Shoebat: Churchill Knew My Grandfather, Grandfather Knew Churchill

Walid Shoebat (this guy) has been in contact to express his displeasure at my commentary on his claim, made in the book Why We Left Islam, that his “maternal grandfather, F.W. Georgeson… was a great friend of Winston Churchill”. I suggested that “Georgeson’s supposed association with Churchill appears to have eluded the attention of historians and biographers”.

Shoebat draws attention to two newspaper extracts, concerning Churchill’s visit to the town of Eureka in California in 1929. I have not seen the original extracts myself, but I am willing to accept Shoebat’s testimony that his transcriptions, reproduced here, are genuine.

(1) From the Humboldt Standard, 9 September, 1929 (bracketed material is also a quote from the original source):

…continuing to Eureka yesterday morning. They [Churchill in company with his son, his brother and nephew and Gerald Campbeli, British consul-general] after leaving here, the party continued to Crescent City, where they stayed Saturday night, continuing to Eureka yesterday morning. They were met at the Eureka Inn by F. W. Georgeson, publisher of the Humboldt Standard, upon their arrival here.

(2) From the Times Standard, 7 November 1982:

…Eureka was a planned overnight stopover for Churchill since he had made arrangements to meet with old friend, Frederick Georgeson, editor of The Humboldt Standard. Arriving on Sept. 8, 1929, Churchill was treated in grand manner by high society members of British and Scot descent…

I must confess that although I consulted a couple of Churchill biographies available via Amazon search and Google Books, my claim was not based on an exhaustive survey of Churchill scholarship – in particular, I was not able to consult anything by Martin Gilbert, although I will endeavour to do so at the first opportunity.

Meanwhile, Shoebat has declared that he has “thwarted slander” and such:

The fact was ESTABLISHED that they were “ASSOCIATED”.

Do you CONFESS that you were WRONG at this point?

And if indeed I proved a “great friendship” you would still insist that by record I prove other issues.

A prejudiced person can never be satisfied.

Etc, etc.

But given Shoebat’s new wish to “thwart” what I have written about him, it would be nice to hear more about “Harris Ben Cobb” and his connection to Samaw’al ibn ‘Adiya, and, more pertinently, how Shoebat managed to discover strange symbols predictive of a “Muslim anti-Christ” in the Codex Vaticanus and the Codex Sinaiticus Biblical manuscripts, when I consulted images of the same texts and found nothing of the sort.

It is, of course, difficult to be lectured on “slander” by a man who has made the most extravagant accusations against Mosab Hassan Yousef (“his main goal in coming to the U.S. is to infiltrate the main source of international support for Israel: the American church”); Huma Abedin (“Imagine during World War II, the U.S. government accepted Eva Braun…”); and Barack Obama (“Islam could not defeat us by destroying the twin towers. But they are able to defeat us by sneaking in their man”).