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Oliver Kamm (born 1963) is a British blogger, journalist and author. He writes articles for The Times and has published the book Anti-Totalitarianism: The Left-wing Case for a Neoconservative Foreign Policy for the Social Affairs Unit. In the book he argues in favour of the 2003 Invasion of Iraq.

He studied at Wyggeston and Queen Elizabeth I College, Leicester and Oxford University and had a career in the Bank of England and the securities industry. He helped start a pan-European investment bank in 1997 and is part of its management . He is the nephew of former MP Martin Bell and was his adviser from 1997 to 2001.

Kamm was a founding signatory in 2005 of the Henry Jackson Society principles, advocating a proactive approach to the spread of liberal democracy across the world, including when necessary by military intervention.

Kamm is probably best known for his criticisms of the linguist and radical political activist Noam Chomsky. These are summarised in an article for Prospect magazine opposing its readers' choice of Chomsky in the top position for its 2005 Global Intellectuals Poll. Chomsky retorted that Kamm's article demonstrated "the lengths to which some will go to prevent exposure of state crimes and their own complicity in them". Kamm returned to the fray by claiming Chomsky had failed to quote himself correctly.

Chomsky/Guardian Controversy

On October 31, 2005, The Guardian newspaper published an interview conducted by Emma Brockes with Noam Chomsky in which Brockes suggested that Chomsky denied the existence of a massacre in Srebrenica. The editors of The Guardian retracted the interview several weeks later, following complaints from Chomsky. The editors found in favor of Chomsky on three significant counts, and the readers’ editor Ian Mayes posted an apology and correction.

In early December Kamm, along with co-authors David Aaronovich and Francis Wheen, sent a 4,500-word riposte to The Guardian, alleging that Chomsky “most certainly does seem to believe that...Srebrenica was not a massacre.” The authors asked that the correction itself be retracted or corrected. While emphasizing that “none of the material sent to me has persuaded me that I should do that,” Mayes nevertheless turned the matter over to an external ombudsman, John Willis, for investigation and review.

On May 8, 2006 Willis published his full report, which found that “the Readers' Editor was right to conclude that an apology and correction was deserved,” but that The Guardian was wrong to delete the original interview from its fully-archived website.

Kamm maintains that Willis’s report was constrained to review only matters of internal procedure, and that therefore Kamm's substantive complaint “remains unconsidered.” Willis’s report, however, addresses Kamm's complaint as well as Guardian procedure, concluding that the readers’ editor "was also right, on the evidence sent to him, that the substantive complaint from Messrs. Aaronovitch, Kamm and Wheen about Professor Chomsky's views on Srebrenica should be rejected and that therefore the original correction should stand." The Guardian now considers the matter closed, though Kamm's contention about the inadequacy of Willis's report has received support from another commentator, Stephen Glover of The Independent.

External links

• Oliver Kamm's blog

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