Mondoweiss' fundraising hoax

As reported here yesterday, the blog Mondoweiss first published, then rescinded without explanation, a fundraising plea falsely claiming the blog needed help because it was "under Israeli attack".  When a regular reader who had seen the original version posted a sympathetic comment asking what form the Israeli attack on Mondoweiss had taken, an editor of the blog was forced to admit that the charge had been false, but failed to explain how it came to be published.  The headline was changed to something innocuous  and the fraud was forgotten.  (Read here.)

At the suggestion of someone who read my initial post about this, I went back and found a cached version of the original post with the fraudulent headline.  Here's a screen shot of it:

Mondoweiss fundraiser with fraudulent headline

That fundraising pitch, while signed by the blog's co-editors Philip Weiss and Adam Horowitz, was posted by a Mondoweiss blogger by the name of Alec Kinnear (read here).  The Vienna-based Kinnear not only blogs on Mondoweiss, he also maintains his own blogs.  From one of them, we learn that Kinnear believes that 9/11 was "probably" done by the Mossad under the direction of Dick Cheney (read here), and that Rachel Corrie was murdered on the direct orders of Ariel Sharon in order to gauge the American reaction (read here).  On another blog he maintains, we learn that Kinnear was an admirer of the late neo-fascist Austrian politician Jörg Haider (read here), although, oddly, he fails to mention Haider's troubling politics.

It is impossible to know for certain which of these three Mondoweiss bloggers, Weiss, Horowitz or Kinnear, wrote the fraudulent fundraising headline which falsely claimed that the blog needed help because it was "under Israeli attack".  That question has not been addressed on the blog.  We do know that Kinnear has made no secret of his bizarre political opinions -- in fact, he has expressed them on the Mondoweiss website, where he writes that he literally worries that Israel will stage a covert op to disrupt a benefit for the blog (read here).  That a person with such views has unsupervised blogging privileges at Mondoweiss, and that the blog entrusts its fundraising to him and lets him post as true completely false reports which they then delete without explanation, raise serious questions about Mondoweiss and its editors -- questions about journalistic ethics and judgement which the blog should address.

If any readers of this post think these concerns inflated, consider the following.   If a blog publishes a false report in order to raise funds, would you consider that an attempted fraud?  At the very least, having been caught soliciting money from their readers based on a falsehood, wouldn't that blog owe their readers a full accounting of how this happened and an offer to return any funds raised via deception?

Moreover, doesn't Mondoweiss owe its readers an explanation of their lapse in judgement in granting Alec Kinnear unsupervised blogging privileges on their website?  After all, his bizarre political views are on the public record.

Kinnear, in fairness, has written in his own defense that he can't be an anti-Semite because, he says, "I have many Jewish friends and colleagues".  Yet, in the column that elicited that familiar defense (read here), he predicted the following for Jews:

Logically the quandary is thus posed:

--the state policies of Israel are totally unacceptable to civilised man
--it is our duty as a state to oppose these Israeli policies
--many Jews support these policies and other Jews support these policies clandestinely, indeed Jewish advisors led America into this preposterous war
--thus no Jew can be trusted in government any longer, as he may be working against his own state to support the inhuman policies in Palestine

In the Spanish Inquisition, many Jews would convert superficially to Catholicism but continue to practice their faith, until discovered. At that point, the unfortunate Jew (and others) would suffer persecution if not death, until finally the Jews were driven from that country. A similar unwelcome fate awaits Jews around the world if this madness cannot be stopped.

Philip Weiss and Adam Horowitz recently published a column which used neo-Nazi leader David Duke's term to define Zionism and opposition to anti-Semitism: "Jewish supremacism".  (Read here.)  Now they have turned over some of their blog's fundraising to someone who admires Jörg Haider and predicts a reprise of the Spanish Inquisition.   In spite of all this, they claim that their blog represents a "progressive Jewish" point of view.  (Read here.)  Can a legitimately progressive and Jewish point of view include common ground with the opinions of David Duke,  Jörg Haider and Torquemada?  At what point will Mondoweiss' sponsors and readership look at this madness and say "enough"?


[NOTE (7/11/11): In the hours since this was published, Mondoweiss editors have scrubbed some of the webpages discussed in this post from their website in an apparent attempt to cover up the fraud.  A cached version of the revised fundraising pitch and the attached comment by an editor indicating that the initial report was false is available in cached version here.  A report about Mondoweiss' cover-up featuring screen shots of the some of the deleted documents can be read here.]

Below, screen shot of Alec Kinnear's column entitled "Farewell Jörg | Abschiedsbrief Jörg Haider", which eulogized far-right politician Jörg Haider: