(JNS.org<\/em>) — <\/span> When the fugitive WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange first holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy in London seven years ago, \u201cBrexit\u201d was an unknown word, Donald Trump was still hosting \u201cThe Apprentice,\u201d and the Iran nuclear deal was just a twinkle in the eye of U.S. President Barack Obama. So when, last week, British police officers carried a horizontal Assange out of the embassy\u2019s doors and into a world greatly changed since the last time he breathed in the fresh morning air, one couldn\u2019t help reflecting that those changes would not quite have been the same without his contribution.<\/p>\n That observation should not be taken as an expression of admiration. Among his many detractors, Assange has been variously painted as a clown, a devious sex offender, a Russian dupe (some might even say \u201coperative\u201d) and an unprincipled publicity addict. That image that is hardly relieved by the stories of riding a skateboard along narrow corridors, playing indoor soccer with visiting friends and verbally abusing security guards\u2014apparently among the less <\/em>obnoxious behaviors exhibited by Assange during his embassy sojourn.<\/p>\n Still, none of that changes the fact that Assange is an influencer. Through the medium of the leaked private communications of governments and political leaders, he has championed the notion that politics in the digital age is an especially dirty game of murky money trails, corrupt elected officials, heinous violations of individual privacy and a foreign policy that is owned by corporate and special interests. As Assange faces conceivably lengthy extradition proceedings in the United Kingdom and then a possible criminal trial in the United States, those themes will surface again and again, mainly to reinforce the sense among his supporters that Assange is a fighter for free speech and a speaker of truth to power.<\/p>\n Assange knows from experience that his way of viewing the world chimes with lots of people. It was a worldview that tapped into the public disgruntlement that influenced two key electoral tests in the Western world in 2016: the U.S. presidential election and the British referendum on leaving the European Union. Assange and his WikiLeaks project provided as-good-as empirical evidence for politicians as diverse as Trump, Democratic contender Sen. Bernie Sanders (VT.), Brexit advocate Nigel Farage and British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn to depict cosmopolitan, transnational and unaccountable \u201celites\u201d as the alleged source of the rot in public life.<\/p>\n Critically, Assange does not belong to the right or the left politically because he speaks to both sides; he speaks more so to their extremes. In many ways, Assange personifies a zeitgeist in which genuinely divisive and important arguments about the limits of national sovereignty\u2014or the erosion of personal privacy by national-security imperatives\u2014have been intensified by more exotic claims about the reach of the \u201cdeep state,\u201d or the extraordinary influence of \u201cspecial interests\u201d smart enough to avoid public scrutiny.<\/p>\n Not everyone who sees the world in these rather brutalist terms is an anti-Semite, of course. But because anti-Semitism is, in essence, a conspiratorial fantasy, those who are afflicted with it tend to gravitate to the political poles where their anxieties about Jewish power receive greater sympathy.<\/p>\n Assange himself has spoken about Jews several times, with plain and heartfelt hostility. The first occasion was in 2011, when he phoned Ian Hislop, the editor of the British satirical magazine Private Eye<\/em>, to complain about a piece that highlighted Assange\u2019s friendship with a notorious character named Israel Shamir. (A Russian Jew who converted to Orthodox Christianity, Shamir has been writing unhinged missives denouncing Judaism and Zionism for the last 20 years, mostly for far-right websites.) By running the item, Assange said, Hislop had joined an international conspiracy against WikiLeaks led by journalists, all of whom, Assange emphasized, \u201care Jewish.\u201d When Hislop challenged this invocation of a classic anti-Semitic trope, Assange suddenly replied, \u201cForget about the Jewish thing.\u201d<\/p>\n But Hislop didn\u2019t forget, and Assange promptly accused him\u2014as is the fashion among those charged with making anti-Semitic statements\u2014of engaging in a smear campaign. Those who gave Assange the benefit of the doubt on that occasion were, however, stumped in 2013, when WikiLeaks employee James Ball resigned from the organization precisely because of Assange\u2019s relationship with Shamir, whom he described as \u201can anti-Semitic writer \u2026 and a man with ties and friends in the Russian security services.\u201d Then, in 2016, four years into his residency at the Ecuadorean embassy, Assange picked up on the social-media meme of placing parentheses symbolizing an echo chamber on either side of the names of Jewish writers.<\/p>\n \u201cTribalist symbol for establishment climbers? Most of our critics have 3 (((brackets around their names))) & have black-rim glasses. Bizarre,\u201d Assange said on Twitter, in a routine example of anti-Semitic dog-whistling. Shortly afterwards, and getting a taste of his own medicine, a private message sent by Assange in which he insulted the Jewish journalist Raphael Sutter was leaked online. \u201cHe\u2019s always been a rat,\u201d Assange said of Sutter. \u201cBut he\u2019s Jewish and engaged with the ((()))) issue.\u201d<\/p>\n It would seem, then, that what most agitates Assange about Jews is their clannishness and tribalism, their habit of sticking together politically, their notorious practice of smearing critics as \u201canti-Semites\u201d and their penetration of the establishment. It\u2019s probably not coincidental that these supposed traits are exactly what Shamir detests about Jews, too, as will be demonstrated by a quick perusal of his ravings.<\/p>\n When the next chapter in the Assange saga begins\u2014and it is already being cast by the WikiLeaks faithful as the trial of the century, with their hero muzzled by an American flag\u2014get ready for more of the same.<\/p>\n (Ben Cohen i<\/em>s a New York City-based journalist and author who writes a weekly column on Jewish and international affairs for JNS.)<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n![\"Share](\"https:\/\/static.hupso.com\/share\/buttons\/share-medium.png\")