I'm launching a crowd-funded legal action for libel and harassment against Oliver Kamm, The Times newspaper and Rupert Murdoch. Here's why:
Oliver Kamm- cyberstalker.
A SIGN OF THE TIMES- THE VICIOUS VENDETTAS OF OLIVER KAMM, CYBERSTALKER
Neil Clark
The author of a-pro
Iraq
war book sees it critically reviewed in a national newspaper. He then spends over ten years stalking, attacking, hounding and defaming the anti-war author of the review. He even tweets the Minutes of the reviewer’s local parish council meetings in an attempt to discredit his ‘enemy’. He attacks articles written by the wife of the reviewer on the rare occasions she ventures into print. He boasts about his efforts in ‘destroying’ the reviewer’s career in a blog post.
He tweets obsessively about the 'obscure' reviewer and when the reviewers’ work is cited or praised by someone with a high profile on Twitter, he intervenes to warn them off with claims that the reviewer is a ‘fake’, a ’fraud’, a ‘crank’ and a ‘genocide denier‘.
Then, after he is finally questioned under caution of arrest by the police in relation to stalking/harassment activities, the author accuses the person he has been relentlessly persecuting of harassing him- and falsely claims that his victim has been ordered by the police not to contact him, his family and his employers!
Sounds like pretty disturbing behaviour, don’t you think? I certainly would agree, but as I’ve found out over the past decade, waging vicious vendettas - and telling lies in an attempt to destroy the reputation of his ‘enemies’ is par for the course for Mr Oliver Kamm, ‘former banker, Leader Writer and Columnist, The Times’ and author of ‘Anti-Totalitarianism-The Left Wing Case for a NeoConservative Foreign Policy’.
Kamm’s behaviour is a scandal, but even more shocking has been how powerful individuals in the British neocon Establishment have not only protected the Internet stalker, but promoted him.
My review of Kamm’s book was published by the Daily Telegraph on New Years Eve 2005. It was critical, but as reviews go, not particularly harsh- and certainly nowhere near as harsh as the bile-dripping book reviews that Kamm himself writes for The Times. What I did not know, when I filed copy, was that the book’s author was an incredibly malicious and vindictive individual with a history of cyber-stalking and online persecution of people whose views he disagreed with.
The day after the review appeared, Kamm attacked me on his blog- and accused me of not reading his book. The first of over twenty-five posts devoted to attacking/denigrating me (or my wife) over the next two years, was no mindless rant, but was clearly designed to discredit me with newspapers who commissioned my work.
Kamm’s initial attempts to discredit me didn’t work, but then there was a more sinister development. A poison-pen style email, from a ‘George Courtenay’ was sent to Tom Switzer, the opinion editor of The Australian newspaper, who regularly commissioned me. The email read:
‘I see you have published an opinion article by Neil Clark today. That's all good to print a range of views but you may be interested that Oliver Kamm of the London Times has been investigating Mr. Clark's use of sources. Mr.Clark doesn't say the same thing in his new article but as he's lied to other editors I'm bringing it to your attention'.
G. Courtenay
FW: Neil Clark sources
ST
Switzer, Tom
Reply|
Tue 21/02/2006, 07:20
You
You forwarded this message on 06/12/2015 18:47
FYI -- I have no idea who this guy is....
-----Original Message-----
From: George Courtenay [mailto:georgeco@gawab.com]
Sent: Tuesday, 21 February 2006 12:33
To: switzert@theaustralian.com.au
Cc: neil.clark@otc.ac.uk; oliver.kamm@tiscali.co.uk
Subject: Neil Clark sources
I see you have published an opinion article by Neil Clark today. That's all good to print a range of views but you may be interested that Oliver Kamm of the London Times has been investigating Mr. Clark's use of sources.
http://oliverkamm.typepad.com/blog/2006/02/more_on_balkan_.html
http://oliverkamm.typepad.com/blog/2006/02/balkan_claims_r.html
Mr.Clark doesn't say the same thing in his new article but as he's lied to other editors I'm bringing it to your attention. G. Courtenay
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‘George Courtenay’ included links to two of Kamm’s recent blog posts about me. He cced his email to Kamm.
Courtenay was asked to provide an address and telephone number- but he never responded. Suspicious about his identity, I google-searched the name and found that the only traces of the mysterious ‘GC’ was to write comments in praise of Oliver Kamm when Kamm had been criticised on a website.
After publicizing my findings about him on my blog, ‘Courtenay’ disappeared into the ether, but Tom Switzer continued to receive very similar poison emails, this time sent by ‘anonymous’, urging him to replace me.
Later on IP addresses for ‘George Courtenay’ were identified. On 24th December 2005 Courtenay - with the same email address as the person who had contacted The Australian-was posting from
Denmark
(IP address of 83.91.105. 126
(to see, scroll down to the Tom Watson MP blog post of 12/22/05 entitled ‘Oliver Kamm vs Noam Chomsky’ http://www.tom-watson.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2006/11/big1
Oliver Kamm’s wife was/is Danish.
Did Kamm go to
Denmark
that Christmas with his wife?
On 23rd December, Kamm had announced to his blog readersthat there would be ‘no posts for the next few days’- indicating that he was not expecting to post over Christmas. But he did publish a blog entry on 25th December -so clearly had access to a computer that day.
On New Years Day 2006, Kamm posted his first attack on me. We know that on 13thJanuary 2006, ‘George Courtenay’ was definitely back in the
UK
and posting on the same blog thread on TomWatson’s website from an IP address 81.155.147.174- (which was traced to Bexhill-On-Sea,
East Sussex
.) A further clue is that Courtenay/ ‘anonymous’,( in emails to Tom Switzer 3rd May 2007 and 17thOctober 2007 following publication of my articles), used words/phrases such as ‘erudition’, ‘doctrinaire’ , ‘perfervid’ ‘zealotry’ historical literacy’ ‘bounds of decency’-hardly everyday words or phrases- but all used by Kamm on his blog and elsewhere- and in some cases on many occasions. In addition Kamm‘s middle name is George.
The leader writer of the Times could easily have cleared up the George Courtenay mystery by publicly stating that he was not in Denmark at any time on Christmas Eve 2005, but
he has refused to answer the question when asked.
How should I respond to these extremely malicious attempts to destroy my career as a journalist? I decided I had no other option but to sue Kamm for defamation to prevent links to his attacks from being emailed to more of my employers. For financial reasons, I brought the case in my local County Court. But to have a libel case heard there requires the consent of the other party and Kamm did not give his consent. Instead he portrayed my putative action as an attempt to infringe his freedom of speech to criticise my work, and cast himself- not for the last time- as the innocent victim.
The attacks on me by Kamm and his mysterious trolls intensified throughout 2006 and 2007. Anonymous or pseudonymous comments, linking to Kamm’s blog posts on me, were left on websites where my articles appeared. Inquiries with one newspaper (The Guardian) revealed the sender, although he used different aliases, was posting from just one computer. Kamm regularly popped up early in the comments section of my pieces to put the boot in. Here are just a few examples:
http://www.theweek.co.uk/politics/17881/war-crime-case-against-tony-blair-now-rock-solid
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/shock-and-waugh/
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/mar/20/libya-iraq
http://davidaslindsay.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/never-ending.html
Whenever someone praised my work online, ‘Anonymous’ would arrive on the scene very quickly. A typical example was when Derek Wall, a Green Party spokesperson, described an article I had written as ‘great’ and quoted from it on his blog. ‘Anonymous’ duly arrived to warn Wall to be ‘careful’ of me, saying that I had been ‘exposed’ and copy and pasted an attack on me by- guess who? Oliver Kamm!
Kamm also regularly wrote in to publications where my work appeared claiming there were significant mistakes in my articles and asking for corrections to be published. Each time his complaint was rejected. No corrections to Kamm’s alleged significant mistakes were published.
Another disturbing development was the repeated sending of threatening/bullying comments to my blog. They often included an implied threat to ‘expose’ me for some ‘serious’ offence- asking me if such and such a newspaper which I wrote for ‘knew about this/that’- ‘offences’ which only one person in the world- Oliver Kamm- had accused me of.
The comments were clearly designed to cause me maximum distress. I identified regularly recurring IP addresses for these malicious communications. There was a large number coming from
Sussex
and the City of
London
. The
Sussex
ones tended to come in late at night, the
London
ones usually during the day time, indicating that the person was someone who commuted from
Sussex
to the capital and who was totally obsessed with Neil Clark.
Kamm fitted the bill, as he lived (until 2013), in
Hove
,
Sussex
,
and worked in
London
. Many of the
London
malicious comments sent to my blog in 2009 came an IP address which I traced to the Royal Society of Arts. I contacted the RSA to report what was going on. Then the posts from the RSA dried up. Was there anything to link Kamm and the RSA? Well, we know Kamm was at a meeting at the RSA in early 2009 and also wrote for the RSA Blog.
While admittedly this is not conclusive proof that my RSA harasser was Kamm, once again there was a link between a location from where my stalker was operating and Kamm.
In early 2008, I decided to go the police, on grounds of criminal harassment. After reading through all the material I gave them, the police phoned Kamm at his
London
hedge fund office, and by his own admission, he gave the police an undertaking that he would cease commenting on my work.
Once again, my persecutor tried to portray himself as the victim. After the police intervention, the attacks did die down for a while. But not long afterwards, it was business as usual for my cyber-stalker.
In May 2008, Kamm boasted on his blog,(in the comments section to this post
“I can reasonably claim to have done more than anyone in destroying (Neil)
Clark
's career as a political commentator“, adding menacingly: “I am not a commentator whose work will last, but I'm effective in my own way.”
But despite his barrage of attacks, Kamm had not succeeded in destroying my career. His attacks therefore became ever more desperate.
After I had complained to senior wikipedia editors over the repeated malicious editing of my page by an editor called ‘Philip Cross (of whom we’ll hear more in Part Two) Kamm popped up on the discussion page to argue for the page’s deletion on the grounds that I was ‘non-notable’. Yet despite his haughty dismissal of me as a ‘highly obscure figure’, Kamm never explained why, if that was indeed the case, he devoted so much time attacking me. In an article chronicling Kamm’s obsessive Internet smear campaigns entitled ‘The Oliver KammSchool of Falsification’ the US writers David Peterson and Edward Herman wrote “A glance at a number of (Neil) Clark's writings online shows that Kamm seeks out websites where Clark's writings appear, and then posts the same allegations against Clark over and over again, no matter how off-topic these allegations are“.
I’m not the only person to have been pursued by Kamm in such a creepy way. Peterson and Hermann have documented Kamm‘s ‘pathologically obsessive’ attacks on the US anti-war academic Noam Chomsky. “One feature of the Kamm pathology is the vendetta, and in pursuit of his vendettas, Kamm displays few constraints”, they added.
I knew the truth of that only too well.
PART TWO
In Part Two- how the mysterious wikipedia editor ‘Philip Cross’ assists Kamm in his campaigns- Kamm’s Twitter policeman routine and his war against ‘fake news channel’ RT.
The advent of Twitter gave Obsessive Oliver a new forum in which to carry out his persecution campaigns.
In addition to regular tweeting about his enemies, he also monitors very closely who retweets them, and if it’s someone he deems important enough, he intervenes to warn them off. Kamm’s smears are tailor-made to the tweeter- he writes whatever he thinks will best put them off the person he is targeting.
So when people on the Left cite with me with approval- Kamm’s strategy is to smear me as an ‘obscure far-right blogger’ and falsely claim that I’m opposed to immigration. When someone on the centre or centre-right retweets me- I’m a hardline communist.
Kamm also monitors very closely who his targets retweet too- to find them ’guilty by association’- a classic McCarthyite technique. In April 2016, I retweeted someone called Patrick Harrington, who had praised an article I had written for the Morning Star newspaper. Unbeknown to me Harrington, had been involved many years earlier in the far-right National Front party. My stalker Kamm used my retweet to try and discredit both me - and RT.
The anti-war media monitoring organisation Media Lens is also a regular target of Kamm‘s obsessive stalking. The Times leader writer is a usually very quick off the blocks when they get cited with approval - or if someone with a following clashes with them.
Media Lens wrote about Kamm’s relentless smearing of them here- in a post in which they also discussed their attacker’s own journalistic record.
Kamm works tirelessly to make sure that positive mentions of his ‘enemies’ by people of high profile on Twitter are corrected. Here is he is intervening when I was cited by Mehdi Hasan, who has over 230K twitter followers.
I have tried to ignore Kamm’s obsessive tweeting about me. But sometimes that’s not possible.
On the afternoon of Saturday November 7th 2015, I received a ‘DM’ from a Twitter follower, which said : ‘Have you got a stalker? I mentioned your name in a tweet and a certain Times ‘journalist’ crawled out of nowhere to comment. He must follow mentions of your name because there’s no way he would have seen that comment otherwise’. Yes, on a Saturday afternoon in early November, when many people in the UK would have been out Christmas shopping with the family, attending a football match or sports fixture, or watching tv, Kamm was obsessing about a journalist he calls ‘obscure’ and seeing who was citing him on Twitter. The word ‘Pathetic’ goes nowhere near to describing this behaviour, as I’m sure you’d agree.
Kamm’s regular libelling of me as a ‘Srebrenica denier/genocide denier’ is typical of his dishonesty. He bases the claim on one article I wrote for The Guardian in 2004 in which I wrote of the ‘massacre of between 2,000 and 4,000 men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995 ‘
I used these figures as I- and the Guardian editorial/comment team, believed they were probably the most accurate ones at the time. But in every subsequent published piece which I have mentioned Srebrenica I have used the higher, now widely accepted 8,000 figure- and fully accept that a genocide took place. Here I am in The Week in 2008, and in RTlast summer, on the 20th anniversary of Srebrenica.
Kamm monitors everything I write, so he would know of the later pieces ( and I’ve also linked to them when he’s libelled me). Only someone with very clear malicious intent could read my articles and then label me a ‘Srebrenica denier/genocide denier’.
Accusing people he doesn’t like of ‘genocide denial‘- usually in connection with Srebrenica, is a favoured smear of Kamm‘s. His robotic ’genocide denier’ smearing of his ‘enemies’ even led to a parody @Oliver KammBot twitter account being set up.
On the subject of Kamm’s libelling antiwar writers as ‘Srebrenica deniers’: there’s been
a dramatic new development. The
US
website Mondoweiss has published an article on the neocon smear campaign against the left-wing anti-war academic Noam Chomsky.
Internal memos from the first meeting of the Henry Jackson Society outlined the group’s main agenda. ‘One of the items on the minutes, listed prominently in fourth place, was to discredit Chomsky,‘ writes Theodore Sayeed. ‘Their tack was to allege that he is a “denier” of the Srebrenica massacre in
Bosnia
. In the art of controversy, slapping the label “denier” on someone is meant to evoke the Holocaust. Chomsky, the furtive charge proceeds, is a kind of Nazi.’ ‘The task of getting this slur into circulation was delegated to Marko Attila Hoare and Oliver Kamm’
When Kamm was first attacking me in early 2006, and trying to destroy my career as a political commentator, the Balkans historian he enlisted to help his cause was- you’ve guessed it- Marko Attila Hoare
Kamm has recently tried to distance himself from the Henry Jackson Society. But although his name no longer appears on the group’s website, he was a signatory to the statement of principles in 2005
The Times leader writer has received enormous help in his internet smear campaigns from one ‘Andrew Philip Cross’- a mysterious individual to whom we must now turn our attention.
Cross- like Kamm- follows very closely who retweets Neil Clark and Media Lens and obviously has our names on Google Alert. When I was asked via Twitter by a Sky News producer if I’d like to come on and be interviewed on Royal Mail privatisation- I found that before I had the time to reply, ‘PhilipCross63’ had already suggested that the producer got a female pundit instead.
Cross shares Kamm’s obsession with me, even publishing a blog entitled ‘Anti-Illiberal’- largely aimed at attacking my wife and I and regurgitating Kamm‘s smears.
While Cross assists Kamm’s campaigns on Twitter, his main focus is on editing Wikipedia.
Kamm wrote a piece in 2009 criticising Wikipedia, saying that ‘The loudest voices and most obsessive contributors become the arbiters of truth.’ How true. He should have addressed these remarks to ‘Philip Cross’.
Now if you make a list of all the public figures that Oliver Kamm can’t abide, you‘ll find- lo and behold- their pages have been edited-to show the subject in the worst possible light- by Philip Cross.
Media Lens are a case in point. Criticism by Kamm of Media Lens- put up there by Cross, is prominent in their wikipedia page-
When Kamm mentions Media Lens in an ‘approved source’, Cross posts links to the criticism with great alacrity. On Saturday 27th February 2016, Kamm called ML a ‘far-left’ group in his Times column on grammar- and at 15.47 that same day Kamm’s comment had been put, by Cross, on the Media Lens page.
You can read a full history of Cross editing of the Media Lens page here.
Media Lens posted Kamm’s February attack on the group on their Facebook page noting:
‘In the 'mainstream' press, nobody writes or Tweets about us more than a certain Times propagandist. Impressive that he should devote so much attention to an 'obscure far-left pressure group'
Others figures who have clashed publicly with Kamm or who don’t meet with his approval and who have had their pages edited by Philip Cross
include investigative journalist Dr Nafeez Ahmed (see the talk page here here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Nafeez_Mosaddeq_Ahmed
antiwar journalist Seumas Milne, (who is now Press Officer for Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn)
award-winning anti-war journalist and broadcaster John Pilger and the anti-war politician George Galloway
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:George_Galloway
See the talk page of Galloway also.
On Milne’s page, Cross worked to keep off a link to my piece written for Sputnik International defending Milne when he had come in for attack. On the talk page Cross gave his reason: ’The Putin-backed Sputnik website is not a reliable source.’
But he also kept another article defending Milne, by my fellow RT OpEdger John Wight, written for the Huffington Post, off the page.
Cross’s obsessive hatred of me even extended to him taking down links to my articles in other people’s wikipedia pages, as he did in relation to a Guardian article I wrote about philosopher Erich Fromm.
When it comes to Oliver Kamm’s own wikipedia page however, Cross edits in a very different way. He is The Grand Protector of Kamm‘s online reputation, making sure his wikipedia page is maintained as a puff page (with handy links to his agent’s Janklow and Nesbit’s page)
and that criticism is kept to a minimum, even if it comes from legitimate sources. It goes without saying that Cross worked to keep mention of the recent Mondoweiss article cited above off Kamm’s page, as well as the earlier piece on Kamm by Messrs Peterson and Herman. Yes, you’ve guessed it. They’re not reliable sources….
Read Cross here in the Talk section of Kamm’s page.
Media Lens noted earlier this year::
Philip Cross' is putting up a valiant fight to fend off criticism of Oliver Kamm on Wikipedia. He seems particularly unhappy that a new section has appeared, titled:
'Kamm, Noam Chomsky and The Guardian controversy' noted Media Lens on Facebook on 23rd February.
Cross, when challenged about his identity responded: ‘Sorry David, I have never met Oliver Kamm, nor am I Charles Mingus (above and left)’. He then predicted; ‘ I am certain the extended largely off-topic section in Kamm's Wikipedia article about your (sorry, Chomsky's) pyrrhic victory against the Guardian a decade ago will be removed soon enough.’
Cross, who says he edits wikipedia in his ‘real name’,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Nafeez_Mosaddeq_Ahmed
has refused to post proof of his identity, and tried to make out that if he did so, he’d be some kind of a ‘victim’
Interestingly, ‘Philip Cross’ hasn’t just edited Kamm’s page, but also the pages of Kamm’s parents, a translator called AntheaBell, and one Anthony Kamm, described as a ‘publisher, author, historian and cricketer‘..
Once again, its only good stuff that gets posted there. On Anthony Kamm’s page, Cross edited to include a mention that the subject's son, Oliver, was ‘now a journalist on the Times‘ and to add a link to Kamm’s ownwikipedia page, of which he has been the main editor.
Another shared obsession of Kamm and Philip Cross is the television news channel RT (Russia Today)..
On the one hand, Kamm denigrates RT as a channel that noone, or hardly anyone watches, misrepresenting viewing figures.
But if no one was bothering to watch RT- why does Kamm spend so much time attacking it? It's very similar to the way Kamm loves to label his ‘enemies’ (like me) as, ‘obscure‘- again if we really are so ‘obscure’, why spend so much time attacking?
When RTUK launched in October 2014, Kamm went into overdrive.
He penned a ferocious opinion piece for the Times calling for Ofcom, the
UK
media regulator, to act against ‘this den of deceivers’.
Kamm’s fierce criticism of RT figures prominently on the RTUK wikipedia page, in the third paragraph.
And the editor who’s made four of the last eight edits to the RTUK wikipedia page? Why.. It‘s none other than Philip Cross!
Kamm tweets obsessively about RT-routinely labelling it a ‘fake news channel’
It‘s contributors and pundits are- you’ve guessed it are ‘fakes/frauds/fantasists‘ and of course, ‘genocide deniers‘
He likes to pompously declare that he refuses to go on the channel.
Yet, despite his hatred for RT- or rather because of it- he seems to spend an awful lot of time monitoring its output. Again, if no one was watching RT- as Kamm claims- and it was obvious that RT experts were ‘cranks, fantasists and fabulists‘- then why does he devote so much time and energy to attacking it?
In March 2015, the American writer Glenn Greenwald wrote about the anti-RT campaign.
‘The most vocal among the anti-RT crowd - on the ground that it spreads lies and propaganda — such as Nick Cohen and Oliver Kamm — were also the most aggressive peddlers of the pro-U.K.-government conspiracy theories and lies that led to the Iraq War.
That people like this, with their histories of pro-government propaganda, are the ones demanding punishment of RT for “bias” tells you all you need to know about what is really at play here".
In the summer of 2015, Kamm’s attacks on me intensified still further.
On Saturday 1st August, my new biography of Edgar Wallace, the crime writer, received a very positive review in The Guardian.
Kamm acolyte Max Dunbar (and fellow ’Euston Manifesto’ signatory) wasn’t too pleased..
Shortly afterwards, both Oliver Kamm and ‘PhilipCross63‘ turned up on the thread. I said to my wife that it wouldn’t be long before an attempt was made to post a ‘George Courtenay’-esque comment underneath the Guardian review. Sure enough, at 23.56 on Monday 3rd August, ‘Peter Tarlan’ arrived.
There’s no prize for guessing what the first sentence was.
‘Neil Clark has denied the massacre of 8,000 men and boys at Srebrenica.’ ‘Peter Tarlan’ went on ’ I draw this to the reader’s attention as it says something profound about his contempt for the canons of evidence and scholarship. Something readers may want to consider before deciding whether or not to spend their hard-earned money on a work of non-fiction by this man’.
.’Tarlan‘ then went on to ridicule a piece I had written in 2010 for the Sunday Express on the beauty of winter landscapes. The only person who had passed such comment on the piece before was- yes, you’ve guessed it- Oliver Kamm (see entry of 7th January 2010)
To try and make sure that readers had got the Kammite message about Neil Clark, ‘Peter Tarlan’ finished his attack with ‘I suggest no sane person should accept either historical claims or literary judgments from this man’.
I discovered that ‘Peter Tarlan’ had set up his Guardian account on 26th January 2011 (here is his Guardian profile page , just five days after my piece on the Socialist Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky, which Kamm commented on ( and didn‘t much like), appeared on the Guardian website. Shortly after a comment appeared which said ‘A very special article. One of the very few that are unashamedly dedicated to intellectual honesty‘, Kamm, no doubt fuming at the gills, arrived to accuse Kreisky - a Jew- of anti-Semitism- and to add: ‘Mr Clark describes himself in his CiF biography as a regular contributor to The Times, and this ought perhaps to be corrected‘.
At the same time he set up a Guardian profile, ‘Peter Tarlan’ set up a protected Twitter account.
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