Offense

If you followed the link I provided last post – the one tracking back to the ‘goat groping’ – you’d likely have seen that directly beneath the original post, someone had responded with this message:

"If you want to have some fun with this self-important twat, post a comment on her blog saying, Aron Palmi should rot in jail!" She will delete your comment, and then hold forth at length about what a poor victim of brutal American justice he is. Repeat as often as desired."

As if on cue, a comment appeared in my comments box: ‘Aron Palmi should rot in jail. [signed] Aron Palmi.’

After a brief WTF?? moment, the fog lifted. Here we probably had the return of a certain ‘Paul’ who first entered stage left in response to this post, that I penned almost a year ago to this day.

A bit of background: several years ago, an Icelandic kid named Aron Pálmi Ágústsson, who was living in Texas, was caught in some sort of ‘playing doctor’ act with another, younger, kid. The actual details are sketchy, presumably in response to Aron Pálmi’s status as a minor – he was 12 or 13 at the time. However, his minor status did not prevent him from being convicted under the Texas penal system as a sex offender and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment, part of which was served in state prisons [as opposed to juvenile homes]. Repeated attempts by Icelandic child protection authorities to talk on his behalf and/or have him returned to Iceland to serve his sentence have failed.

Personally I find the entire matter appalling and an example of a cruel and heartless system. Others – including ‘Paul’ who deposited a comment in response to that post – are clearly not of the same opinion. That’s fine. I respect others’ rights to their views – also those that differ from mine.

However, I will not tolerate when someone launches a vile attack on my views, or on me personally for having those views. Consequently I deleted the comment by ‘Paul’ [who gave no email or website address], and wrote a response of my own by way of justification. I also decided to set up a little bait. I suspected the identity of this person and thus embedded a link in the comment to a certain website that he was in charge of. Sure enough, the bait worked and ‘Paul’ returned – under the guise of ‘Anonymous’ this time. There was another brief exchange ... and that was the end of it.

Until two nights ago, that is, when the ‘Aron Pálmi should rot in jail’ comment turned up in my comments box [in the heat of the moment I deleted it – which in hindsight I shouldn’t have done]. Now, the person who is urging this campaign of hate against the Weather Report has the alias ‘jadetree’. If you follow the link underneath that name, you get a profile. And under the ‘homepage’ section of the profile, you get the same website I embedded as bait in my comment all those months ago: grapevine.is.

To my knowledge, the only ‘Paul’ working for Iceland’s alternative newspaper The Grapevine is a certain Paul F. Nikolov. I don’t know if Paul F. Nikolov is the same person urging people to flame The Iceland Weather Report with hateful comments, but I must say he’s very strongly implicated. Certainly Paul F. Nikolov has written about Aron Pálmi at length in The Grapevine and how he thinks he should, as per the comment above, ‘rot in jail’.

I don’t know about you, but I find the tone and content of the above message dark, twisted and vile. Far be it from me to judge, but the word ‘psychopath’ springs to mind. The scary part is that this Paul F. Nikolov character has recently formed some sort of ‘immigrant’s party’ [sic] here in Iceland. This immigrants’ party is supposed to fight for the rights of immigrants here, which if you read the exposés on the subject by Paul F. Nikolov are sorry indeed. So sorry, in fact, that he hopes to run for parliament on behalf of his immigrants’ party in the next national elections. He appeared on the cover of Birta – one of the most widely-read mags in Iceland – a few weeks ago, and while he made an impression that was not exactly grand [I read that interview with a growing feeling of distaste] he certainly came off a hundred times better than the twisted individual who penned the above hate campaign message. And – let there be no mistake – a hate campaign launched for no other reason than ‘this self-important twat’ having opinions different from his own.

I have no qualms about admitting that I am thoroughly creeped out. So at this point, dear Weather Report reader, I would like to ask a big favour. Would you kindly click on this link and then leave me a quick message in the comments box, telling me the name of homepage you see under the name ‘jadetree’? The reason I ask this is that I have a hunch that if mr jadetree knows he’s being watched, he’ll be scrambling to cover his tracks, and will remove the website url. And this way we’ll have witnesses.

If this guy is who I think he is, I think people should see both of his faces. Not just the one he likes to show to the world.

UPDATE:
Joseph was kind enough to leave a comment in which the identity of Mr Jadetree is fully revealed. He googled jadetree and Grapevine and got this link, under which there is a commenter by the name of jadetree. If you click on that, you get this profile, where 'jadetree' is identified as Paul Fontaine-Nikolov. Bingo.