My First Troll

This actually happened a couple of weeks ago, but I’ve been a bit busy lately and have only just taken the time to look properly at my first real set of ‘troll’ comments. A troll, for the uninitiated, is, according to Urban Dictionary, “one who posts a deliberately provocative message to a newsgroup or message board with the intention of causing maximum disruption and argument”.
On one hand, I hate troll comments on other people’s sites, because they wind me up and then cause me to waste time replying to them (or mustering the energy to not reply to them, since their main aim is to get people to expend time and thought on them). On the other, I think that sometimes publishing them is useful in that it shows up what revolting, bigoted and historically illiterate characters they are. A nice (re-)post on the pros and cons is here. Ali Abunimah, co-founder of Electronic Intifada, has a delightful example of this tactic here.
Trolls like the one whose pearls of wisdom I’ll share with you in a paragraph or two also raise the issue of comments policies on websites. Should we ‘approve’ every comment, for the sake of free speech (and site stats)? Should we not approve comments if they are deliberately offensive (or should we use them to reveal the hatefulness of the offender)? There’s a discussion of the issue here, with some good links. I suppose my vague policy, subject to change whenever I feel like it coz it’s my website, after all, can be stolen from the previous link, as follows:

*ad hominem attacks will only get published if they are genuinely witty
* anything that says people of colour/women/muslims/white men etc are all “x” or “y” or “z” must have links to decent supportive evidence or it’s going in the trash, cos them’s fightin’ words…
* anything that is abusive but contains useful information/coherent statements will get snipped and clipped, time and interest permitting.

So, to the nitty gritty. The 3 (yep, count ’em) troll comments which a little charmer calling himself Mark Bernardiner (mbernadiner@mail.ru, IP address 66.193.117.60, in case anyone’s interested) shared with me on the 22nd February at 18.07 were (shortest first):

“total extermination of palestinian thugs and thier supporters, islamofascist whores, is only justice way to peace in the ME and around the world”

Lovely, isn’t he? Spelling’s a bit cock-eyed, though. Not uncommon amongst trolls.
This was preceded 2 minutes earlier with the rather lengthier:

“How and when palestinian issue emerged
In 1975, by its resolution 3376 the General Assembly established the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian people. At that time, Secretary-General of the United Nations was Kurt Waldheim.
So, the question is how this resolution emerged in 1975? The analysis of historic documents revealed two undeniable facts:
Fact 1. In 1920s-30s, Palestinian Muslims committed massacre of Jews in occupied Israel murdering thousands of children and civilians. The murder was organized by the founder and supreme leader of the Arab Higher Committee, Haj Amin al Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, and supported by British Administration of Palestine. The primary objective was elimination of all Jews from Palestine. The massacre was, in reality, the Holocaust committed by Palestinian Arabs.
Haj Amin was a close friend of Hitler. In 1941, Haj Amin came to Berlin and visited Hitler. He brought the Holocaust idea to Hitler. In 1943, Amin organized Bosnian Muslim battalions in Croatia comprising some twenty thousand men. The battalions were put in Waffen-SS units, fought Yugoslav partisans in Bosnia; thousands of Serbs, Roma (‘Gypsies’) and Jews hunted down by Haj Amin’s SS troops were killed by those same troops, or they were sent to the Islamic death camp Jasenovac. After the WWII, the International tribunal declared Haj Amin war criminal; however, he escaped prosecution (thanks to Britain), fled to Egypt and then Palestine where he organized Fatah. After his death in 1974, Arafat, who was Haj Amin lieutenant, became Fatah commander. He organized PLO. Thus, PLO and Fatah were created by people close to Nazi and based on Nazi ideology.
Fact 2. Kurt Waldheim was a Nazi SS officer in WWII, committed numerous crimes in Europe and responsible for death of thousands of European. He is a war criminal.
These two facts clearly show that the Palestinian issue was introduced to commemorate Nazi-Palestinian Muslims unbreakable criminal connection and to recognize PLO-Fatah as Nazi successor. After 1980, every Secretary General, including the current, and entire UN staff uphold Nazi legacy of Kurt Waldheim.
How and when palestinian issue emerged In 1975, by its resolution 3376 the General Assembly established the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian people. At that time, Secretary-General of the United Nations was Kurt Waldheim. So, the question is how this resolution emerged in 1975? The analysis of historic documents revealed two undeniable facts: Fact 1. In 1920s-30s, Palestinian Muslims committed massacre of Jews in occupied Israel murdering thousands of children and civilians. The murder was organized by the founder and supreme leader of the Arab Higher Committee, Haj Amin al Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, and supported by British Administration of Palestine. The primary objective was elimination of all Jews from Palestine. The massacre was, in reality, the Holocaust committed by Palestinian Arabs. Haj Amin was a close friend of Hitler. In 1941, Haj Amin came to Berlin and visited Hitler. He brought the Holocaust idea to Hitler. In 1943, Amin organized Bosnian Muslim battalions in Croatia comprising some twenty thousand men. The battalions were put in Waffen-SS units, fought Yugoslav partisans in Bosnia; thousands of Serbs, Roma (‘Gypsies’) and Jews hunted down by Haj Amin’s SS troops were killed by those same troops, or they were sent to the Islamic death camp Jasenovac. After the WWII, the International tribunal declared Haj Amin war criminal; however, he escaped prosecution (thanks to Britain), fled to Egypt and then Palestine where he organized Fatah. After his death in 1974, Arafat, who was Haj Amin lieutenant, became Fatah commander. He organized PLO. Thus, PLO and Fatah were created by people close to Nazi and based on Nazi ideology. Fact 2. Kurt Waldheim was a Nazi SS officer in WWII, committed numerous crimes in Europe and responsible for death of thousands of European. He is a war criminal. These two facts clearly show that the Palestinian issue was introduced to commemorate Nazi-Palestinian Muslims unbreakable criminal connection and to recognize PLO-Fatah as Nazi successor. After 1980, every Secretary General, including the current, and entire UN staff uphold Nazi legacy of Kurt Waldheim.”

This is classic troll material, combining what looks like well-researched detail with some glossed-over but strategic inaccuracies (and more bad grammar).
A minute earlier (he was obviously copying + pasting text in here), we got:

“history of “palestinians”:
Arab leader Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi told the Peel Commission in 1937: “There is no such country as ‘Palestine’; ‘Palestine’ is a term the Zionists invented!”
In 1946, Arab historian Philip Hitti testified before the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry that “there is no such thing as Palestine in history.”
In 1947, Arab leaders protesting the UN partition plan argued that Palestine was part of Syria and “politically, the Arabs of Palestine (were) not (an) independent separate … political entity.”
An executive committee member of the PLO Zahir Muhsein confirmed that there is no such thing as a separate “palestinian” people of Arab descent. In an interview with the Dutch newspaper Trouw in March 31, 1977, he stated the following:
“The palestinian people do not exist. The creation of a palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity.
In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct “palestinian people” to oppose Zionism.”
Who “palestinians” are: a gang of genetic thieves who stole ethnicity, history, land, and natural resources; murderers who killed thousands of Americans, Europeans, and Israelis; and pathological liars. They have close ties to Hitler, Nazi and SS; invented and implemented ethnic cleansing for thousands of years and Holocaust in 1920s-30s-40s.
“Palestinians” have no place in human society, that is why no muslim country would like to have them.
Who abbas is: a fake president of the fake and never existed country and for fake-ethnicity people; genetic thief, pathological liar and murderer; KGB puppet; Nazi and SS descendent; Holocaust denier.
Death to this piece of Islamic shit abbas. Death to islamofascist organizations of Fatah and PLO.”

As well as the characteristics mentioned above, this also shows the common traits of the extreme form of troll, ie: the tendency to accuse other people (in this case ‘islamofascists’) of exactly the kind of behaviour the troll themself exhibits in such as abundance (‘“Palestinians” have no place in human society’, etc). Not a pleasant insight into human nature.