Why does CounterPunch, which is ostensibly a left-wing website, continue to post articles by the neo-fascist nutjob, Israel Shamir? You only have to read Shamir’s website to see that the guy is crazy. Yet he is apparently not too crazy to be published by CounterPunch.
CounterPunch has just posted an article by Shamir entitled The Secret History of Pussy Riot. In it, he repeatedly refers to the members of the band by the misogynist term, “viragos”. This fact alone should have been sufficient reason to reject the article. Alas, it’s actually even worse than that. Shamir argues that the Putin government was right to send these women to prison for merely expressing their opinions. He writes:
- Two years’ sentence is quite in line with prevailing European practice. For much milder anti-Jewish hate talk, European countries customarily sentence offenders to two-to-five years of prison for the first offence. The Russians applied hate crime laws to offenders against Christian faith, and this is probably a Russian novelty. The Russians proved that they care for Christ as much as the French care for Auschwitz, and this shocked the Europeans who apparently thought ‘hate laws’ may be applied only to protect Jews and gays. The Western governments call for more freedom for the anti-Christian Russians, while denying it for holocaust revisionists in their midst.
Why does CounterPunch insult its readers by posting this garbage? The kindest thing one can assume here is that they didn’t bother to read this article.
Shamir has ties to the Lukaschenko dictatorship in Belarus. When David Irving was sentenced to prison for Holocaust deanial, Shamir wrote:
- Thus we should say: David Irving was sentenced for denial of Jewish superiority. His doom seals the reign of (albeit limited) freedom that began with the fall of Bastille. European history went full circle: from rejecting the rule of Church and embracing free thought, to the new Jewish mind-control on a world scale. Not only is Western Christian civilisation dead, but even its successor, secular European civilisation, has met its demise only a few days after its proud and last celebration by the Danish scribes. It was short-lived: about two hundred years from beginning to the end, the Europeans may once have had the illusion that they can live without an ideological supremacy. Now this illusion is over; and the Jews came in the stead of the old and tired See of St Peter to rule over the minds and souls of Europeans.
This is anti-Semitism, plain and simple. The Breivik shootings in Norway have shown that fascism is still a force to be reckoned with. Yet the editors of CounterPunch apparently think it is all a joke.
August 30, 2012 at 11:12 am |
Perhaps they publish this because Counterpunch is not a left-wing site.
August 31, 2012 at 9:24 am |
You may be right, but many leftists look to CounterPunch as a source of information. I find all this frustrating.
August 31, 2012 at 10:14 am |
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