brings us to the antisemitic AsaJew put down.  The latest campaigner against "antisemitism", Baroness Royall, makes a specific point of this one in her blog post for the UK Labourite wing of the World Zionist Organisation:
Many students reported that should a Jewish student preface a remark “as a Jew …” they are likely to face ridicule and behaviour that would not be acceptable for someone saying “as a woman …” or “as an Afro-Caribbean”.  This should not be tolerated.  
We need to note here that Baroness Royall offers no evidence of what she claims but if you google AsaJew you will pretty much only find Zionists throwing this particular antisemitic putdown around. Aaronovitch is not just not an exception, he even offers advice on when or how it should or can be used or abused:
Of course Aaro works for Murdoch, probably the biggest Zionist in Christendom, and typically also antisemitic:
And as a JC regular he also works for Stephen Pollard, assuming the editor of the JC is the commentator's boss. And here's Pollard:

Of course no one has to pay for Aaro's racist outbursts at The Times or the JC but he is also something of a regular on BBC Radio 4 and if you live in the UK, as I do, and you own a television, which I do, you do have to pay for the BBC so most Brits have to pay for David Aaronovitch one way or another.

So while the Labour Party is allowing Zionists to goosestep all over it, silencing criticism of Israel amid a welter of bogus allegations of antisemitism,  those most likely to hurl antisemitic abuse at their political opponents are given a free, indeed a paid for, hand.
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October 30, 2015

Guardian Opinion Editor denies all knowledge of Guardian Editorial Opinion

An utterly bogus hasbara piece on The Guardian website titled The Guardian view on the war of knives in Israel and the West Bank and subtitled Editorial prompted an interesting twitter exchange.

Here are some chunks from the editorial:

For openers:
Off-duty soldiers go jogging with submachine guns slung across their chests. Men and women who have never owned a firearm hesitate at the door of gun shops after the laws on weapon ownership were relaxed. People eat at home, and plan their trips to the supermarket or their bus journeys to avoid the places where the Palestinian stabbing attacks, which have surprised and frightened Israelis in recent weeks, seem most likely.
The issue here is "the Palestinian stabbing attacks" and the Israeli response.  Palestinian actions couldn't possibly themselves be a response.
On the Arab side, parents worry that a loved son or daughter will decide to trade their own life for that of an Israeli, or that a family member will be caught in crossfire.
Not deliberately killed by Israelis simply for being Palestinian.
at the last count, nine Israelis dead, although with more than 60 Palestinians killed as armed Israelis reacted to the attacks or tried to forestall attacks they thought imminent. The Palestinian dead include some who were demonstrators, not perpetrators, some who were killed in error, and some who just got in the way. 
Wow, a concession to the idea that Palestinians might, just might, get killed by Israelis simply for demonstrating.

Well it was only a small concession and it was soon marred by this little gem:
For one thing it is hard to imagine that the influence of jihad movements beyond Israel’s and Palestine’s borders has not played a part in inflaming young minds, a development that must be bad news for both Israelis and Palestinians.
Which brings us to Twitter and a tweet from Ben White:
He quickly followed up with a question to Jonathan Freedland whose profile page at The Guardian reads:
Jonathan Freedland is the Guardian's executive editor, Opinion, overseeingComment is free, editorials and long reads.
Here's the question:
And here's Jonathan Freedland's response:
Then David Aaronovitch appears in the thread:
"Well, you know..", as Ben White points out, it's in Jonathan Freedland's job description and he often opines in The Guardian and elsewhere in favour of Israel.  I'm fed up with embedding, copying and pasting but you can follow the thread for yourself where you'll see that Aaro seems to be saying that there are lots of people at The Guardian with the same JD and who write about Palestine.  But I think there is only one person with the JD which states, that the person in question is the Guardian's executive editor, Opinion, overseeing Comment is free, editorials and long reads and that is Jonathan Freedland.

Now surely that makes it fair to assume that Jonathan Freedland was responsible for an editorial comment at The Guardian or if he's not directly responsible he could "provide some insight into how such an 'observation' made it into the editorial."

He claims that he can't.

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June 26, 2015

Knowing the difference between Antisemitism and Anti-Zionism

David Aaronovitch had an article in The Jewish Chronicle a few weeks ago where he commends Sarah Annes Brown for spotting the antisemitism of one of the organisers of the recently postponed Southampton University conference on Israel.  It's a quirky piece but, typically, it ends up taking a swipe at the anti-zionist left.

Let's see how he starts:
What with one thing and another, I followed the spring furore over the "Israel" symposium at Southampton University only rather loosely.....

What I hadn't realised is how far gone some of the conference's animating spirits are in what I can only call the New Judeophobia. The gap in my education was filled this week with the latest edition of the magazine Fathom and an article by Professor Sarah Brown, anatomising the thinking of the Southampton academic and symposium organiser Oren Ben-Dor.
See that?  Maybe you didn't notice but Aaro only followed loosely what had been appearing all over The JC, for which he writes, for weeks before and after the event was postponed and the JC article he linked to no longer appears on the JC site but he snapped up and eagerly devoured the latest edition of the mouthpiece of Israel lobby group, BICOM, for which he doesn't yet write. Strange for a self-styled "non-Zionist" but let's read on:
One of the more unwelcome phenomena of recent life in the broad diaspora has been the appearance of a certain kind of Israeli exile who insists on telling us how bad Jews are.
See that?  In the previous paragraph he hadn't known about what in the next paragraph he describes as "phenomena of recent life".  Fast learner this guy.

And the next paragraph is a flat contradiction of the "recent life" one which, as we've seen contradicted the one before that.
until last week I had imagined that Mr Atzmon was more or less unique
So "recent life" began last week.

But for all that nonsense I think Aaro's understanding of what Sarah Annes Brown wrote was fair and in turn her understanding of Oren Ben-Dor was fair too.  And here is Aaro's take:
his article is entitled "Occupied Minds: Philosophical Reflections on Zionism, Anti-Zionism and the Jewish Prison..... it argues that Zionist and most anti-Zionist Jews are captives of the same primeval Jewish mindset, and that it is this mindset that, in effect, provoked antisemitic reaction, right down to the Holocaust itself.
In other words, Jews have been asking for it throughout history, and in fact quite like it when they get it.
Actually he misses the bit where Ben-Dor says that the nazis had to become like Jews themselves in order to carry out the holocaust but I suppose that's relatively small beer against the central thesis. Actually to give Sarah more credit than Aaro does, she refers to Ben-Dor's methodology such as it is by mentioning his penchant for "dark suggestion" over hard evidence, or indeed any evidence. But anyway, where does Aaro go with all this?
What is depressing about Ben-Dor is that 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.
Now that was the bit that had me sending an email to the JC as follows:
Dear Sir

If nothing else the now "postponed" University of Southampton conference on the legitimacy or not of the State of Israel has raised the profile of one of its organisers, Oren Ben-Dor.

Ben-Dor's antisemitism was noticed and blogged by anti-Zionist Tony Greenstein back in 2008 whereas David Aaronovitch has only just noticed it.

In fairness, that doesn't tell us anything about David Aaronovitch's perception of antisemitism. The Board of Deputies knew nothing of Ben-Dor's warped world view when it lobbied the University of Southampton to cancel the conference using "two lines of attack...legal and health and safety".  Note, not antisemitism.

Zionists John Strawson and Geoffrey Alderman were going to address the conference. Neither of them raised any issue about Ben-Dor.

Even on the Israel advocacy and self-styled anti-antisemitism blog Engage, Zionist academic and racism expert Ben Gidley failed to mention any issue with Ben-Dor.  Engage's Dr David Hirsh simply said that Ben-Dor "has come to the defence of an open antisemite", not that he is antisemitic himself.

Given his low profile, Oren Ben-Dor has flown below the radar of most activists, both Zionist and anti-Zionist.  So why does David Aaronovitch berate the left and Palestine solidarity supporters over a failure to "tell the difference between progressive thinking and "essentialist" bigotry"?

It might even be that in defence of the State of Israel, Zionists have made so many bad faith allegations of antisemitism they can no longer differentiate between the crying of "wolf" and the wolf itself.

Yours faithfully
Now as luck would have it the JC didn't publish my letter.  I say it's lucky because one usually incisive blogger, Louis Proyect, the Unrepentant Marxist, has decided to prove Aaro at least partly correct by publishing a lengthy and tedious defence of quite a high profile American antisemite by the name of Alison Weir.

Now Louis Proyect's take on the various antisemites rearing their heads mostly on the internet has ranged from dismissive (Atzmon) to disgusted (Moon of Alabama & MRZine).  He's never been supportive before and I haven't noticed him being evasive when challenged before now.  Anyway, here's his post, which as I said is a guest post.  When asked why he was defending Weir he asked the questioner to elaborate. I reckon evasion is all Louis Proyect has when challenged over this post but I'll update if anything changes or maybe even if nothing does.

UPDATE 3/7/2015 09:51 - I'm being told by supporters of MRZine that Louis Proyect was smearing by association when he denounced them here.  I really don't know enough of what he was talking about to comment on that - though others may wish to.  What I have noticed in Louis Proyect's post titled, MRZine regular circulates anti-Semitic filth, is the logic he employs could easily apply to his own decision to publish support for an antisemite and a promotion of engagement with white supremacists.

See this from the post itself:
It doesn’t really matter if Chandan did not write this filth himself. He made the decision to publish the article by Muhammad Nasr, a long-time anti-Semite who writes for http://freearabvoice.org/.
And here's Louis in the comments:
I don’t think that MRZine is “promoting” these views, only that one of their favorite bloggers is too stupid to have noticed that an article he put on his blog was garbage.
I still don't know much about this but Louis has certainly published garbage on his blog with the guest post from this Amith Gupta.  He might not have realised what he was posting when he first posted it but when it was brought to his attention that Alison Weir has plenty of form for antisemitism in her own right without getting into her "repeat and friendly" associations with white supremacists he went into denial, blocked critics on twitter, started hurling insults around and ended up simply lying.  I also noticed that in spite of the post being about antisemitism and definitely not about Palestine, he has tagged it to Palestine and not to antisemitism.  It suggests to me that he does have the good sense to want the post buried and forgotten eventually and certainly he doesn't want it compared and contrasted with his usual position on antisemitism.  But given his ducking, diving, insulting, lying and blocking I don't suppose we'll ever know why he hosted a guest post by someone who wants antisemites to enjoy credibility in the Palestine solidarity movement.

All in all I have been shocked by Louis Proyect's sheer lack of integrity. The guest post was at best disingenuous and Louis's defences of it, such as they were, have been worse. I know that many bloggers let their egos get in the way of their integrity but what is genuinely sad is that Louis Proyect has shown such appalling judgement in all this
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August 27, 2014

When Dodgy Dave met Uncle Joe

I had a bit of a twitter exchange with David Aaronovitch the other day.  I went into it with some trepidation because I thought some troll might pop up to derail the thread, simply insult Dave's interlocutor or even come out as a zionist sympathiser having been anti-zionist in the past.  I even thought that Dave himself might be on good form but it was not to be.

It all started when I noticed an unremarkable tweet from @ejhchess to @Flying_Rodent:
From David Aaronovitch's "logical" tweet I saw Dave angrily challenging someone called i was id (@iwasid to "Find me a single thing either of us has said or written that supports right-wing racism anywhere. One."

Well as coincidence would have it I noticed something Dave had written only the day before for the Jewish Chronicle that I thought was racist so, with some trepidation (see above) I mentioned it in a tweet:


To which Dave replied:
To which I responded:
And another guy joined in:
 And Dave responded, warming to his subjectivity theme:

 At this point it started to look like he wasn't simply being slippery, he really didn't know what was racist about generalising about whole minority groups so I explained:
Now he did start to get slippery:
 Yes I did know it was about France but how does that change anything?

I also mentioned that his last tweet was a non sequitur but now tetchiness was setting in as a nerve seems to have been struck:

Wow! What was that all about?  How does using "surely" amount to Stalinism?  Reading back I wish I hadn't used the word surely because it should have been clear by then that he really didn't know that his generalisation was racist.  Also I if I didn't say "surely" I could have put the apostrophe in "countrys" making it "country's".  Still never mind, it was worth the bad grammer to see Aaro lose it like a complete idiot.

It must have been while I was tweeting something else that Aaro tweeted to a @rico_hands and me that "You retweeted this earlier: "The Zionist Jews own all the Media the Film Industry and are all Corrupt."  It didn't look like a comment I'd approve of and I said so and Aaro said it wasn't me, it was that Rico chap.  I know some people put all their addressees at the beginning of a tweet but if you're making an accusation you should only put the target of the accusation at the beginning and other addressees at the end.  Just a word on protocol because people can get the wrong idea. Anyway, I asked Aaro for a link and he told me it wasn't me that retweeted it.  So that was nice.

But I still responded to the stalinist thing:

 So now he tried to modify what he actually said:

 Now actually I don't think that's much better but is better in that it's not a generalisation.  But it is a rather bland assertion and it's devoid of any analysis as to what he means by antisemitism or any explanation as to why he thinks it's the case but anyway back I came still focused on the undeniably (though he did deny it) racist  generalisation:

 Noticing that Aaro's reference to antisemitism meant that he was alluding to Jews when he said "old ones", I asked then what he meant by "new minorities" but heard no more from him.

Now all the while this was going on I was surprised that no one came along to help Aaro dig himself out of the hole he had dug.  None came until that Gerasite/Unrepentant Jacobin chap, Jamie Palmer appeared with this little gem:


I just couldn't be bothered with him and I was truly feeling too sorry for Aaro to point that Jacobin's use of the word "also" meant that he was agreeing with me, that what Aaro had written was indeed a racist generalisation (also).  Aaro smartly ignored the "supportive" tweet too and he was promoting the young Gerasite only recently

But what of the statement itself?  "Ethnic hatred has become a basic element in the everyday life of Israeli youth".  Of itself, it isn't making a generalisation.  As it stands it could simply be a reference to the racist environment that Israeli youth inhabits.  I found its origin just now.  It's a Ha'aretz headline.

Of course, Ha'aretz is an Israeli newspaper.  Israelis are not a minority in Israel so the headline wasn't even about a minority.  So a great help Aaro's protégé turned out to be.  He confirmed my own point about Aaro's racist generalisation and lifted a Ha'aretz headline out of context.  I'm sure he'll go far but he and Aaro have to bear in mind that context is all.
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June 26, 2013

The Growing Pain of David Aaronovitch

Below is hopefully a tweet exchange pretty much in the order that they were tweeted:
  1. @crookedfootball @DAaronovitch Perhaps it's a McGinn argument - he wasn't calling anyone a p. f., just saying that p. f.s shd be ignored...

  3. @jewssf @crookedfootball In what way were you "smeared" in that piece, Mark? Criticised, yes. Characterised, yes. But "smeared"? Nah.
  4. @crookedfootball @JackofKent I am not furious. Anyone following our exchange can see that you made an accusation you couldn't substantiate.
  5. .@DAaronovitch you impugned my motive for being AntiZionist & lied about why I described Tony Blair as a zionist @crookedfootball

  6. @jewssf @crookedfootball I described you as adolescent. In light of your tweets that seems fair.
  7. .@DAaronovitch you lied about (ie "smeared") me to make your point and you're being equally dishonest and "adolescent" now @crookedfootball

  8. @jewssf @crookedfootball No, I didn't lie about you. I just wdn't take you at face value. You dish it out industrially M, but can't take it.
  9. @DAaronovitch u think calling ppl worried about the growth of surveillance state "paranoid fantasists" isn't a smear then? #semantics
  10. @DAaronovitch no comparison between ur ad hom smears and my honest criticisms of u & u can give yourself a right of reply @crookedfootball
  11. @DAaronovitch & you did lie about me. I can take it, I just dont see why I should. You cant even take true & fair criticism @crookedfootball

There's some weird stuff from Aaro there.  His appearance on the thread at all is bizarre given that he is such a celeb these days BBC Radio 4 uses him to send out the message that the dumbing down is strategy, not a blip.

Do we need to analyse Aaro's nonsense?  Probably not but here goes:

First up, I don't know specifically what Chris Bertram was referring to about earlier smears but clearly what he links to involves smears by Aaronovitch.  My own tweet was perfectly honest. Smearing the critics of his most favoured states is a major part of Aaro's stock-in-trade.  I could understand him denying it on BBC Question Time or a radio phone in but I was surprised he popped into a thread involving, at that point, two relative unknowns.

I'm also surprised at Aaro's apparently unself-conscious projection of his own flaws onto others.  I mean, isn't it adolescent of him to get into a spat that involves a semantic argument over what amounts to a smear?

Anyway, I wouldn't have bothered doing a post on this but I got an email from Twitter yesterday telling me that since I follow BBC Radio 4 Today I might to like to follow the "similar" David Aaronovitch.  Sheesh, does BBC Radio 4 Today know this?  Should they complain to Twitter or should their listeners complain to the BBC?

I'm weary of this already but I made the mistake last night of telling someone I was going to do a post called, The Growing Pain of David Aaronovitch.  I'll tell you what, I'll get ready and go to work where I can't blog and I'll come back to this later.

What I intend is to show several instances where Aaro has resorted to ad hominem smears, usually impugning a person's motive for adopting a certain position, projection (ie accusing others of what he does wrong), contradicting himself from article to article whilst pretending consistency and even contradicting himself within the same article leaving one to wonder if anyone actually checks his stuff.

Meanwhile, check out this post on Aaronovitch on a blog that I only really discovered when it was on the verge of closing down, Aaronovitch Watch.

 UPDATE: Many thanks to Gert in the comments for saving me an easy but potentially endless job with the following comment:
I'm still inclined to say: 'Leave it, he ain't wurffit...'
Agreed! No more Aaro for now and I usually only notice him in the JC. I wouldn't have noticed him this time if it wasn't for his ludicrous denial of ad hominem smears.  Perhaps I'll come back when he comes up with another bogus redefinition of Zionism.
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