This is a cross post by Effendi from The Spittoon:
A shoddy piece of smear-mongering against The Spittoon perpetrated byProfessor David Miller of the University of Strathclyde has recently come to our attention:
It has also exposed The Spittoon, a McCarthyite operation run by members of Centre for Social Cohesion in collaboration, for a while at least, with members of the government funded Quilliam Foundation.[25] This expose was not well-received by the interests behind The Spittoon. The website first tried to intimidate the Powerbase researcher who had made the discovery with threatening emails, followed by a smear campaign, which was coordinated with an allied attack blog, Harry’s Place.[26] Shortly afterwards a similar smear campaign was also directed against the founder of Powerbase. Several neoconservative operators have also tried to use legal threats to shut Powerbase down. In June 2010, Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens of the Centre for Social Cohesion, a frequent contributor to The Spittoon, successfully pressured Powerbase’s British domain name registrar to temporarily shut down the website.
A quick run through the baseless lies and accusations made in this text are in order.
1) The Spittoon is a blog which accepts the writing of a group of friends and associates. The Spittoon has never been “run” by “members of Centre for Social Cohesion” nor by members of the “government funded Quilliam Foundation”.
2) No threatening emails have ever been sent to any Powerbase researcher by anyone associated with The Spittoon. If David Miller thinks there are, he is free to publish them and prove their existence.
3) The Spittoon has published a number of pieces on David Miller and the attack sites run by he and his team of “researchers”. It is not known what exactly David Miller’s motivations are for initiating these attacks via his sites: SpinWatch, SpinProfiles and the now defunct NeoCon-Europe; they also includes the blog PulseMedia, run by Miller’s protégé, Idrees Ahmed. They have consistently attacked and smeared specific Muslims (such as Ed Husain, Shiraz Maher and others) seemingly because they are opposed to anti-semitism or are opposed to Hamas and other theocratic genocidal Islamist movements in general. Perhaps Miller considers these attributes to be unacceptable, otherwise why would he employ lies and smears in his character assassinations of them on his numerous websites?
It is worth clarifying what David Miller’s definition of The Spittoon’s “smear campaign” entails. As far as we can tell, it has consisted of a number of articles by Shiraz Maher which reported the fact that someone on his team had cited the prominent neo-Nazi academic Kevin MacDonald, to explain the political behaviour of Jews.
They are worth reading again here and here.
Of course, in the gripes he lists against The Spittoon, Miller is careful to exclude this uncomfortable fact because he obviously knows only too well that this is exactly the sort of inadvertent disclosure that would do his academic reputation no credit. Perhaps Professor Miller’s gripe with The Spittoon has nothing to do with the baseless lies that he has fabricated but more to do with real facts that he has chosen to leave out.
