Counterpunch Attacks Pussy Riot and Links Up with Euro Far-Right.
Alliance of ‘Anti-Imperialists’ and Euro Far-Right?Is CounterPunch now the US vehicle for the European ‘anti-imperialist’ and extreme right alliance represented by Entre la plume et l’enclume? *
The
Spanish Prisoner (a highly recommended site) signals Israel Shamir’s most recent offering.
He cites (from the latest Counterpunch) The Secret History of Pussy Riot, (Hitting the Commercial Jackpot) by Shamir.
During the trial, the defence and the accused did their worst to antagonize the judge by threatening her with the wrath of the United States (sic!) and by defiantly voicing anti-Christian hate speeches. The judge had no choice but to find the accused guilty of hate crime (hooliganism with religious hate as the motive). The prosecution did not charge the accused with a more serious hate crime “with intent to cause religious strife”, though it could probably be made to stick. (It would call for a stiffer sentence; swastika-drawers charged with intent to cause strife receive five years of jail).
He comments,
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.
Shamir should know about this: he regularly writes for the Revisionist and Holocaust denial site Entre la plume et l’enclume.
He has written on Holocaust denial,
The legal enforcers of the Holocaust want us to bow down to the idol of Jewish superiority, or else! They won’t jail Deborah Lipstadt for denial of the Holocaust of Dresden, or Guenter Lewy who penned a lengthy piece entitled Were American Indians the Victims of Genocide? denying the genocide of native Americans. The Jews produced and published these denials for the same reason they published the Satanic Pictures – in order to emphasise the difference between a goy and a Jew. They want you to remember: you may profane Islam and Christianity, but not Judaism. You may discount the suffering of anybody but the Jews.
We have dealt with his efforts to cast doubt on Dreyfus’s innocence and the announcement that Counterpunch intended to publish this.
Apparently Counterpunch is ‘left-wing’.
It continues to reproduce Shamir’s material.
It will be interesting to see how New Left Review mentions (or does not mention) Alexander Cockburn’s career in Counterpunch and his ties with Shamir in their next issue.
* For information on this site and its Holocaust denial see here. 
