WikiLeaks and Israel Shamir

WikiLeaks's spokesperson and conduit in Russia has been exposed in the Swedish media as an anti-semite and Holocaust denier; his son, who represents the organisation in Sweden and is handing out stories to selected papers there, has been involved in an earlier scandal where a story he wrote about the supposed Israeli control of Swedish media was withdrawn after several of the people in it complained of being misquoted.

While this does not affect the credibility of the WikiLeaks revelations, it does raise uncomfortable questions for the whistleblowers' organisation.
The two men involved are Israel Shamir, a Jew who has converted to Orthodox Christianity and passionate antisemitism, and his son Johannes Wahlström. Shamir was listed as a co-author of a story in Counterpunch, which suggested that the woman who brought a complaint of rape against Julian Assange was a CIA plant. But he has a longer and stranger past than this would suggest.

According to Magnus Ljunggren, a retired professor of Russian literature at Gothenburg University, Shamir has had at least six different names, among them Izrail Schmerler (as he was born in Novosibirsk, Siberia), Jöran Jermas, Adam Ermash, but is internationally known as Shamir. He has been a Swedish citizen since 1992.

In an interview with a Swedish Holocaust-denying creationist and Islamist named Mohamed Omar, headlined "The Holocaust is an idol", Shamir says:

"Antisemitism is an invented concept without any real meaning. I don't believe antisemitism exists at all. In the Jewish religion it is an article of faith that Jews and gentiles must hate one another. That's where so-called "antisemitism" comes from. It is a Jewish article of faith. I have met many so-called "anti-semites" and I haven't found a single one of them who hates Jews. I agree with Joseph Sobran, who said that an anti-semite is not someone who hates Jews, but someone whom the Jews hate. Most people don't care at all about Jews, let alone hate them. But, as I say, the idea that gentiles nurture a hatred of Jews is a Jewish article of faith, and has nothing to do with reality."

His latest book, in Russian, is called is called How to Break the Conspiracy of the Elders of Zion.

His son, Wahlström, is even more remarkable because he is more outwardly respectable. He has been employed in various journalistic capacities by the Swedish state broadcaster, SVT, by the newspaper Aftonbladet, and by the leftwing magazine Ordfront. The magazine was forced to retract and to apologise for a story he wrote in 2005 about supposed Israeli control of the Swedish media, which contained quotes attributed to three other journalists, which they denied ever making. None the less, Aftonbladet is paying him both as a researcher and a consultant, because he has exclusive access to the WikiLeaks cable dump in Sweden and is the gatekeeper who doles out stories to favoured media partners. This use of freelance journalists is the model used by WikiLeaks in countries where it does not have a large and established media partner like the Guardian or Der Spiegel.

The other recipients of Wahlström's stories are Uppdrag Granskning, a flagship current affairs programme on Swedish television, and Svenska Dagbladet, one of the main Stockholm newspapers (owned by the same concern as Aftonbladet).

Wahlström has described his father as a persecuted intellectual comparable to Salman Rushdie, but refused to talk to a Swedish radio programme investigating the story. His father was reached and conducted a bizarre interview with them in English. Asked if Wahlström was, in fact, his son, he replied: "I have heard such things. That's what they say. I have heard this kind of rumour, but I don't intend to talk about my personal, family things at all."

He also denied that he had any special connection with WikiLeaks, though the group's spokesman, Kristinn Hrafnsson, confirmed that he was their representative in Russia, just as his son is in Scandinavia. Expressen also published a photograph of him standing behind Julian Assange at a computer, published in the Russian paper, which has been reprinting the WikiLeaks cables he passed to them.

There, for the moment, the story rests. Given the tight if murky links between the Russian security apparatus and the quasi-fascist Nationalist movement with which Shamir is associated there, it has worrying implications for the security of anyone named in the cables. This is not because the cables themselves are inaccurate, but because they are not.

I'm sorry that so many of the links are in Swedish. ACB