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Traitors in our fight for survival
HOW evil that while Spain drags out its dead, our academics and arts bosses roll out a blood-red carpet for apologists for similar terror. From Madrid came pictures of whatâs left of the trains and people who were blown up by bombers possibly from al-Qaida. "I saw a baby torn to bits," said one survivor, Ana Maria Mayor, her voice cracking. That baby was the target of these killers, and so were the thousands of innocents -- mothers, fathers, children -- who travelled with her or him. Sorry. Thereâs the word "innocent" that so irks Yvonne Ridley, in Melbourne this week as a guest of Monash University. You may have heard her on Jon Faineâs show on ABC 774. Sheâs the British journalist who converted to Islam and worked for the extremist al Jazeera Islamic news service. What you didnât hear on the show, however, is that Ridley reportedly told a Belfast meeting of the Islamic Students Association in January there was no innocent Israeli when it came to suicide bombings. Not even children. "There are no innocents in this war," she raged, because children could grow up to be Israeli soldiers. And talk of "suicide bombers" was "insulting": "Letâs call suicide bombers by their proper name, which is martyrs." This is a woman who wed a colonel in the terrorist PLO, and who says the jailed Abu Hamza, spiritual head in Europe of al-Qaida, is "so nice" that "I donât have a problem with him". Yet here she is as the guest of Monash Universityâs funky School of Social and Political Inquiry, one of those taxpayer-funded bodies devoted to the trivial and recklessly perverse -- a true sign of our decline into barbarity. The schoolâs head, Peter Lentini, for instance, gets big grants from the Australian Research Council to write Raging Against the Machine: Popular Music, Politics and Identity and to do a "comparative study of Australian and American soccer supportersâ cultures". Thatâs when heâs not working on "identity politics in the Melbourne punk community". But so many of our public institutions have this cultural death wish, thus aiding those who side with barbarians in their war against civilisation. SBS recently ran yet another "documentary" by "journalist" John Pilger in which he claims the US is far more evil than the genocidal Saddam Hussein. On Wednesday, Pilger appeared on ABC TVâs Lateline to promote his noxious views and declare it was "incredibly important" that the "resistance" in Iraq defeated the US, and so stop it from confronting, say, North Korea or Iran. Yes, true. He was asked: "Can you approve in that context the killing of American, British or Australian troops who are in the occupying forces?" His answer: "Well yes, theyâre legitimate targets." What about policemen of newly liberated Iraq being blown up by suicide bombers? They were targets, too, Pilger said, because they were "collaborators" and "vicious". And what about the women and children splattered over a mosque by yet more suicide bombers, linked to al-Qaida? "Well, of course, the killing of innocent people canât be condoned under any circumstances, but in all resistances, it happens," Pilger shrugged. This apologist for terrorists -- this moral pygmy -- is not only welcomed into an ABC studio and promoted by SBS, but is honoured with an exhibition by the Melbourne Museum. All paid for by you. Likewise, the Melbourne Writers Festival, also backed by taxpayers, last year hired as its keynote speaker Tariq Ali, the Trotskyist agitator who endorses the murder of Iraqi "collaborators" -- like, I assume, the dozens of Iraqi Red Cross workers and United Nations staff who were blown up by suicide bombers. Sydney University last year gave its Sydney Peace Prize to Hanan Ashrawi of the PLO, whose boss, Yasser Arafat, runs an Al Aqsa Martyrsâ Brigade that bombs buses filled with Israeli women and children. And Melbourne University lecturer Janet McCalman trilled that "the shocking events of September 11 may have served some good purpose if they awakened the complacent", such as, she said, "naive" Yankee tourists. The evil Spanish bombings show we are in a war to defend civilisation -- a war that now stretches from Madrid to Melbourne and New York to Bali. But not all the enemies of our civilisation are Islamic or foreigners. Many are people we pay to defend our culture, but, we find, betray it instead. Posted by: tipper 2004-03-13 |
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