The left is tip-toeing away from Julian Assange today. Like Cindy Sheehan and other lefty heroes who eventually showed themselves to be loony toons, Assange revealed himself to be just another bottom-dwelling computer hacker who harbors bigoted beliefs.

The New York Times:

A report published by a British magazine on Tuesday said the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, suggested that British journalists, including the editor of The Guardian, were engaged in a Jewish-led conspiracy to smear his organization.

[...]

The Private Eye article quoted Mr. Assange as saying the conspiracy was led by The Guardian and included the newspaper's editor, Alan Rusbridger, and investigations editor, David Leigh, as well as John Kampfner, a prominent London journalist who recently reviewed two books about WikiLeaks for The Sunday Times of London.

When Mr. Hislop pointed out that Mr. Rusbridger was not Jewish, Mr. Assange countered that The Guardian's editor was "sort of Jewish" because he and Mr. Leigh, who is Jewish, were brothers-in-law. Later, the article recounted, Mr. Assange asked Mr. Hislop to "forget the Jewish thing," but he continued to insist there was a conspiracy against WikiLeaks based on the friendship among Mr. Rusbridger, Mr. Leigh and Mr. Kampfner.

Evidently, Assange is contesting his characterizations to the Private Eye of a "Jewish" conspiracy. And since the source is a media outlet with about as much respect in Britain as a supermarket tabloid here in the states, we would certainly like a little more verification.

But despite the denials, one wonders why Assange's Russian "content aggregator" is a proven Holocaust denier? Reason Magazine has the lowdown on some of Assange's employees:

During an appearance on Echo Moskvy radio, Yulia Latynina, a reporter at the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, wondered "What does it mean that Assange is allowing himself to be represented by an extremist?" Latynina also found that the Kremlin-friendly paper working with Shamir to promote the WikiLeaks material had already published "outright lies" Shamir claimed were supported by leaks. According to Latynina, Shamir faked a cable related to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's speech to the United Nations, which supposedly showed collusion amongst those who walked out of the talk in protest. That he would invent such a cable is perhaps unsurprising, considering Shamir has previously written an encomium to the "brave and charismatic leader" of Iran. 

So let us quickly recap the foulness of Shamir's political views. As I noted last week, he has called the Auschwitz concentration camp "an internment facility, attended by the Red Cross (as opposed to the US internment centre in Guantanamo)," not a place of extermination. He told a Swedish journalist (and fellow Holocaust denier) that "it's every Muslim and Christian's duty to deny the Holocaust." The Jews, he says, are a "virus in human form" and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is real.

But wait, there's more!

The Swedish media has identified Shamir's son, a disgraced journalist named Johannes Wahlström, himself accused of anti-Semitism and falsifying quotes, as a WikiLeaks spokesman in Sweden. Indeed, Wahlström has authored stories based on the WikiLeaks material for the newspaper Aftonbladet and is credited as a producer on a recent Swedish public television documentary about the group.