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- Dumb Idea Hall of Fame by Aaron David Miller, Foreign Policy
- Nadine Dorries threatens Cameron's Party Leadership by Nadine Dorries, Daily Mail
- Boris set for party leadership? by Traci Watson, USAToday
- Anti-Israel students deface Star of David at student conference by Jonny Paul, Jerusalem Post
- Jihadist Videos on University Facebook by Rupert Sutton, Huffington Post UK
- Skintland: Heads I Win, Tails You Lose by Alex Massie, Spectator UK
- Green tax on conservatories by James Slack and Tamara Cohen, Daily Mail
- Saudi princess: What I'd change about my country by Staff writers, BBC
Huffington Post UK runs into “smears” accusations over Norwegian massacre
An attempted 'takedown piece' by Charles Delalande for the Huffington Post has led to great embarrassment for Arianna's British flagship.
Less than a month after launching in the United Kingdom, the Huffington Post UK has blundered into a potentially damaging scandal after smearing right-wing writers for their alleged reticence in condemning Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik.
In an article entitled, “Breivik: The Strange Silence of Right-Wing Bloggers” Charles Delalande castigated London Mayor Boris Johnson for saying that Breivik’s actions were not motivated by “ideology or religion" but by sexual inadequacy. This, he said, was in stark contrast, with Johnson’s appraisal that “Islam is the problem” in the wake of the July 7, 2005 bombings on the London transport system.
But Delalande reserved his most vitriolic remarks for Douglas Murray, Melanie Phillips, The Spectator, and Standpoint Magazine accusing them of being conspicuously slow or entirely silent on the matter with the strong inference that this is because they have some degree of common cause with a fellow exponent of “Christian cultural conservatism”.
In two angry phone calls with Huffpo staffers, Douglas Murray, associate director at the Henry Jackson Society, described the inference as scurrilous, adding that to accuse someone of not having written publicly about such recent events was a smear of the lowest order. Murray, in any case, has written a piece on the subject which is slated to appear in a respected publication over the weekend.
In the second phone call, heard by The Commentator, he asked a Huffpo staffer whether he had written anything about the Madrid train bombings which took place in 2004. He hadn’t, more than seven years after the bombings took place!
Murray warned the Huffpo that its time in Britain would be short if it persisted in libeling people in this manner.
At which point, the Huffington Post agreed to remove references to Murray from the story.
However, accusations against Boris Johnson, Melanie Phillips, the Spectator and Standpoint remained up at the time of writing.
In a the-lights-are-on-but-nobody’s-home sort of way the bio of the author of the article says that he “is writing a novel about the ideological roots of militant Islam which he hopes will make people less worried and a bit happier”.
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HuffPost will struggle in the UK. They are caught between mainstream press and thought leadership and are getting it horribly wrong. They are living off their US status/traffic at the moment, but that won't last. Libelous journalism like this just reinforces my opinion they have swaggered into the UK way bigger than their boots.
Another company f**ked by AOL.
National SOCIALISTS and neo-National Socialists are on the LEFT - I cite Hayek (The Road to Serfdom) and Goldberg (Liberal Fascists), whose appendix (pp.410-413) quotes the Nazi programme point by point and it's Socialist nature is undeniable.
Shame that they seem to forget that Boris Johnson is part Turkish Muslim, so l doubt he has anti muslim feelings.
OK so the piece wasn't taken down (contrary to your picture), they extracted one paragraph after being threatened with yet another abuse of this country's draconian libel laws.
obviously it's a cheap shot by delalande but it's no different from what people like phillips say about muslims when there's an islamist terror attack. fair, next.
Huffpo UK - its like the Guardian on prozac.
As a right winger I can honestly say that the Norwegian scumbag who murdered those poor children has nothing to do with the "right wing".
Not once have I heard him state anything regarding:
* Low taxes
* Small state
* Free market.
Thats right wing to me - not murdering children in cold blood.
OK?
When Murray was on 'Secure Freedom Radio' - a bonker US website - a couple of days ago he spent most of his time whinging that 'certain parties' would be trying to make political capital out Oslo. He had virtually nothing to say about the attack or about how Breivik had been radicalised.
Very telling
Telling of what, 'J Bond'? If you have something to say, say it and take the full liabilities of libeling someone with that. Chicken?
It's 'telling' of the fact that a) No one knew enough to speculate - something Murray doesn't do unlike nonsense lefty types and b) of the fact that the Speccie were PAYING him to write on this for them - so why would he give the best away free to some random radio station?
Fool.
J Bond, So when Islamists carry out atrocities and tell us that they are following the word of god and the allegedly infallible prophet, we are told by the wise sages of the left that we mustn't blame the messenger, the Koran is sacred, that the hundreds of thousands of radical Islamists that support and perpetrate these atrocities are an insignificant minority and that we must not use them as an excuse to denigrate others.
When an atrocity is carried out by a man who merely makes mention that he likes the writings of a neo-con author you dive straight in like a 3 year old on a bouncy castle, blaming anyone you can think of who doesn't agree with your pathetically naive world view.
The word hypocrite is too good for the likes of you.
I don't get it. We're supposed to be pleased because a well connected journo bullies a website into altering a blog? Either it is libellous, in which case they would have printed an apology (as far as I can tell they haven't) and offered some kind of settlement, or it isn't. Since there's no apology this looks as though it's another case of our crazy libel laws defeating free speech.
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It's fantastic that Douglas Murray will finally be wading into this morass by writing a piece, which will appear a full 168 hours too late.
Let's hope that something remains for him to preserve, after the Left have had a full week to systematically delegitimise virtually everything he stands for.