Breaking news: Jason Arday was telling the truth. That, at least, is the verdict of Middle East Eye, a generously funded outlet based in London which is famous for its ardent truth-telling about such matters as the ‘victory’ of Iran, the ‘Palestinian Holocaust’ and Israel’s status as a ‘settler-colonial beachhead’.
In a long article, the rag has pronounced that after a ‘Middle East Eye analysis’, following Arday’s death, several of his improbable claims – including one walked back by Arday himself – have been ‘found to be true’. MEE’s evidence? That Arday made the same claims to a couple of local newspapers at the time.
As MEE puts it:
Particularly mocked was Arday’s claim that he ran 30 marathons in 35 days. But Arday does in fact appear to have completed the challenge… The news outlet My London ran a story saying Arday… was “taking on the challenge of a lifetime by attempting to complete 30 marathons in 35 days”… On 20 July 2010, a Richmond and Twickenham Times article reported that Arday had completed his first marathon… A Your Local Guardian story on 13 August then reported that the ‘end is in sight for an energetic lecturer who has nearly reached his target of running 30 marathons in 35 days’… On 25 August, according to the Richmond and Twickenham Times, Arday completed his marathon “after enduring daily ice baths and a hairline fracture to his leg.”
As MEE must know, none of these articles proves that the future professor completed 30 marathons. Indeed, three of the four don’t even quote Arday as saying he’d done it – just that he intended to do it, had run the first one, or had run most of them. Then there’s the fact that Arday claimed to have run the last nine of the 30 with that fractured leg which, he said, ‘ballooned to twice its size’. Doing this, according to doctors quoted in the Guardian, would have been ‘incredibly painful’. However, pictures show Arday finishing his supposed 30th marathon equipped with two legs of completely normal girth.
MEE also says the professor’s claim to have raised £5m for charity is ‘plausible’ because ‘the publicly identifiable charities Arday was associated with had a combined gross income of more than £1.4bn to £1.5bn.’ This is a complete non sequitur, of course. Indeed, even Arday himself withdrew that claim before his death, saying the sum was raised by a syndicate of about 100 people.
The charity analysis is sourced to the even more deranged article, published by the Byline Times, which claims that Arday’s downfall came after he was ‘targeted’ by a ‘race science network that penetrated Cambridge University’ at the behest of (of course!) Palantir’s Peter Thiel.
This kind of thing from titles such as MEE and Byline Times shows that what’s already happened in discourse on the Middle East is starting to happen to discourse about identity in the UK: the subjugation of facts to politics. As with Israel-Palestine, there is no such thing as the truth, only your side’s version of the truth. Even proven lies from a fantasist must be adopted and defended, using arguments which you must know are paper-thin, if your side demands it. Fortunately, I don’t think Britain has gone as far down this path as MEE or the Byline Times would seem to like. Many on the left, for instance, can see the folly of adopting Jason Arday as a British George Floyd.
We know the kind of Britain MEE wants to create. Last year, the MEE published an article saying media exposés of the child grooming gangs were a ‘racist campaign’, and then last month it published another piece demanding that the author of that article, Ali Milani, who worked on Andy Burnham’s leadership campaign, be given a job in Burnham’s No. 10, calling it a way for the PM to oppose ‘the forces of bigotry and ignorance which have shaped British politics’.
MEE has 15 staff, according to its latest accounts, but chooses not to say who pays the bills. Its editor-in-chief, David Hearst, has written that ‘the law is telling people to think of Hamas as terrorists, but they are increasingly disinclined to do so’, and that ‘Gaza cannot be cleansed of Hamas, any more than England can be cleansed of the English’. Charming.
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