He has the appearance of someone who does his hair by dipping his head into a vat of sulfuric acid, but his looks aren't the only thing about Iran's man in Canada, Joshua Blakeney, that has 'crazy' written all over it.
Blakeney is the Canadian correspondent for Iran's English-language propaganda service, Press TV, as well as the Canadian Bureau Chief for the antisemtic, Holocaust-denying website Veterans Today, and a sometime contributor to the Canadian left-wing hotbed for antisemitism, rabble.ca.
Today, Blakeney is trying to make a splash for himself by claiming he received a "threatening" email from the Jewish Defense League and his employers at Press TV have plastered it on the Internet.
Except that Meir Weinstein, in an email exchange with me, has explicitly denied that the JDL sent the email in question to Blakeney.
Blakeney alleges that the email purportedly from the JDL contains the sentence, "When we are attacked by hate-filled antisemites like you, we respond with all the resources at our disposal, and with extreme prejudice."
But bolstering JDL Director Weinstein's denial of the email originating with his group is the fact Blakeney has produced neither a name nor an email address associated with the supposed threat he claims to have received.
Along with his detestation of Israel, Blakeney is a well-known figure among Canadian 9-11 conspiracy theorists. If that isn't enough of an indication of Blakeney's challenges with rational thought, there is the line from his own website in which he brags his "work has been quoted and referred to in media venues including The National Post. "
What suggests there may be something very odd about Joshua Blakeney is that it doesn't require too subtle a reading of the National Post's articles referencing him to see they imply that the Canadian Press TV correspondent is a raving mental case. But I guess when you're as apparently detached from reality as Blakeney, there really is no such thing as bad publicity.
In an interview that Blakeney did with his bosses at Press TV, Blakeney claims he takes the JDL threat seriously. The reason being because a "German historian" had his house bombed, and Blakeney implies the JDL was involved with that.
The "German historian" to whom Blakeney referred was the notorious neo-Nazi Holocaust-denier Ernst Zundel. Describing Zundel as "German historian" would be akin to describing that neo-Nazi as a "human rights activist." For anyone who thinks that comparison is far-fetched, they have only to look at Blakeney's other employer, Veterans Today, which publishes pro-Nazi articles by Zundel's wife Ingrid and refers to Ernst Zundel, who served time in a German prison for promoting hate, as a "human rights activist."
JDL head Weinstein informed me that a writer for another of the websites for which Blakeney wrote, rabble.ca, contacted him in order to request an interview. However, Weinstein declined because he was concerned that the biases that guide everything written in rabble, which he also described as "an enabler of antisemitism," would make a fair report unlikely.
In response to that, the rabble.ca writer expressed umbrage and claimed such a statement is "potentially defamatory." It would be interesting to hear how a Canadian citizen is being 'defamatory' by taking the same view as the Canadian government.
Not only is rabble.ca an "enabler of antisemitism" but it promotes what the Canadian government defines as actual antisemitism with its sponsorship of antisemitic boycotts of Israel and the so-called "Israeli Apartheid Week," as well as articles in which it implies Canadian Jews' first loyalty is to Israel.
In his self-promoting article, Blakeney asserts that "academicians and law experts have advised me to take this threatening email to the authorities here in Canada. However, I am intuitively averse to having the state decide which emails are good and which are bad. I’d rather engage in debate and dialogue with my interlocutors."
Among those encouraging Blakeney to take his email to the authorities is JDL Director Meir Weinstein.
The result of that could be almost as embarrassing for the Press TV correspondent as Blakeney proved for his alma mater, the University of Lethbridge. At Blakeney's behest, his school offered a pro forma congratulation to its oddball alumnus on getting a post at Veteran Today, then upon learning about the insane bigotry it promotes, they publicly retracted it.
UPDATE (June 4): Jim Fetzer, an editor at Veterans Today, the online home for deranged 9-11 conspiracy nuts, mindless Jew-haters, and suck-ups to Iran's dictatorship, has helpfully produced the email that Blakeney claims came from the Jewish Defense League. The email address on it is JDL.org@usa.com. That email address, I am informed, has absolutely nothing to do with the Jewish Defense League of Canada. USA.com is a free webmail service like hotmail, and anyone can take out an email account on it in any name they like.
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| The notorious "threatening" email (via Veterans Today) |
In response to this information, the Jewish Defense League of Canada's Director, Meir Weinstein, reiterated that if Joshua Blakeney has received a threat from any one or group, particularly one that purports, even as implausibly as in this case, to be from a representative of a listed terrorist group in the US, he should contact the relevant authorities so they can investigate it.
So it would appear that Blakeney received an anonymous threat and demonstrating his usual comical ineptitude, without even bothering to contact the Jewish Defense League of Canada, leaped to and publicized his erroneous assumption that they had threatened him.
