RUTHFULLY YOURS

Huffington Post UK runs into “smears” accusations over Norwegian massacre

An attempted ‘takedown piece’ by Charles Delalande for the Huffington Post has led to great embarrassment for Arianna’s British flagship.Less than a month after launching in the United Kingdom, the Huffington Post UK has blundered into a potentially damaging scandal after smearing right-wing writers for their alleged reticence in condemning Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik.

In an article entitled, “Breivik: The Strange Silence of Right-Wing Bloggers” Charles Delalande castigated London Mayor Boris Johnson for saying that Breivik’s actions were not motivated by “ideology or religion” but by sexual inadequacy. This, he said, was in stark contrast, with Johnson’s appraisal that “Islam is the problem” in the wake of the July 7, 2005 bombings on the London transport system.

But Delalande reserved his most vitriolic remarks for Douglas Murray, Melanie Phillips, The Spectator, and Standpoint Magazine accusing them of being conspicuously slow or entirely silent on the matter with the strong inference that this is because they have some degree of common cause with a fellow exponent of “Christian cultural conservatism”.

In two angry phone calls with Huffpo staffers, Douglas Murray, associate director at the Henry Jackson Society, described the inference as scurrilous, adding that to accuse someone of not having written publicly about such recent events was a smear of the lowest order. Murray, in any case, has written a piece on the subject which is slated to appear in a respected publication over the weekend.

In the second phone call, heard by The Commentator, he asked a Huffpo staffer whether he had written anything about the Madrid train bombings which took place in 2004. He hadn’t, more than seven years after the bombings took place!

Murray warned the Huffpo that its time in Britain would be short if it persisted in libeling people in this manner.

At which point, the Huffington Post agreed to remove references to Murray from the story.

However, accusations against Boris Johnson, Melanie Phillips, the Spectator and Standpoint remained up at the time of writing.

In a the-lights-are-on-but-nobody’s-home sort of way the bio of the author of the article says that he “is writing a novel about the ideological roots of militant Islam which he hopes will make people less worried and a bit happier”.