Jeremy Reynalds forgot to declare an interest

This entry was posted on
Monday, February 9th, 2009
at
12:59 pm and is filed
under Old Media, The Political Weblog Movement.

Jeremy Reynalds is an interesting man whose mind works in interesting ways.

Take, for example, his reaction to the Abu Ghraib scandal; which *so* obviously raised questions about homosexuals in the military and the way CBS conduct themselves.

So when he is presented with evidence that Glen Jenvey posed as an extremist on Ummah.com, we should not be surprised that he asks questions about the way Ummah.com conduct themselves, and we should count ourselves lucky that he’s not speculating about their sexuality:

Jeremy Reynalds – Large Islamic Website Still Carries Material Advocating Destruction of Israel Ummah forum administrators posted a vocal defense of their site (www.ummah.com/forum/showthread.php?t=197121), headlined “Ummah forum detest today’s misleading article in ‘The Sun,'” and alleged that Abuislam is really Jenvey, claiming confirmation from his IP and email addresses. In an e-mailed statement, Jenvey denied being Abu Islam, adding that some inflammatory posts formerly on the site have now been either removed or manipulated to the forum administrators’ advantage. He said, “Over the years I have monitored both www.ummah.net and www.ummah.com and their chat rooms. I know they hate me enough to try and discredit me.” (via)

That’s not much of a denial, and I reject it for two main reasons:

1) That Ummah.com alone/initially declared a direct link between ‘abuislam’ and Glen Jenvey is a false premise; Ummah.com declared a link between ‘abuislam’ and a post by ‘Richard Tims’. The link between ‘Richard Tims’ and Glen Jenvey was later revealed at Bloggerheads, and involved otherwise-innocuous spam submitted some 6+ months previous to multiple websites, including the website of a close ally of Jenvey’s.

2) If Jenvey is claiming or suggesting that he’s the victim of a set-up, he’ll have to do better than establish possible motive. As Richard Bartholomew points out here; “Rather more is required than simply asserting (or even proving) that Ummah.com is run by bad people.” (more)

But the main point I wish to raise in this post involves declarations of interest.

Right toward the end of the article, there’s a passage where Jeremy Reynalds refers to “Jenvey and former colleague Johnathan Galt”, but there is no mention at all of any past or present relationship Jeremy Reynalds might have with Glen Jenvey. In fact, that sentence could be read to mean that it is Jenvey and Galt who are former colleagues (i.e. connected professionally to each other and not to Reynalds).

There are many ways that Glen Jenvey and Jeremy Reynalds (and Jonathan Galt) have intersected online, but in an effort to convince Mr Reynalds to take a closer look at the evidence linking ‘Richard Tims’ to Glen Jenvey, I have decided to use the following single example, that also includes a heck of a lot of spam:

Over the weekend, D-Notice kindly got the ball rolling on a Wikipedia investigation into the PCCLIES sock puppet, which led me to browse through Wikipedia edits made under Glen Jenvey’s old profile.

When doing so, I noticed that Glen Jenvey had link-spammed Wikipedia to promote Jeremy Reynalds’ (now out of print) book War of the Web: Fighting the Online Jihad, here on this page about Islam.

Oh, and here on this page about Islamic terrorism, here on this page about the Tamil Tigers, here on this page about Al Qaeda, here on this page about Abu Hamza, here on this page about Hizb ut-Tahrir, here on this page about Osama Bin Laden, here on this page about ‘espionage’, , here on this page about the PLO, here on this page about Terrorism, here on this page about Cyberterrorism, here on this page about the September 11 attacks, and, quite hilariously, here on this page about ‘bestsellers’.

[Note – Jenvey made several attempts to spam some entries, most persistently on the entry for Al Qaeda. Many of these spam entries include crimes against the apostrophe that have since become Jenvey’s trademark, and though the relevant ‘talk’ page was deleted a long time ago, it’s a fair bet that this activity led to him being banned or flagged as a spammer, and subsequently starting one or more replacement accounts to edit his own entry, promote his websites at glen-jenvey.com, abuhamza.org.uk & sellyourstory.org, plug the literary works of Jeremy Reynalds, and/or ‘set the record straight’ on his relationship with the FBI. There’s one hell of a vapour trail waiting to be uncovered, by the looks of things. If I find myself with a spare hour or two I may go browsing again later.]

I will remind readers again that this is only one visible way in which Glen Jenvey and Jeremy Reynalds have intersected online.

If there is a past, present, personal and/or professional link between Jeremy Reynalds and Glen Jenvey, then Reynalds should have declared it in his article… even if only to claim that Jenvey is merely one of his biggest fans.

After all, Reynalds is a CEO and he has a master’s degree in communication; he should know what a conflict of interest is.

PS – Link-spamming the entry for the 7 July 2005 London bombings was a class act… but I’m sure Jenvey was thinking of the victims in his own special way when he did it.








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