When I heard that a current Indymedia UK moderator was involved with a racist website I refused to believe it until I heard it was the odious jew hater Roy Bard who of course has blackened the Indymedia reputation for years with numerous ethnic slurs and hate speech directed toward jews.

Why this individual is allowed to remain within the collective is beyond me.

Well done to the original poster for letting us know about this.

What confuses me is why the other mods don't say anything. I can't think they are comfortable having a racist in the group and yet I have never seen any comment let along condemnation. This new site of ftp's doesn't even hide its profoundly racist nature so they really have no excuse for not knowing what he is doing.

Other racists are roundly and rightly condemned here on Indy, take a look at the posts covering the bonehead's summer piss up in Brighton, but there seems to be a 'blind eye' policy when it comes to Jewish people. I have seen writings of ftp's where he is quite open about his dislike of Jews and the historical reasons for it so the other mods MUST know what he thinks.

The acceptance of antisemitic posts on Indy UK has certainly been a factor in the decline of the site (not the only reason) so it would seem logical that the collective make a firm statement with regard to stopping it in the future and trying to rebuild support however I fear that ftp's position is now so powerful in the de-facto hierarchy that controls the site he is beyond censure.

Indymedia as a project has already been left behind by the developments of Web 2.0, Twitter, Facebook, Blogs and the rest however the mods seem happy for the slow decline of the site to continue and a racist to more or less take full control of the site.

You would be surprised how many of them share his antisemitism.

Above it says,

"Indymedia as a project has already been left behind by the developments of Web 2.0, Twitter, Facebook, Blogs and the rest however the mods seem happy for the slow decline of the site to continue and a racist to more or less take full control of the site."





There were those of us who fought tooth and nail to prevent the decline, we spoke up at meetings and tried all we could to get people to listen but you must remember that for two individuals IMCUK is near to being the total focus of their lives, they live and breath it. They talk a good story about wanting new moderators and increased involvement from the community but this is far from their real wishes. A declining obscure newswire they control is, in their eyes better than a vibrant expanding newswire somebody else controls. At the end of the day this is about control.
The theft of the newswire after the agreed fork showed the extent that some people are prepared to go to ensure their control remains in place. The consolidation of power by an individual with a clear antisemitic agenda is no surprise to those of us who watched him bring the UK collective network to the brink of collapse as he defended posts by an individual who should never have been allowed to see the newswire as a vehicle for his racism. His involvement with a site whose policy of "no gatekeepers" surprises nobody who has spent time with him.
Anybody who has been involved with open publishing knows that "no gatekeepers" quickly allows those with a grudge against Jews to publish pseudo-intellectual antisemitism happy in their knowledge it will be treated as though it is a worthy piece of journalism.
My involvement here as a mod ended some time ago but like a parent drawn to an errant child I find myself returning hoping against hope the difficult teenage years are over and maturity has developed but again and again I still see the same angry, spoilt, self-obsessed 17 year old who thinks Jews run the world and that Israel wants to kill every living Arab.

That individual now runs the site, runs a racist site and is I am sure confident that nobody is going to stop him.