Peter Siebelt. Poseur 4

De extreem-rechtse fantast Peter Siebelt.

Ko heeft een nieuwe reactie op uw bericht "Peter Siebelt. Poseur 3" achtergelaten:

Ik las dat beveuiliger Peter Siebelt ook aandacht besteed heeft aan de gevaarlijke "cyberterrorist" Rop Gongrijp.
http://rop.gonggri.jp/?p=452 

Remarkable transformations

Some rather bizarre developments here in The Netherlands. Monday there was an extensive article(PDF, dutch) about me in De Telegraaf. De Telegraaf is the newspaper with the largest circulation and it leans to the right politically. In it, they describe all the developments with the court order to Twitter.

More interestingly, the article features me as “Julian Assange’s adjudant” as well as ”a left-wing terror activist” with “close ties to the Chaos Computer Club who in turn had ties with RAF terrorists”. Also, the article claims that “their research shows that US intelligence has been told by a Dutch source that I was offering close to a million euros to various web hosting companies on behalf of Wikileaks.”

The article leans quite extensively on “research” done by “intelligence expert” Peter Siebelt. Siebelt wrote a book in 2005 called “The Fourth World War”, a crackpot theory of seamless continuity from Marxism to radical Islamism in which everyone left of center in this country is part of a large and well-coordinated conspiracy to introduce sharia law and make the Netherlands a caliphate. (Don’t ask me what happened to the third world war.)

So this book, almost 500 pages, has a whole chapter on me and someone else called Michael Polman. Michael is a friendly web hoster whose company works mostly in the NGO universe. I have met him over the years but we were never in day-to-day cooperation. Just to give you an idea, here’s the beginning of “our” chapter in this book:

Cyberterrorism

Dutch hackers and internet fanatics have been known for years to be the most dangerous in the world. Not just because of the hacking of computers but also because of their pioneering in building worldwide computer networks. Since the seventies they play an important role in the movement and work closely with the previously mentioned ‘telematics’ in Den Bosch.

Two sounding names are Rop Gonggrijp and Michael Polman. In their early years they were ‘errand boys’ in the leftist political struggle of higher gods. For example de then professor Gerrit Huizer in Nijmegen or the pakistani Ahmad Eqbal. Both were at the cradle of the enormous NGO network in the Netherlands.

Soon after, Gonggrijp and Polman outgrew their ‘bosses’ and became leading figures themselves. The originally marxists computer technologists were excellent teachers. They taught and built electronic networks for left-wing activists and organizations in the Netherlands and rebels in Africa, Asia and Latin-America. Islamic organizations participated or looked on. For example the Committee for Marroccan Workers in the Netherlands (KMAN) and the institute for Women’s Studies in the Arab World (IWSAW) in Beirut.

The rest of the chapter at least has at least a few names I recognize, but the stuff about me reads like a mix between my Wikipedia entry, twisted half-truths and complete fabrication, all made to sound dark and sinister. Things like “Part of their ideology was – and still is – that software should be free and the internet a gift economy.”

Back to reality

Let me point out that I was never a marxist. Nor am I, or have I ever been, a member of the Communist Party. Furthermore, I had never heard of any of the people or organizations in the intro quoted above. (I checked with Michael, and he only knew Gerrit Huizer, the Nijmegen prof.) Most ridiculous of all, Siebelt somehow doesn’t realize that I was 11 (read: eleven) at the end of the seventies. I was living with my parents, my father ironically a journalist for this same newspaper. I didn’t even have my first computer at 11. (But I had built a small FM transmitter that was probably illegal now that I think about it.)

And as for the rest: I did not arrange web-hosting for Wikileaks. Not now, not back in the time I was helping out. Not that I see anything terribly wrong with doing so, but I just didn’t. And I most certainly didn’t do it with “close to million euros” in my pocket. I mean: think about it…  A million euros worth of web-hosting. I’m not sure what kind of hosting services package to imagine at 1M euro. A million euros probably gets you a sizable stake in many web hosting companies, if it doesn’t buy them outright.

Anyway… So there we have it. Remarkable transformations happen. You go to bed having helped release a video of soldiers routinely killing people trying to save the wounded, and you wake up the next day a nefarious left-wing terror activist-adjudant secretly spending millions on web hosting. I wonder what I’ll be tomorrow.