I think Tim Ireland is a bit silly. There. I’ve said it.
We met when the Guardian did an article about us, and then we had a nice lunch afterwards. Tim seemed OK to me.
I have never really followed Tim’s site. At my last place of work, it was categorised – surreally – as pornographic, and so I couldn’t access it. However, when looking at it from home, the articles struck me as over long and complicated, and often relied on the reader having an in depth knowledge of previous arguments and campaigns by Tim, without which they were incomprehensible. I think I may disagree with him politically, but I don’t really know what Tim’s politics are.
Tim was also the subject of some pretty outrageous libel threats from a chap called Alisher Usmanov, who succeeded in getting his website taken down, temporarily. I supported him over that. He also supported us when Jenna Delich’s supporters had our site taken down, for pointing out that she had circulated material from far Right websites on the UCU list. He also spoke up for us when we received a libel threat from a fugitive Hamas commander, Mohammed Sawalha.
Now Tim is in trouble, again. He proved that a free range nutter, Glen Jenvey, had been impersonating Muslims on a website called Ummah.com, and then selling the product to the Sun, who used one of his “revelations” to run a wholly bogus story about Alan Sugar being on a jihadi hit list. Jenvey, you will remember, has now joined Al Muhajiroun.
Anybody who knows the history of Ummah.com will appreciate that it is the home to some pretty extreme and nasty people. It was excellent that Jenvey was exposed. It is a pity that a way could not have been found that didn’t have the effect of assisting Ummah.com, but there you have it. I think that Tim is insufficiently concerned about extreme and vicious Islamist political movements.
This is a footnote to the main purpose of this post. There is a group called The Cheerleaders, who are Situationists. They appear to have threatened Tim with violence. I do not think that they are likely to attack Tim, but it is a terrible thing to be at the receiving end of threats like that.
Richard Bartholomew reports:
As I blogged a few days ago, a group called “the Cheerleaders” (apparently connected to a music band called “the Fighting Cocks” – see my blog entry here) has been harrassing Tim Ireland by posting his home address in various places on-line, in the specific hope that “everyone [he’s] pissed off” will see it. They have also made threats of violence – which they have later deleted – such as “machete to your throat”. Now Tim reveals that that their leader, who goes by the stage name of “Ludas Matyi”, has sent an email declaring his intention to come around to Tim’s house for a fight:
Fuck it, I’m coming round to your house in the week. Fight or no fight?
Fighting on the internet is never a great idea, as far as I’m concerned. Threatening to fight somebody in person, however, clearly crosses the line.
I very much hope that these attacks on Tim stop, and until they do, he has my full support, for whatever that is worth.