Israel Shamir

Israel Shamir (Russian: Исраэль Шамир, ; born 1947 or 1948), also known by the names Robert David, Vassili Krasevsky, Jöran Jermas and Adam Ermash, is a Swedish writer and journalist, known for promoting antisemitism and Holocaust denial.

Shamir says that he was born in Novosibirsk, Siberia, in 1947, although the Shorter Jewish Encyclopedia says that a man called Schmerler was born in 1948.

Shamir says that he "studied mathematics and law at Novosibirsk University".

He also says he moved to Israel in 1969.

He claimed to have served in the Israeli Paratroopers Brigade and fought in the Yom Kippur War.

He also claimed to have worked for the BBC and to have translated the works of Shai Agnon from Hebrew into Russian.

Norman Finkelstein told Tablet that Shamir is a "maniac" who "has invented his entire personal history. Nothing he says about himself is true".

Searchlight describes him as a "Swedish anti-semite", and says that he was registered in Sweden in 1984 and gained Swedish citizenship in 1992.

Shamir says he left Sweden for Russia and then Israel in 1993, before returning in 1998, saying that he had remarried in Israel in July 1994.

However, others argue that Swedish files show that he was married in Sweden.

Shamir says that he went to Russia and wrote about the political changes in the country until 1993, for newspapers including Pravda and the extreme nationalist Zavtra.

He was known as Jöran Jermas from 2001 to 2005, before changing his name to Adam Ermash, although continuing to use Israel Shamir as a pen name.

The French edition of Shamir's Flowers of Galilee was originally co-published in October 2003 by Éditions Blanche and Éditions Balland.

It was withdrawn from sale at the end of October after Balland's director had his attention drawn to the content of the book, which he considered anti-semitic.

Shamir has published or self-published a number of his books; his book Flowers of Galilee (2004) was banned for a time in France over allegations it was inciting racial hatred and antisemitism.

Shamir says that he was born in a Jewish family in Russia, and converted to Orthodox Christianity.

By his own account, his birth name was Izrail Schmerler.

The book was republished in 2004 by the French Islamist Éditions Al-Qalam company, which led to a civil case brought by the Ligue internationale contre le racisme et l'antisémitisme (LICRA), with the publisher sentenced to three months in prison (suspended) and a 10,000-euro fine, and the banning of the book.

The ban was overturned on appeal, and the fine reduced.

In 2004, Searchlight wrote about his connections to antisemitic publications and groups, and the campaign Hope not Hate has listed Shamir as a "notable Holocaust denier," citing the "rabid Holocaust denial material" on his website.

In 2005, Shamir was featured as a speaker in the "Zionism As the Biggest Threat to Modern Civilization" conference co-chaired by David Duke in Ukraine, and sponsored by the Interregional Academy of Personnel Management which has been associated with antisemitic discourse in Eastern Europe.

According to the scholar of antisemitism, Shamir borrows from neo-Nazi terminology when describing an alleged "Zionist" conspiracy to bring about the Iraq War.

Bachner has said that Shamir's writing would have been of little interest had they been published only on his website, however, Flowers of Galilee was issued by a respected publisher and promoted by parts of the left in Sweden.

The book was recommended by former Swedish MP and promoted by The Palestine Solidarity Association in Sweden which also engaged Shamir as speaker.

In Cabbala of Power, Shamir writes: "The Jewish 'plan' is no secret; there is no need to re-read The Protocols or to ask Jews what they want."

Henrik Bachner, described Shamir's online outlet as "a multilingual website in which Jewish conspiracies are brought forward as an explanation for both historical and contemporary world events".

Stephen Pollard reported in The Times in 2005 that it included such statements as "Jews asked God to kill, destroy, humiliate, exterminate, defame, starve, impale Christians, to usher in Divine Vengeance and to cover God’s mantle with blood of goyim."

At an event at the British Houses of Parliament in 2005, Shamir claimed "Jews indeed own, control and edit a big share of mass media" and said US foreign policy in the Middle East was a "fight for ensuring Jewish supremacy".

The Anti-Defamation League reported in 2006 that Shamir had written on his website of "accumulating evidence of Israeli Connection" for 9/11 and wrote of the United States and Israel creating the attacks to carry out anti-Muslim policies.

He had expressed his belief in the "blood libel" on his website.

In 2006, discussing the upcoming Iranian International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust, Deutsche Welle wrote that the Iranian government "said it intended to invite academics such as German neo-Nazi [lawyer] Horst Mahler and the Israeli journalist and Christian convert Israel Shamir, both of whom are Holocaust deniers."

In December 2010, Shamir's connection with WikiLeaks brought him more public attention.

Katha Pollitt, writing in The Nation in December 2010, described Shamir's web site: "I spent a few hours on www.israelshamir.net and learned that: 'the Jews' foisted capitalism, advertising and consumerism on harmonious and modest Christian Europe; were behind Stalin's famine in Ukraine; control the banks, the media and many governments; and that 'Palestine is not the ultimate goal of the Jews; the world is.' There are numerous guest articles by Holocaust deniers, aka 'historical revisionists.'"

In early 2011, David Leigh and Luke Harding, writing in The Guardian, described Shamir as being "notorious for Holocaust denial and publishing a string of antisemitic articles."

The Jerusalem Post called him "an avowed Holocaust-denier" who said of the International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust that it "proved that the Holocaust dogma is a basic tenet in the great world-embracing brainwashing machine of mass media".

Shamir denied the accusation of Holocaust denial in an article for CounterPunch, writing that his family "lost too many of its sons and daughters for me to deny the facts of Jewish tragedy" but that he denies "the morbid cult of Holocaust".

In his 2011 Tablet interview, Shamir referred to "perceptions during the war" of Auschwitz as a "quite awful deportation camp" whereas "after the war, different perception came. And that was a perception of mass annihilation, and mass murder, and all that."

Asked which "perception" was true, Shamir said he had no interest in the subject.

When asked if the concentration camps were used for mass murder, he responded by saying he had "no knowledge about it at all" and rejected "the idea that it is important."

Shamir is a vocal backer of the WikiLeaks organization.