The Legend Of David Collier & The Hole-y Tale...

Self-styled ‘warrior against injustice’ and vicious online bully David Collier wrote a piece for his blog last week, claiming 'Corbyn supporters' had shut down his website. And hollering 'antisemitism!' of course. But does the well known wolf-cryer’s tale stack up...?

Collier, a close pal of the infamous ‘Gnasher Jew’ troll network, claims to have been given notice of the ‘attack’, writing:

“There was a warning. I was given twenty-four hours to comply with a simple set of demands, or, as my attacker threatened, he would be ‘forced’ to take my website down. The demands were simple, I just had to remove everything on this website that is critical of Jeremy Corbyn”

He posted this screengrab of the alleged warning, and continued:

“The threat is clear and to the point. These people support Jeremy Corbyn, believe I am making up the antisemitism issue and think that I must be silenced. The only question that remained over the threat – was whether or not it was real”

We decided we would also like to know the answer to that question...

So firstly – was the website down? The piece claims this was the case for several hours, starting at around 8pm on Saturday 22 December – before which he received a second message containing nothing but the letter ‘A’

As some readers may know, there are a number of online tools for checking the status of a website and whether it is or has been ‘down’. We chose to use Uptime Robot, and analysis of david-collier.com provided the following results.

Happily the site was confirmed as being in full working order at the time of checking, and Uptime Robot was also able to inform us that it had enjoyed 100% ‘uptime’ for the previous 24 hours, seven days, and indeed thirty days. No downtime recorded.

Curious – how could this be the case when Mr Collier clearly insists the Corbyn-backing hackers had put it out of commission? And, indeed, claimed it was ‘still unstable’ days later. Shortly before asking for donations to fund his ‘work’...

We checked the comment section at the end of the piece – and guess what? Two comments from the alleged perpetrators of the ‘attack’ – the conveniently-named ‘JCARMY’. Admitting their responsibility, or course, and threatening more. And denying there was any antisemitism involved - which as we all know is positive proof of antisemitism on planet Collier.

There’s an email address in Collier’s screengrab of the ‘warning’. It seems the villains use the secure encrypted email service Tutanota.

So we searched for any mention of the ‘JCARMY@tutanota.de’ email address online, and found nothing. We emailed them – answer came there none. It was almost as if this email address didn’t exist.

We did the same with the second email address ‘A@A.com’, which yielded the information that it was a well-known dummy address.

How could this be? Surely it isn’t possible to send a message to a website simply using any old dummy or made up email address, is it? Well, yes, actually.

Or to comment on a website using the same method? Ditto.

As you can see from the below pictures, we have also received messages very similar to those Mr Collier posted in his piece. We sent them to ourselves.

Hypothetically of course, if a Corbyn-hating ‘writer’ wanted to completely fabricate an attack on their website, and then stage a conversation with the attackers in the comments section, it’s that simple – although we would suggest that the simple step of also taking the site down for a few hours ‘during’ the attack might have lent that essential bit of verisimilitude...

Naturally, if Mr Collier’s site DID suffer an attack, we would condemn it as we would any attack on free speech – sentiments not shared in the least by him, particularly when it comes to comments critical of Israeli state policy.

But in this case, we were extremely unconvinced. It’s too convenient, too calculatedly Corbyn-based – and too easy to fake.

At the time of writing Mr Collier is tweeting images of another message from (again conveniently-named) 'thefinalsolution@nazi.cc' saying 'Osker Schindler won't be around to save you this time. Revolting if genuine. However the IP address leads back to a Tor router, the domain 'nazi.cc' is up for sale, and the email address, well...

Bit more Muttley than Gnasher...