Johann Hari admits copying and pasting interview quotes

[Streathamite]

Oh dear. Naughty, naughty, Mr. Hari. He claims to loathe the Daily Heil, yet at the same time he can't resist 'borrowing' a rather sizeable quantity of copy from the Heil to spice up his own work:

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/guy-walters/2011/07/ann-leslie-india-hari-british

A liar, a plagiarist and a hypocrite. A truly sterling example of the most honourable, ethical, finest attributes of British journalism.

oh fucking hell, this is just getting beyond ridiculous now.
If blackhurst keeps him on, he'll have made the worst start possible as Editor

 

[Idris2002]

Oh dear. Naughty, naughty, Mr. Hari. He claims to loathe the Daily Heil, yet at the same time he can't resist 'borrowing' a rather sizeable quantity of copy from the Heil to spice up his own work:

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/guy-walters/2011/07/ann-leslie-india-hari-british

A liar, a plagiarist and a hypocrite. A truly sterling example of the most honourable, ethical, finest attributes of British journalism.

You cannot hope to bribe or twist,

Thank god, the British journalist.

But seeing what the man will do,

Unbribed, there's no occasion to.

 

[frogwoman]

"

Ann Leslie's article in the Daily Mail, 1997:

The long Indian train clattered and screeched to a halt somewhere in the middle of nowhere. A sudden silence.

And then the screams. My mother clutched me to her, covered my eyes, told me not to be scared, there was nothing to worry about.

And there wasn't: not for us, at least.

Not for a freckled British memsahib and her missy baba, her equally freckled little daughter, sitting alone in the shabby first-class compartment of what was to become one of the 'killing trains' in the world's largest post-war holocaust.

Johann Hari's interview with Ann Leslie in the Independent, 2004:

She draws unusually heavily on her ominpresent cigarette now. She was sitting on a train in her teens and "the long Indian train clattered and screeched to a halt somewhere in the middle of nowhere. A sudden silence. And then I heard the screams. My mother clutched me to her, covered my eyes, told me not to be scared, there was nothing to worry about. And there wasn't: not for us, at least. Not for a freckled British memsahib and her missy baba, her equally freckled little daughter, sitting alone in the shabby first-class compartment of what was to become one of the 'killing trains' in the world's largest post-war holocaust."

bloody hell that's particularly shameless.

Has he actually done any real interviews?

 

[sihhi]

2003 column "Another country that wants a US invasion" had a lie exchange with Noam Chomsky

the brave and often inspirational African liberation movements from the 1950s to 70s called simply for Africans to be given their own space to develop freely. But the result of this approach, where it has been tried, has, alas, also been a disaster. Liberia, abandoned by America since the end of the Cold War, has sunk ever deeper in blood and psychosis.

There is, however, another way. It is described by Michael Ignatieff, the theorist of the Kosovo war and of humanitarian intervention, as "imperialism lite". This model requires rich countries (and not just the West: in comparative terms, South Africa, for example, is rich) to intervene in failed states, so long as the people in that state clearly want us, in order to ensure stability and a transition towards a more liberal democratic system.

The best possible example of this "imperialism lite" was carried out by our own government... The success of that country is now a standing retort to cynics like my historian friend. Even Noam Chomsky, the chief critic of American and British foreign policy, told me at a New Statesman lunch that he thought Sierra Leone was "perhaps" the one genuine example of a humanitarian intervention - but, he added, "that's probably because I haven't looked into it properly."

Chomsky's response:

"I have no idea whether I met him at the lunch, but I certainly didn't 'admit' anything of the sort. Rather, I stated that Britain in Sierra Leone might be an authentic example of humanitarian intervention. And there was no 'although'; another flight of the Hari imagination. Rather, I stated that I hadn't looked into it more closely. The reasons are not his silly inventions -- which tell us a lot about him; more below -- but rather a moral truism, that I have repeated to the point of boredom, and did again at the lunch: a person is responsible for the anticipated consequences of his or her own acts, and if capable if comprehending moral truisms, will therefore focus finite energy and attention on them -- +focus+, which does not mean, as the subservient intellectuals like to pretend, keep to them exclusively.
...
Those who do understand moral truisms and elementary facts will understand at once why, in a life with finite time and energy, I wouldn't undertake the kind of research project about Britain in Sierra Leone than I do about issues for which I share responsibility, which I can influence, and which therefore should take priority. That would be true even if I had not again explained the obvious, in monosyllables, at that lunch. The fact that he would resort to these idiotic fabrications tells us a lot about him; even more, perhaps, than his apparent utter inability to comprehend moral truisms." (Email to Media Lens, November 29, 2003)

Another dodgy Iraq interview from 2003. Who speaks like this in these quotes?

The IPO will be starting a campaign calling for a mass movement across Britain and America that does not call simplistically for immediate withdrawal from Iraq, but instead urges the coalition to begin a steady transition to democracy, alongside the cancellation of all Iraqi debt. This will be launched in opposition to the End The Occupation rally on September 27 being organised by a coalition of Trotskyite and Islamic fundamentalist organisations. Yasser describes the demonstrations as "totally unhelpful. If the occupation did end tomorrow, Iraqis would be traumatised and appalled." For information about the IPO campaign, see www.iprospect.org.uk.

Yasser adds: "There's something I'd like to say to your readers. People who really care about Iraqis should join us in fighting for democracy in Iraq and for the debts accumulated by Saddam to be cancelled. Join Jubilee Iraq [a group campaigning against Saddam's debt, conctactable at www.jubileeiraq.org]. Argue for the Governing Council to be strengthened. Support us. Don't spend your time hoping that Iraq fails just so you feel better about opposing the war."

He is holding Sama's hand. They smile. Suddenly, I have a strong sense that they – and perhaps Iraq – are going to be OK.

Incidentally the IPO was a media PR exercise to sell the war to Western public http://www.iprospect.org.uk/media.php

Children of Western-minded middle-class Iraqi exile families (not a criticism of them) don't berate Westerners by adding things like "just so you feel better about opposing the war".


I am also suspicious of Hari's 2008 column "Yes, for welfare you must be made to work" about his friend Andy.

a. It's an open invitation to ruin a friendship by naming a friend in public as a dirty sponger, so why call him "my best friend from school".
b. A "best from school" ... you doss about aged 16, you go back to school, cambridge, edit the uni newspaper, write a prizewinning play staged at the edinburgh festival 2001 "I've been coming to Edinburgh for five years", then become a frontpage pictured columnist in the new statesman and indie ... after his 15 years of total unemployment until aged 31 you mention him to make sure left-wing people support cuts in welfare.

If you want a parable of this lost potential, look at my best friend from school, Andy. When we were teenagers, we would skive off together and hang about in the Trocodero centre, playing arcade games and smoking spliffs in the toilets. After our GCSEs, we dropped out. For a year we mooched around London, watching old films, playing video games, and – as all teenage boys do – moodily hating the world.

But at the end of that year, some impulse, some need, made me go back to do my A-levels, while Andy stayed in his house and mooched some more. He went onto benefits – and, with a few brief swings around the New Deal, he has never come off; not in the 15 years since. He is clever and funny and he could be making an amazing contribution, but inactivity is infectious. Once you sink into it, it consumes you. The muscles of work soon atrophy; you become convinced you can't do anything. With each year that passed, he saw the world of work as more alien. Andy has reacted to his worklessness with listless depression; lots of other young men respond with aggression.

Andy is hardly a lone anecdote. There are more than a million young "Neets" – Not in education, employment or training – in Britain today. We have a higher proportion than any other OECD country. Go to the place where I was born – Glasgow East, site of the potentially Brown-busting by-election this Thursday – and you will see them spreading before you in great concrete estates of poverty. You can taste the ennui in the air. Ask the kids what they want to do when they grow up and they shrug with heartbreaking indifference and say, "Dunno".

This event from Finsbury Park Mosque bookshop from a 2001 interview with Abu Hamza also sounds like bullshit:

As I browse in the mosque bookshop after the interview - deliberating whether to buy the video Jihad Combat Tips: for the armed and unarmed - a man in his early twenties rushes in. Not noticing me, in a state of extreme tension, he says to the three other blokes there: "The halal butcher was punched in the face this morning by a kaffir." "Where?" somebody asks, with perhaps a hint of scepticism in his voice. "Here!" he responds with irritation. "Everywhere! For years Sheikh Hamza has said we need to arm ourselves. He said we can't trust anyone. We didn't listen. Now we have to listen . . . We have to take out the bastard kaffirs before they take us out. I'm telling you, this is war."

Most Islamists rarely, if ever, swear, it's seen as a taboo. Usually they use kafir and munafik nothing else.

I call bullshit on this graffiti from Genoa too October 2001 Young, educated - and dangerous? "Anti-globalisation and al Qua'ida".

The day after the destruction of the World Trade Center, the great symbol of global capitalism, graffiti appeared in Genoa. Next to a red star - the symbol of the most hard-core anti-globalisation groups - protesters had sprayed the words "Fly Osama Airlines".

In Genoa in Italy the only comprehensible word would be Osama.
The Italian phrases are nothing 'fly' or 'airlines'.

P.S. Who on earth thinks a red star is for hardcore antiglobalisation?
The Brigate Garibaldi (Communist partisans in ww2) used the Italian flag with a red star in the middle. It means communism.
If the graffiti was there in Genoa, the chances of it being a neofascist provocation and telling us nothing about the antiglobalisation movement are quite high.


The wisdom of Johann Hari

criticising an SDPer for criticising New Labour too much

"[Ex-Labour, founder of the SDP] David Marquand takes an excessively critical view on this change [New Labour abandoning demand-led policies], and argues that in the economic domain, New Labour is "egalitarian only in the sense that it wishes to give more people the opportunity to be unequal."

"The last thing Iraqis want is for British and American troops to leave now"

"Blair should come out and tell the truth: He is a progressive politician"

"Almost any discussion of paedophilia in Britain degenerates into expressions of the paediatrician-bashing mob mentality that has swept across this country for the past few years."

 

[sihhi]

The October 2001 article "Anti-globalisation and al Qua'ida"
was actually called

"Young, educated - and dangerous?
Johann Hari Published 01 October 2001

War on Terror: Anti-Globalisation Movement - Amid website ramblings, a proposal for an alliance: between fundamentalists and anti-capitalists. Johann Hari finds affinities between the two movements"

See here http://www.newstatesman.com/200110010016.htm

features this analysis of u75 way before i was a user:

The terrorist attacks have forced the campaigners to ask themselves how far they would be prepared to go. In the aftermath, chatroom users excitedly discussed whether "we" might have been responsible. Some were horrified at the prospect, but others were more positive. One writer, on the anti-globalisation site urban75.org, said: "There has been much talk of terrorist organisations pulling together . . . Could this shift from military to economic targets herald a new era of co-operation between radical groups of completely different ideologies? By this I mean religious fundamentalist and anti-capitalist factions."

The anti-globalisation movement has many benign aspirations to enhance participatory democracy and curb corporate power. But it also has some violent and frightening adherents who are capable of the kind of terrorism being visited upon us by Muslim fundamentalists.

 

[killer b]

he's been lifting stuff off urban? that's glorious...

 

[sihhi]

He repeatedly just misquotes people like this from a review of Tariq Ali's Bush in Babylon

http://johannhari.com/2003/11/22/-b...-ali-and-hegemony-or-survival-by-noam-chomsky

In Bush in Babylon, he is trying to make the new Iraqi beat fit his old 1960s anti-imperialist tune, and the result is painful to hear. His ideological contortions have twisted his internationalism beyond all recognition. He says that the charities and NGOs such as the Red Cross are "like aliens from another planet", that will "descend on Iraq like a swarm of locusts and interbreed with the locals". Interbreeding will never do.

What Tariq Ali actually says is about the effect of private capital [charities, trusts, Soros etc] on Iraqi civil society ie its privatisation:

If a referendum on this question alone were permitted, over 90 percent of the population would vote for Iraqi control of Iraqi oil. But this is imperialism in the epoch of neo-liberal economics. Everything will be privatised, including civil society. Like aliens from another planet, once the cities are secured (if that ever happens), NGOs will descend on Iraq like a swarm of locusts and interbreed with the locals. Intellectuals and activists of every stripe in all the major cities will be bought off and put to work producing bad pamphlets on subjects of purely academic interest. This has the effect of neutering potential opposition or, to be more precise, of confiscating dissent in order to channel it in a safe direction. The message from the donors is straightforward: make some noise, by all means, but if you do anything really political that seriously affects the functioning of the neo-liberal state on any level, your funds might not be renewed. And, as usually happens, participation in serious politics is likely to be forbidden. This is then characterised as 'civil society' or 'real grass-roots democracy', cleaner and more user-friendly than any political party. Users may be limited, but the NGO salaries from the West are there to ensure that this remains the case. Some NGOs do buck the trend and are involved in serious projects, but these are an exception. Long-term experiments in Egypt and Pakistan have produced reasonable results. The main problem in both places is that religious groups have seized the day, filled the vacuum, and argued against consumerism as the dominant value in contemporary societies. There is no effective secular opposition in either country, both of which are presided over by military dictators.

It has nothing to with opposing "interbreeding", it's about stopping Western-money ruining democracy in Iraqi civil society.

 

[gosub]

While further nailing Mr Hari into a coffin of ghost written autobiographies is worthy, has anybody checked the scribblings of those immediately who leapt to his defense? Wonder how wide spread it was?

 

[eoin_k]

He has demonstrated some brass neck in the last couple of days by particpating in a panel discussion on free speech:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/press/tabloid-tactics-are-a-threat-to-free-speech-says-independent-chief-2307523.html

 

[audiotech]

For an article, published in Indian newspaper, The Statesman, in the tradition accorded to the principles of India secularism, Johann Hari states: "Just afterwards three thousand Muslim fundamentalists rioted outside their offices calling for me, the editor and the publisher to be arrested, or killed.... Believe me, that puts a twitter hash-tag into context."



Well done Mr Hari.

 

[butchersapron]

Hari, apart from praying to god for this murdoch shit to save him, has been maliciously editing wikipedia articles of journalists who've criticised him. Not since this shit kicked off, but from long before. According to this piece from the almost equally odious Nick Cohen.

 

[frogwoman]

Lol yeah he must be thanking the lord that this has come at this time ...

 

[audiotech]

'praying to god'?

Source?

 

[butchersapron]

You're not one who should be piping up on this thread are you really?

 

[audiotech]

Oh I forgot, you check all my posts, annoy you and should be shot.

 

[butchersapron]

Don't post other people's stuff as your own and you won't be.

 

[audiotech]

Academically and literally pure.

 

[butchersapron]

Don't get caught. What drives people like you to do it?

 

[audiotech]

Eye problems mainly to do with a syndrome: "Can't see, can't wee, can't climb a tree."

Sorry don't have a source for that.

 

[butchersapron]

Fresh from the hari changing peoples wiki expose, there's more to come as today regards this article: Johann Hari: How multiculturalism is betraying women

 

[frogwoman]

Ugh. More plagiarism shit or something else?

Has he written anything that ISN'T plagiarised?

 

[Mrs Magpie]

Don't know whether this has been posted yet (search can't tell me and I'm about to go out).

http://jackofkent.blogspot.com/2011/07/another-journalist-associated-with.html

 

[killer b]

it's a pathetic defense tbh mrs m.

 

[JHE]

Don't know whether this has been posted yet (search can't tell me and I'm about to go out).

http://jackofkent.blogspot.com/2011/07/another-journalist-associated-with.html

Yes, some of Orwell's most interesting books - Homage to Catalonia, Down and Out in Paris and London, Road to Wigan Pier - were fictionalised accounts of his experience. This was made clear in Crick's biography of Orwell. (In the same book Orwell came across as a less nice person than I had imagined. He was a bit of an ingrate to the people who helped and accommodated him.)

I can't see much similarity with Hari's rather dishonest write-ups of his interviews.

 

[frogwoman]

it's a pathetic defense tbh mrs m.

yep. got to agree with this.

 

[Riklet]

So has the odious shitbag clung on then? Nice connections.... someone's pulled a string or three...

I would recommend anyone who hasn't read all of this thread to go back and read Melting Pot's anger at the Hari-Hatred for some epic lols. Hari is a total saint because of that thing he did in Africa or what-ever despite lying, plagiarising, bullshitting and faux-apologising ('I admit where i'm wrong' la la la). Yeah ok! His kind of imagino-persuasive storytelling journalism is a fucking blight, although not sure if he can really be seen as a bigger 'threat' than more reactionary right-wing media types. Either way they are baying for his blood now too...

 

[Mrs Magpie]

it's a pathetic defense tbh mrs m.

Eh? I am not Jack of Kent. I just thought it was interesting and quite funny. Blimey, you are a po-faced bunch. I am not doing any sort of defence of Hari (for a start I think I've only read two or three pieces of his, ever) Where do I say I agree? I nip out to get some baking powder and come back to a jumped conclusion. Heigh-ho.

 

[butchersapron]

He didn't say that it was your defence jumper. It was comment on the shitness of the article you linked to.

 

[butchersapron]

Johann Hari, Wikipedia and a porn site: an extraordinary new development

wtf, this is getting mental, I'm not sure this one is right tbh, but...it's out there now. If this is wrong it could be Hari getting very lucky once more....

So this David Rose is a Cambridge friend of Hari, and at that time he works at the Independent as a sub on shifts. He is also well-known in the office for his disagreements with Hari.

David Rose is also something to do with Methuselah Productions. It is used as his hotmail address and (in abbreviated form) his Wikipedia address. Unfortunately whatever productions Methuselah Productions produced were not successful, as it has no easily identifiable trace on internet.


Intrigued, I asked another friend of mine - Tim Ireland of Bloggerheads what he could find. He is very good on internet searches and this sort of thing.

Well he found this piece of gay incest porn [NOT SAFE FOR WORK - link in original, i've removed it] attributed to the methuselahproductions@hotmail.com emaill address. Here is the first sentence (and I have not read any more than this).

How my little brother learned to be a whore

How much do we charge for this?" my little brother asked -- with a low moan -- as he felt my cock slide into him, my balls slapping against his ass for the first (but certainly not the last) time.

edit: you really need to read the comments on this one as well, from the original article - here

edit2: for those just reading the quote, the suggestion is that David Rose is Hari.

 

[Spanky Longhorn]

It gets better...