Occasionally I will take note of the lunatic wanderings of the Israeli settler Steven Plaut, a so-called economics professor in Israel (no doubt teaching his Jabotinsky-inspired brood how to steal land from Palestinians), if only to correct his lies and counter his slanderous remarks about your humble blogger. For instance, since the demise of David Horowitz’s Moonbat Central blog (probably retired because the reactionaries posting there often engaged in slander and outrageous if not transparent lies instead of making actual logical arguments, thus opening Horowitz and his CIA-connected meal ticket Richard Mellon Scaife to lawsuits), Plaut has since wandered about, “guest” posting on the blog of another dispossessed Horowitzite, Rocco DiPippo. In one such recent post, Plaut claims I was “fired” from Counterpunch.

I don’t know how much CIA money Plaut received from the Horowitz operation, but when I was writing for Counterpunch I didn’t receive a penny, even after one of my articles appeared in a Counterpunch book (The Politics of Anti-Semitism). In fact, the reason I stopped submitting articles to Counterpunch was, in part, due to a remark Alexander Cockburn made about the article published in the Politics of Anti-Semitism (Amiri Baraka’s Somebody Blew Up America: Poetry as Treason?)—Cockburn had received negative comments (this apparently irked him) about documentation I cited indicating government involvement in the terrorist attacks of nine eleven, thus revealing Counterpunch’s gatekeeping function, a common enough occurrence on the foundation-funded left (according to the research of Bob Feldman and tax forms, in 1999 CP and the Institute for the Advancement of Journalistic Clarity earned $178,000 from its “alternative journalism activity” and unlike “most of the other anti-conspiracist alternative media gatekeepers, IAJC/COUNTERPUNCH doesn’t appear to have received any big Establishment Foundation grants in recent years. But its vice-president, Ford Roosevelt, is a member of a Roosevelt Dynasty that possessed upper-class wealth and much political power during the 20th-century”).

I don’t know if Cockburn and crew made money on the publication of the Politics of Anti-Semitism, but if they did they sure the heck didn’t send me a check for the inclusion of my piece (in fact, I had to buy a copy of the book—the skinflints at AK Press obviously felt disobliged to the various authors, or at least this one).

Of course, since Plaut is a scurrilous liar and documented dirty trickster (stealing email lists from forums, effectuating various nasty personas in order to launch slanderous attacks on various IndyMedia open publishing venues, and other slimeball tricks) who engages in unethical behavior against his enemies—quite natural for a reactionary Jabotinsky neo-fascist to the right of the comatose Ariel Sharon—his invention of the story I was “fired” from CP is loathsome enough. The fact CP publishes dozens of writers and makes nearly $200,000 per year (according to tax forms) is almost as unethical.

However, at least Alexander Cockburn doesn’t live in Israel and advocate stealing land from Palestinians and then murdering them, as does Steven Plaut, who is actually considered an academic in this country, thus revealing that the University of California at Berkeley will hire anybody.