Digital state secrets exposer WikiLeaks has employed an Israeli-Swedish anti-Semite and Holocaust-denier, according to reports published this week in American and Swedish news outlets.
According to New York magazine and Reason magazine, a WikiLeaks spokesman confirmed that a self-titled "leading Russian-Israeli writer" who goes by the name "Israel Shamir" works for the organization as its content aggregator in Russia, where he selects and distributes cables to Russian news outlets.
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A similar report was made by the Swedish Radio program Medierna, in a broadcast this week in which it stated that "Israel Shamir represents WikiLeaks in Russia."
Shamir's website doesn't give any solid confirmation of his employment at WikiLeaks, but it does have on its home page a very prominently displayed picture of Shamir and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, reportedly taken at the organization's headquarters in Sweden. In the picture, Shamir stands behind Assange, looking into the camera as the WikiLeaks founder types on a laptop.
In an entry titled "On the Good Ship Cablegate," Shamir refers to Assange as "our real-life Neo," battling what he describes as the matrix of "American Imperium," a reference to the 1999 Wachowski brothers' action film. He also describes Assange as being hounded by "castrating feminists and secret services."
Shamir has a shadowy past and present that is hard to pin down or confirm. His official biography on his website says that he was born in Novosibirsk, Siberia, in 1947 and moved to Israel in 1969 where he served as a paratrooper during the Yom Kippur War. He later reportedly worked for the BBC and translated the works of Nobel laureate Shai Agnon from Hebrew to Russian.
Along the way, he published a number of anti-Israel and arguably anti-Semitic books including Cabbala of Power, Galilee Flowers and Masters of Discourse.
Shamir also goes by the names Joran Jermas and Adam Ermash, having received the latter title in 2004 when he was baptized into the Greek Orthodox Church of Jerusalem. He is a Swedish citizen and spends much of his time in Stockholm.
Other entries on Shamir's website make his feelings on Israel and Jews and the Holocaust clear. In one titled "Return of the Body Snatchers," Shamir defends Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet's 2009 report that IDF soldiers stole organs from dead Palestinians, saying, "It fits into a larger pattern. All over the world, Israel and Israelis are involved in trafficking human flesh, this modern form of cannibalism."
The website includes other defenses of blood libels and one entry that states "Jews asked God to kill, destroy, humiliate, exterminate, defame, starve, impale Christians, to usher in Divine Vengeance and to cover God's mantle with blood of goyim," and that "the picture of Jews slaughtering children for cultic reasons exerted huge impact on the Christian peoples of Europe."
Other writings by Shamir show him to be an avowed Holocaust-denier, including one entry where he says the Teheran Holocaust Conference of 2006 "proved that the Holocaust dogma is a basic tenet in the great world-embracing brainwashing machine of mass media," and added that the prevalence of Holocaust awareness and education "show that the mass media machine is well integrated and concentrated in philosemitic, mostly Jewish hands. The occupation of Palestine by Jews is painful, but it is not more harmful than this captivity of free discourse."
Shamir, who purports to live in Jaffa, could not be reached by e-mail or phone for comment on Thursday. |
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