I am highly critical of the New Statesman and how its comments boxes are often full of anti-Jewish racism, but this piece by Kapil Komireddi is very informative:
“In December 2010, Israel Shamir, a WikiLeaks associate and an intimate friend of Julian Assange — so close, in fact, that he outed the Swedish women who claim to be victims of rape and sexual assault by Assange — allegedly travelled to Belarus with a cache of unredacted American diplomatic cables concerning the country. He reportedly met Lukashenko’s chief of staff, Vladimir Makei, handed over the documents to the government, and stayed in the country to “observe” the presidential elections.
When Lukashenko pronounced himself the winner on 19 December 2010 with nearly 80 per cent of the vote, Belarusians reacted by staging a mass protest. Lukashenko dispatched the state militia. As their truncheons bloodied the squares and streets of the capital, Minsk, Shamir wrote a story in the American left-wing journal Counterpunch extolling Lukashenko (“The president of Belarus … walks freely among his people”), deriding the dictator’s opponents (“The pro-western ‘Gucci’ crowd”, Shamir called them), and crediting WikiLeaks with exposing America’s “agents” in Belarus (“WikiLeaks has now revealed how… undeclared cash flows from the U.S. coffers to the Belarus ‘opposition’ “).
The following month, Soviet Belarus, a state-run newspaper, began serializing what it claimed to be extracts from the cables gifted to Lukashenko by WikiLeaks . Among the figures “exposed” as recipients of foreign cash were Andrei Sannikov, a defeated opposition presidential candidate presently serving a five-year prison sentence; Oleg Bebenin, Sannikov’s press secretary, who was found dead in suspicious circumstances months before the elections; and Vladimir Neklyayev, the writer and former president of Belarus PEN, who also ran against Lukashenko and is now under house arrest.
Did Assange at this point repudiate Shamir or speak up against Lukashenko? No. Instead he upbraided Ian Hislop for publishing an article in the Private Eye that exposed Shamir as a Holocaust denier and white supremacist. There was, he claimed, a “conspiracy” against him by “Jewish” journalists at the Guardian. Addicted to obedience from others and submerged in a swamp of conspiracy theories, Assange’s reflexive reaction to the first hint of disagreement by his erstwhile friends was to hold malign Jews responsible.
His subsequent attempts to distance himself from Shamir were undermined when James Ball , a former WikiLeaks staffer, revealed that not only did Assange authorise Shamir’s access to the cables — how else could he have got hold of the documents from this impenetrably secretive organisation consecrated to transparency? — he also stopped others from criticising Shamir even after news of his Belarusian expedition became public. “
Soupy One 