We know that Jenna Delich circulated a link to an article by a far Right conspiracy theorist, Joe Quinn, on the website of the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, to the UCU Activists email list. That article claimed:
“Yet the Israeli government does a very good job of convincing the whole world that it is the victim in the conflict. How can this be? Israeli control of the press? Could that ubiquitous “conspiracy theory” actually be closer to a conspiracy fact?”
This was not the first time that Jenna Delich has recommended far Right conspiracy theory material. Here is the text of an email she end to the list, back in May 2008:
[Jenna.Delich@XXXX]
Sent: 24 May 2008 22:05
To: UCU activists e-group
Subject: Re: [activists] UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian
Affairs on GazaFYI
http://www.countercurrents.org/polya150508.htm
Jenna
JENNA DELICH
The article to which she links is by an Australian called Gideon Polya. Gideon Polya is a biochemist who knows a good deal about biochemical targets of plant bioactive compounds. He makes time in his busy life as a “zany scientist” for his other loves: painting and the works of Jane Austen. Polya is also a committed environmentalist, and has written a book entitled “Jane Austen and the black hole of British history: Colonial rapacity, holocaust denial and the crisis in biological sustainability”.
Oh, and he also has a fun sideline in conspiracy theorising about Zionist power, and how Mossad and the CIA carried out the acts of mass murder on 9/11.
Here’s what Polya has to say in the the article that Jenna Delich circulated:
However the real problems of the World have got catastrophically worse for the World in the last few years while the West has been obsessed with the dishonest, racist, murderous, Zionist-inspired War on Terror (indeed according to former president of Italy, law professor and intelligence intimate Francesco Cossiga the initiating 9/11 atrocity was actually committed by the US CIA and Israeli Mossad in the interests of US and Zionist hegemony: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/18569/26/).
There is one problem with Polya’s thesis. Cossiga, the former President of Italy was being sarcastic, and parodying the views of anti-Berlusconi conspiracy nuts. He made it very clear that he was not a conspiracy theorist at all in a later interview.
The notion that Cossiga was affirming the 9/11 Troof thesis is pushed by Polya, because he is a credulous fool whose mind is bubbling over with feverish thoughts of Zionist plots. And it was circulated to British academics on the UCU Activists List because this is her mindset as well.
What are the lessons to be learnt from the Delich affair? First, that Delich did not make an isolated mistake when she pushed a far rightists’ Zionist Occupation Government thesis: and that it is reasonable to assume that Quinn and Polya are the sort of thinkers who inform her world-view. Secondly, that the UCU did nothing about this conspiracy-mongering on the Activists List, and rejected complaints about it, until their hand was forced. Thirdly, that Delich is accepted by many of those who are active in pushing the boycott of Israeli academics as a comrade: one of their own. They see nothing wrong with the views which Delich recommended. They think it was wrong of us to highlight them.
I wonder how many of them share those views.