WikiLeaks and the Belarus affair

Our post “Enough with the Julian Assange hero worship” has accrued nearly 3,000 hits in three days (compared with a typical 300 or less in this period), as well as 59 comments—overwhelmingly negative. Ironically, some readers have urged us to stick to our “typical” posts, implying that we have no right to air a dissenting opinion on the WikiLeaks affair. These same readers have never commented on (and probably rarely read) our painstaking daily reports on human rights in Western Sahara, environmental disasters in Guatemala, peasant uprisings in Peru, et cetera.

And they still fail to seriously address (or, mostly, to address at all) the most grave allegation against WikiLeaks, which has received virtually no coverage from the mainstream media—that WikiLeaks’ representative in Belarus, the notorious anti-Semite Israel Shamir, actively provided dictator Alexander Lukashenko with intelligence on dissidents who were then rounded up and tortured by the hundreds.

The original page now has so many comments that it is having trouble loading. The discussion will continue here, if Assange’s defenders care to keep posting. I have titled this page “WikiLeaks and the Belarus affair” in an effort (probably futile) to provoke some honesty on this issue.

Fire at will…