[History] edit
[At end of section] CounterPunch played a part in the media drama around WikiLeaks in late 2010 and early 2011. Regular Counterpunch contributor, Israel Shamir, was part of the WikiLeaks organisation and an associate of its director, Julian Assange,[1] and has written a series of exclusive articles for CounterPunch drawing on materials from the United States diplomatic cables leak.[2] He has also written and co-written articles for CounterPunch on what he alleges to be a campaign of harassment against Assange.[3] One of these articles, "Assange Betrayed",[4] made allegations against a plaintiff in a Swedish rape case against Assange that were widely circulated in the media.[5][6] The allegations in CounterPunch were the topic of controversy in the mainstream media.[7]
[Topics] edit
[To insert after this material: CounterPunch's "muckraking with a radical attitude" has seen it welcome contributions from a range of contributors critical of conventional wisdom on particular topics. This stance is perhaps most controversial in relation to the Arab-Israeli conflict, where its contributions are frequently critical of Israeli government actions in a way not typical in mainstream US media.[citation needed] This includes contributions from such controversial anti-Zionist figures as Gilad Atzmon, Norman Finkelstein and Israel Shamir, as well as leftwing Israeli Uri Avnery, founder of the Gush Shalom peace movement. Others include Jonathan Cook[19], Alison Weir of If Americans Knew, and Nancy Scheper-Hughes.[20]]
CounterPunch has been criticised by some Jewish and anti-racist groups for some of this material.[8][9]
- ^ Index on Censorship "WikiLeaks, Belarus and Israel Shamir" 5 February 2011]
- ^ e.g. http://www.counterpunch.org/shamir05042011.html
- ^ e.g. http://www.counterpunch.org/shamir02012011.html
- ^ http://www.counterpunch.org/shamir09142010.html 14 September 2010
- ^ e.g. David Edwards Revealed: Assange ‘rape’ accuser linked to notorious CIA operative The Raw Story 6 December 2010
- ^ "On his Twitter feed, MSNBC host Keith Olbermann (162,000 followers) links to a rambling blog post arguing that Anna Ardin, the Swedish feminist who accused Assange of rape, is an anti-Castro activist with connections to CIA front groups. Elsewhere on the Internet, NYU professor Mark Crispin Miller, the popular liberal website FireDogLake, Bianca Jagger, and The First Post (a British news website “brought to you by The Week”) all circulated the charges without an ounce of skepticism... [The original source was] one comes to an article posted on Alexander Cockburn’s far-left website Counterpunch by the writers Israel Shamir and Paul Bennett". Michael C. Moynihan "Olbermann, Assange, and the Holocaust Denier" reason.com December 7, 2010
- ^ Kate Harding "Accusations against Assange's accuser" Australian Broadcasting Company 9 December 2010; David Leigh and Luke Harding "Holocaust denier in charge of handling Moscow cables" The Guardian 31 January 2011
- ^ Tony Greenstein (Jews Against Zionism) Open Letter to Counterpunch: Who’s Afraid of Gilad Atzmon and the Holocaust Deniers? or Why Alex Cockburn Refuses to Print a Reply to Mary Rizzo What Next? 2005
- ^ Anti-Defamation League Alison Weir: Expressions of Anti-Semitism ADL.org