The Google smear
The best way to smear your enemies: make certain Google has your version of the truth on top, as Juan Cole explains:
It seems to me that David Horowitz and some far rightwing friends of his have hit upon a new way of discrediting a political opponent, which is the GoogleSmear. It is an easy maneuver for someone like Horowitz, who has extremely wealthy backers, to set up a web magazine that has a high profile and is indexed in google news. Then he just commissions persons to write up lies about people like me (leavened with innuendo and out-of-context quotes). Anyone googling me will likely come upon the smear profiles, and they can be passed around to journalists and politicians as though they were actual information.
Recently Steven Plaut of the University of Haifa, an Israeli defender of the terrorist groups around the late extremist Rabbi Meir Kahane, was commissioned by Horowitz (and probably others of that circle) to do yet another hatchet job on me, the second in just a few months. I replied to the earlier smear at my blog.
Plaut cited the earlier hatchet jobs and rightwing bloggers as authorities. (One defamation now becomes a “citation” for the next one!)
The GoogleSmear references a body of falsehoods. It creates a nexus of links that increase the chance that the calumny will come to the top of a google search.