While this article is from 2007 its never too late in my opinion to remind people that the anti war moement is usually more pro war but on the side of the enemy. Like how code pink actually supported Islamic insurgents during the Iraq war. There is a myriad of evidence showing direct support for Sadam and after, various groups in Iraq fighting the US led coalition.
The Socialism of Fools: Reports From The Front
UPDATE: Is it possible that there’s not just one but two neo-communist, pro-Islamist, Jew-bashing Canadian translator-journalists who live or lived until very recently in Tashkent, Uzbekistan? “Simon Jones” admits he’s using that name as an alias, but he says he’s not Eric Walberg. He also says Adolph Hitler “copied the zionist programme to the letter” so take what he says with a grain of salt; besides, his former editor outed him. When I called Metta Spencer, editor of Toronto’s Peace Magazine (which has run articles about Uzbekistan under both bylines, Walberg and Jones), to find out more about this Eric Walberg character, I asked who “Simon Jones” was, and Metta said: “Oh, that’s his pseudonym. He needed a pseudonym because of where he was living, you see.”
For an account of the recent strategy sessions in Cairo that brought together Canadian and British “anti-war” activists with some of the world’s most violent and sinister Islamists and jihadists, the English-speaking world was obliged to rely almost exclusively upon an account (“Anti-Globalists Reach Out to Islamists”) in the Egyptian weekly Al Ahram, written by a certain Canadian by the name of Eric Walberg.
There was something odd about his report, I thought. There was a weirdly euphoric tone about it, and it was also a kind of hybrid as these things go. It was partly a celebration of the ongoing convergence between the Islamist far-right and a certain far-left groupuscule that has insinuated itself into the leadership of the “anti-war” movement (in Canada, it runs the Toronto Stop The War Coalition, the umbrella Canadian Peace Alliance, the War Resisters Support Campaign, etc.). The report was also partly a work of dutiful stenography, in service to the conference participants themselves.
Curious to know why this Eric Walberg would be so happy about the moral squalor he had witnessed and participated in, I made some conventional journalistic inquiries about him. You can make up your own mind about whether the result adequately explain Walberg’s obvious delight at the prospect of an ongoing convergence of the far-left and far-right. You can make up your own mind about how significant the Cairo conference was in that phenomenon.
Walberg, who appears sometimes to write under the pseudonym Simon Jones, is a Canadian economist and a frequent contributor to Canada’s Peace Magazine, a reputable journal based out of Toronto. Walberg has also been a regular contributor to the deliberations of a notoriously anti-semitic thinktank known as the Adelaide Institute, whose leader, Frederich Töben, has done hate-speech jail time in Germany. Töben was one of the more prominent guests at Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust-denial conference last December.
A survey of Walberg’s writings show that he regards Jews as having been the authors of their own misfortunes over the past 2,000 years, and all the great wars of the past century can be laid at the feet of shadowy Zionists – even the “still mysterious collapse” of the World Trade Center in New York on September 11. He has written approvingly of the contents of the Protocols of The Elders of Zion – that classic text of pathological Jew-hatred.
As far as I can determine, Walberg’s last real job was a public-relations gig in Tashkent, in the Office of Uzbekstan President Islam Karimov – a dictator who reportedly murders his opponents by boiling them in oil. I’ve also confirmed the substance of an Adelaide Institute report that Walberg was turfed out of Uzbekistan after being sloppy in the work of hiding his identity behind the pseudonyms he adopts. Writing favourably about underground Uzbek Islamist groups was not so smart, it would seem.
I should point out that it was with the help of a fellow journalist and Walberg’s former friends and associates in Canada that I assiduously confirmed Walberg’s impressive cirruculum vitae – his degrees from Cambridge, from the Pushkin Institute in Moscow, and so on – and his strange trajectory from a Stalinist campus “peace activist” in Toronto to true-believer in the restoration of the Caliphate, as well as his various personae and noms de plume.
