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.
RELATED:WikiLeaks: Iran's influence spreads like cancer Judge grants bail to WikiLeaks' Julian Assange 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.