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Six years ago, an American hack took a mouthful of horse sperm for publishing articles that pissed us off, the last one claiming that Moscow had no homeless problem since the homeless here didn't try washing his Western car windshield at stoplights the way they do in New York City. You'd think that Moscow's foreign journalists would have learned a hard lesson: Although the eXile is broke and forever on the verge of death, we're still dangerous in the way that a wounded stray is dangerous, always eager to take a big infected bite out of any asshole who dares try to steal the last piece of maggot-infested meat we've got by our side. For the most part, journalists here have been playing it smart, ignoring our paper, leaving us and our spoiled meat alone. They're still lazy hacks, but we're so bored by it all we only occasionally bother to bare an infected, chipped fang. Too much wasted energy. So there we sit, curled up by the construction yard fence next to our chewed-up bone, rarely bothering to bark at a Peter Finn strolling past with another Putin-Is-A-Nazi story, or at Newsweek as they toss a Russia-Is-The-Weakest-Nation-On-Earth rock over our heads, or at the Economist who whistles a Russian-Threat-So-Serious-It-Makes-Al Qaeda-Look- Like-The-Salvation-Army tune our way... We don't bother barking, because it rarely gets us anything, and all we want is to keep chewing on our old bone.  Luke Harding's casting photo for "Love, Actually" But a guy named Luke Harding walked by us last week, and he stole our fucking bone. No one, not even the worst hack, had ever done that to us in our 10 years of existence. Harding is Moscow's bureau chief for The Guardian, one of the largest English-language news outlets in the world. And he seems to have a knack for publishing articles whose content and lead paragraphs look suspiciously similar, in the cloning sense of the word, to articles published by Kevin O'Flynn of The Moscow Times. In fact, Harding's articles are so regularly similar to O'Flynn's that some of his colleagues have begun accusing him of using a fake "Luke Harding" pen-name in order to milk two checks for each article. The only thing that makes Harding seem real is his photo: a blue-eyed blond with a pinkish complexion and a half-confused expression which, if it were a bumper sticker, would read, "I'd rather be in a romantic comedy."
Last week, Luke Harding came and took our bone. Emails from eXile readers starting pouring in, claiming that one of our articles, "Jews: Where Are They Now?" had been lifted, at times almost word-for-word, by Harding. Our article was published in May; Harding's "The richer they come" was published in the Guardian on July 2. It was so blatant that one blogger out of England even took the time to lay out his case against Harding, titled "Fucking biters!" which opened with this Ginsberg-esque howl: "Remember how I was saying The Guardian is the greatest newspaper in the world? While I still am not backing down from that statement, I am very disappointed. Their newest Moscow correspondent, Luke Harding, is a fucking plagiarist. Let me say that one more time for the benefit of Google searchers. Luke Harding is a plagiarist. Plagiarist Luke Harding. Plagiarist. Luke Harding. Luke Harding. Plagiarist." The blogger even went through the trouble of citing the most damning bits of evidence: The eXile: "Thanks to anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, Jews were restricted in their ability to assimilate and rise up in society, so those who wanted to get ahead were forced into the margins. That meant that while ethnic Slavs dominated all the best career slots in the highly bureaucratized Soviet society, Jews dominated the black market economy. After the collapse of communism, the black market became legalized as free-market capitalism."
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