Indymedia UK

27Mar11

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The Geniza blog designed to save Indymedia UK from antisemitism has a recent update on the end of Indymedia UK, on the further unravelling of Gilad Atzmon, and on the exposure of Israel Shamir. 

A recent comment thread at BobFromBrockley has more details. On one Indymedia editor (aka freethepeeps or FTP), Goodwin Sands writes:

Re the lamentable Roy Bard – you may not know that Indymedia in the UK is now undergoing a major reorganization. The proposed resolution is apparently entirely about reducing the power of Bard’s collective and their first-among-equals don’t-you-forget-your-place-mate attitude. That attitude was first displayed full-grown during the Atzmon donnybrook, when quite a few IMC types expressed aghast disgust at the decision to give Atzmon a platform, only to find themselves denounced as “zionists” by Bard. (This puts them in the same category as Elf , Greenstein, and Rance – also “crypto-Zionists” in Bard’s eyes.)

Bard’s problem is that he is unshakably an acolyte of Israel Shamir. Bard encountered Shamir in the West Bank when he was young and naïve and even now believes him to be an innocent shining soul done in by Zionist smears. And if Shamir calls Atzmon a crusader for justice, then Bard simply doesn’t have the mental equipment necessary to consider any other possibility, no matter how many other Indymedia workers he must shout down to maintain his illusion.

Waterloo Sunset adds:

Sadly, I think it may be too late to save Indymedia from the Bardites. It’s now a haven for troofers and the Tony Goslings of this world. It’s noticable that most of the class struggle anarchists abandoned it as a lost cause ages ago. As did the militant antifascists (at least of some of which is likely to be linked to the fact that the latter really didn’t get on at all well with Bard).

And Goodwin Sands again, referring to the post I linked to at the top here:

The Geniza blog isn’t quite right about the fate of the current IMUK site; it will still exist, but frozen as an archive. Neither the new aggregation site nor the new site for the ‘Indymedia UK’ collective – renamed ‘Mayday’ – will use the indymedia.org.uk URL. In other words, they are going from first-among-equals to actual equals. This is all discussed on their open mailing lists. But because ‘Mayday’ isn’t associated with a geographic area like the others, it’s possible that it will simply drift into the least-among-equals aether over time. On the other hand, it might become Indymedia’s special home for conspiracists, the Cloudcuckoo Collective, as trooferism seems to be one of the issues that prompted the ‘fork’. Re Tony Greenstein’s catalog of Atzmonisms, it’s good to have a single place to point to. But the raving first comment shows that to Atzmon’s acolytes, any attack on Atzmon draws calls of being anti-Palestinian. To put it bluntly, that’s ftp ‘logic’: screeching

See also my post from a year ago about another Atzmonite in a similar milieu, Jay Knott. For previous posts on Israel Shamir: here.

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• Chomsky Reconsidered – Indymedia Ireland (chomskywatch.wordpress.com)
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• Assange recruited Holocaust denier – former WikiLeaks worker (thejc.com)
• Guardian reader pulls out anti-Semitic Khazar myth (cifwatch.com)
• Holocaust denier in charge of handling Moscow cables (guardian.co.uk)
• Guradian contributor Rachel Shabi HEARTS Israel Shamir (cifwatch.com)
• Some Arab conspiracy theorists seeing WikiLeaks-Israel link (jta.org)

Filed under: Anarchism, Another anti-capitalism is possible, Fascists in the anti-globalization movement, psuedo-alternative culture, the anti-Zionism of idiots   |  2 Comments
Tags: Gilad Atzmon, Independent Media Center, indymedia, Indymedia UK, Israel Shamir