The Con Man and the Keffiyeh

Having been born and raised in the UK, I unsurprisingly maintain an interest in what is going on across the pond. I became an American citizen and lived in the U.S. for fifteen years before moving to Jerusalem eighteen months ago, but your first home always exerts a pull on you.

Often, I follow a story from, “The old country” which is truly gripping and would make a great column in The Jewish Press. It never gets written. I realize that I would have to spend so much time explaining the background of the story and the cultural and political differences between the two countries, that there would be no space left for me to say much more.

This column allows me to write about one of these stories at last!

The reason is that the story is so ridiculous, farcical and hilarious that it has already traveled the Atlantic and in fact across the globe. There is therefore a good chance that you will have heard about it already.

Cambridge Professor, Jason Arday was the poster child of Britain’s woke left. His background and the journey that allowed him to overcome it, achieve greatness, and eventually become one of the world’s most prestigious university’s youngest ever professors is simply unbelievable!

As he explains, he was mute until the age of 11 and unable to read and write until he was 18. He earned a PhD by the time he was 30, which he managed to complete while suffering from a brain tumor! This though was not the end of his amazing achievements.

His results in ultra-endurance running were extraordinary. He completed the 600 miles from Edinburgh to London in just six days. Shortly after, he says, he ran another 30 marathons in just 35 days. On day 21 of this latter feat, he suffered a fracture and accordingly, as the professor explains, his leg swelled to twice its normal size.

None of this slowed down this superman No siree! With another nine marathons to complete (and I assume with one leg twice as long as the other) he surely must have hopped on the broken and enlarged leg.

Now, if at this stage, you’re feeling that even now, after so many years, someone is still trying to sell people the Brooklyn Bridge, you are starting to get the measure of Jason Arday. And not only the Brooklyn Bridge but the Verrazzano, the Kosciuszko and the Golden Gate Bridge too!

And the more people belatedly started to look into Jason Arday, the more they could see that his lies were beyond outrageous and unbelievable.

One writer actually wondered if he was in fact real at all. He suggested that he might be the latest character made up by Jewish comedian, Sacha Baron Cohen to follow his cast of other outrageous inventions, like Ali G and Borat.

Professor Arday’s claims continued to unravel.

He said he had featured in the UK TV show “Seven Up” decades before he was born.

He claimed to have been a visiting professor at Ohio State University. He wasn’t.

He claimed to have been a visiting professor at Glasgow University. He wasn’t.

He claimed to have written a book. He didn’t.

And the cream on the cake, (cue trumpets and drumroll), his PhD thesis from Liverpool’s John Moores University, was largely “lifted” straight from another person’s thesis written a decade before.

The question obviously is, how on earth did he get away with this for so long. The answer is Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, DEI and its proponents.

This racist theory seeks to exclude certain categories of people (White, Asian, Jews) and promote others not on the basis of their abilities but on their race.

Jason Arday is black with dreadlocks so long, he would make Bob Marley look like Jeff Bezos. He claims to be autistic (neurodivergent) and working class.

The British Media, the BBC (of course), Guardian newspaper, et al, adored him. They never questioned or seemed to notice the farce that sat in front of their eyes because they didn’t and don’t want to.

The Left want what Jason Arday represents to be true, the fact that it isn’t, is simply an irrelevance.

As George Orwell put it in his 1984, “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."

And the same “Party” tells you the same thing just as forcefully and brutally today.

In case you are feeling a tad sorry for Professor Arday, and I fear that title will vanish soon along with the plagiarized PhD that allowed him to use it, don’t be.

Certainly, the pictures of him clutching his diploma shows a beautiful choir-boy face with an angelic smile.

Yet, like everything else about Jason Arday, it is deception.

As soon as his house of cards started to wobble, a different Jason Arday emerged, and the tale took a nasty turn.

When a journalist from the UK’s Times newspaper started asking him questions about his chain of serial lies, the not so angelic fellow rushed off at top speed to the law firm, "Carter Ruck" for help. This is one of the most successful litigation firms in the UK. They represent Qatar's, Al Jazeera.

You will be familiar with Qatar of course. They host Hamas and have bankrolled them (estimated $1.8 billion). When someone says something unkind about Al Jazeera, they can expect a letter from “Carter Ruck” faster than you can say, “Qassam Rocket.”

Arday had them suggest that the "attack" on him may be (Yes! you guessed it) "Racially motivated."

The cops then sent one of their “thought police” officers to threaten the journalist to back off. He didn’t and the house of cards fell.

Arday resigned from Cambridge on the day of writing this piece, August 6.

Another story came out of the UK this week, which is closely related to Arday, except that it is an inversion of it. It concerns the eighties UK pop star, Boy George, front man of the band, Culture Club.

George has always been fiercely pro-Jewish. This week, he proved it again by releasing a single that stated his support for Jews, his horror over October 7, and the music industry’s antisemitism.

The Spectator Magazine had a brilliant article by Brendan O’Neil on George’s courage and the hate and ostracization he faced for telling the truth. It was called “The Monstering of Boy George.” “Most daringly of all, he refuses to bow to that falsest of false religions: the digital delirium that says Israel is committing genocide.”

The cult of Anti-Israel/Zionism is above all, the testing ground for what Orwell exposed and predicted in 1984.

There is no evidence of Israel committing genocide in Gaza. There is an abundance of evidence that Palestinians committed genocide in Israel.

So many in the west do not believe the truth because they don’t want to believe it or have been told that they cannot believe it. Truth for the Left, is what they say it is.

As Orwell wrote again in 1984, "And if all others accepted the lie, which the Party imposed; if all records told the same tale, then the lie passed into history and became truth."