Posted on 09/23/2001 4:24:00 PM PDT by Straight Vermonter
When Franco’s army was advancing in four columns on the Republicans’ capital of Madrid General Emilio Mola, commander of the advancing forces, boasted that he had a fifth column within the city. Its role was to engage in subversion by promoting defeatism and sowing discord. The response of some journalists and commentators to the terrorist atrocities inflicted on the US strongly reminded me of General Mola’s boast.
What makes members of the ideological fifth column1 that operates within the media particularly dangerous is that they are usually unconscious of their own political prejudices, writing as if no rational or humane person could disagree with them. Hence those who challenge them are invariably dismissed as “rednecks” or “rightwing extremists”.
The terrorist attack on America has certainly had the effect of bringing some of these people out into the open. Unfortunately lack of resources has only allowed me to focus on a very small influential section of the print media, but there is, I believe, sufficient evidence to support my contention that within the media there lurks a significant number of individuals whose ideology is not only deeply anti-American but equally hostile to genuine classical liberal values.
I shall begin with Melbourne’s Age, half of which seems to have been commandeered by the Guardian, a very leftwing British paper which is deeply hostile to the US.
Martin Woollacott, a journalist with the ‘Red’ Guardian wasted no time telling us that a missile defence system would have been useless against such an attack, ignoring the plain fact that it would certainly be effective against a missile attack (What fuelled the anger, the Age 14/9). Woollacott then slipped the leftwing anti-American line into his article, the one the Age loves so well, that what America needed was more “even-handedness. . . .in the Muslim world”. Leftwing code for America to abandon Israel in favour of its enemies, because in the eyes of leftwing journalists like Woollacott democratic Israel is the real aggressor, not its anti-democratic despotic enemies.
The leftwing Louise Dodd pursued the line that Australia should not go “all the way with George W.” because terrorists might retaliate against us (Howard’s challenge is to be a leader 14/9). That appeasement encourages aggression is not something this journalist has apparently learnt. However, it’s a handy excuse for the soft left to argue against supporting the US while paying lip service to her right to retaliate.
The following day Hugo Young, another of the ‘Red’ Guardian’s leftwing media warriors, saw the bombing as an opportunity to lay scorn on President Bush, falsely asserting that America was “faced with a president who showed signs of a withdrawal from global influence and responsibility” (The death of an American dream, Age 15/9). As any reasonably informed person knows, Bush is far from being the Pat Robertson “isolationist” that leftwing journalists maliciously portrayed him to be.
Moreover, there’s no pleasing this lot. If America appears as if it might start looking inwards the likes of Young will accuse it of “isolationism”. If it starts to look outwards with the aim of protecting its own interests and values they immediately attack it as an imperialist bully. What Young and Woollacott really want is their own impossible dream, an America that will be an instrument of their own all too selective morality. Of course, Young rightly condemned the atrocity after he called America militarily “impotent” against terrorism. It isn’t. Still, Young’s article was still morally superior to Woollacott’s.
Mark Lawson (you’ve guessed it, another Guardian journalist) managed to equate the New York atrocity with “the young girl fleeing screaming from the napalm in Vietnam. . .” (Picture this: forever haunted 16/9). I think I know exactly what he wanted his readers to picture: American ‘perfidy’ in South East Asia. Now for some history. The girl in the picture was Phan Thi Kim Phuc whose injuries were caused by a bombing attack on the outskirts of a village under attack by North Vietnamese troops. The attack was carried out by South Vietnamese forces. No Americans were involved. The original aerial attack had been delayed for three days to allow for civilian evacuation. Unfortunately, pilot error resulted in Phan Thi Kim Phuc being struck by napalm and ten South Vietnamese soldiers and civilians being killed.
The photo was taken by Nick Ut who later said: “If the Communists had only stayed in North Vietnam this never would have happened.” These are facts that the likes of the Guardian and the Age chose to ignore, just as they ignored the fact that when Phan Thi Kim Phuc and her husband got the opportunity to defect when their Cuba-bound flight stopped for refuelling in Canada, they took it.
The 16 September was certainly a bumper day in the Age for lefty journalists. Once again the ‘Red’ Guardian was at it. This time we had Blake Morrison basically using the “carpet bombing of Cambodia” to justify the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon (Why the dust should be so emotive I don’t know. But it is 16/9). More history I’m afraid. The kind leftwing journalists try to swill down their Orwellian memory hole.
What America carpet bombed was North Vietnamese occupied Cambodia. More than 100,000 North Vietnamese troops had invaded Cambodian territory and the Cambodians wanted them out. Journalists who argue otherwise are deliberately ignoring the embarrassing fact that in 1969 Sihanhouk revealed a map detailing Cambodian territory occupied by North Vietnamese troops. Father Ponchaud wrote in his book Cambodia: Year Zero: “In his desire to stop the infiltration along his frontiers Sihanouk disclosed the location of the Viet Cong bases which were then bombed by the American Air Force.” It was these enemy bases in communist occupied areas that were bombed, Mr Morrison, not innocent civilians, nearly all of whom had evacuated the area anyhow.
Of course, Mr Morrison is still outraged by the atrocity — despite those “Arabs whose cities have been bombed and children starved, indignation at the huge imbalance in wealth the Third World and the West.” Not to mention the fact that “The Pentagon had blood on its hands. The World Trade Center was a pillar of Mammon.” In other words, the Americans deserved what they got. Let’s get three things straight: 1) Hussein is starving his people, not us. And it was Hussein who started the Gulf War when he invaded Kuwait. 2) His insinuation that difference in wealth are due to exploitation is a socialist lie. The West produces its own wealth. Some of these Arab countries should try it some time. 3) Osama bin Laden is extremely rich and his most ardent and close supporters are far from poor. In fact, most of seem to have been educated at Western universities, where some lecturers, no doubt, fuelled their hatred of the West.
After trying to minimise the atrocity he then said, perhaps with a wink and a nudge: “Let’s not minimise what’s gone on.” Playing the same nauseating theme was Studs Terkel, an American writer and Stalinist, whom the Guardian had decided to publish (I did say that the Guardian seems to have taken over the Age for the duration). According to defender of totalitarian states, America had it coming for trying to prevent the communist takeover of South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos; for liberating Grenadians from a Marxist dictator and for driving Hussein out of Kuwait.
This literary genius and totalitarian apologist went on to assert (the left love asserting things) that America’s resistance to communist aggression was really the creation of “people [who] have a hunger for a faith of some kind. Before, in the Cold War, it was communism. . . now it’s terrorism.” Vicious sanctimonious garbage. Communism killed over 100 million people and terrorism murdered more than 6,000 New Yorkers and he has the nerve to call the reaction to this kind of savagery “a hunger for a faith”.
Then there was the equally sanctimonious leftwing Morag Frazer who stated: “Bush’s vow that America would ‘whip terrorism’ was as frightening as it was banal” (America must ask itself the reason why). And why is it banal? Because it “makes it look like a battle between goodies and baddies”. According to this socialist those who planned the atrocity are not evil, they’re not even bad — they’re just misunderstood. She then used the phoney line that the CIA were basically responsible for bin Laden. That bin Laden is responsible for himself is not something she thought to mention.
To support her prejudiced leftwing view she quotes the leftwing pro-PLO Robert Fisk whom she claims “provides the kind of background that helps you understand not just what has happened and why but how one might then proceed.” This is the same Fisk who writes for the extreme leftwing Nation and who figures the atrocities carried out against America are nothing compared with “American missiles smashing into Palestinian homes.” You see, Fisk also believes that Israel is a murderous aggressor, something that the church-going Fraser neglected to tell her readers.
Naturally she had to bring in the Cambodian bombing. What is else can one ascribe to these continual references to the bombing of North Vietnamese occupied Cambodian territory other than a cowardly insinuation that on 11 September 2001 America deserved what she got. Just as naturally, Fraser made a sneering reference to President Bush as being “not force at all”.
Christopher Kremmer produced a little gem that many more are also parroting when he wrote the US was responsible for the arming and organising of the Taliban. The “very Muslim groups it (the US) used to bring down the Soviet Union” (Once again, Pakistan plays a murky middle role 18/9). The US did not create the Taliban. The Soviet Union did that when it invaded Afghanistan. If it were not for the Soviet invasion the Taliban resistance would obviously never have emerged. But never blame even the defunct Soviet Union if you can blame the bad ol’ USA.
Directly below Kremmer we dear old Gay Alcorn. Never the brightest button in the draw, Gay decided to give us one of her invaluable insights by deferring to Mr Bassiouni, international law expert, who claimed that assassinations are not allowed under international law. According to this view, Britain would have been acting illegally if it had managed to assassinate Hitler in September. But think of the lives it would have saved, Gay. By putting rogue states in inverted commas dear Gay managed to give the impression that it was wrong to attach such labels to countries likes Iraq or North Korea. Or maybe she does think its wrong. After all, she does work for the Age. In The world in his hands Alcorn arrogantly described President Bush as “smaller than life in office” but now he has a real “opportunity to show his Mettle”. To tell the truth, I can’t go on with this one.
Ewen MacAskill of the Guardian (Age 19/9) expended about 600 words trying to explain why America should do nothing. He too had to bring Vietnam into it by sneering at the domino theory which argued that if one country fell to communism then so would others. But that’s exactly what happened. As soon as the South fell to the communist North, with the likes of the Guardian cheering her on, Cambodia and Laos swiftly followed. But in MacAskill’s leftwing parallel world it just didn’t happen.
The same issue gave us a real gem by Shahram Akbarzadeh, a lecturer at La Trobe University, Victoria, who argued, wait for it, that “Bin Laden represents a backlash against the US for its role in supporting undemocratic and unpopular regimes, such as the Saudi dynasty and the former Shah of Persia”. And just how democratic is the murderous Iraqi regime, Mr Shahram, as well as the Iranian theocracy and the primitive Taliban, and lets not forget that democratic beacon on the hill Syria? Israel is the only democratic state in the whole region and that’s the very state Shahram Akbarzadeh and his mates want to exterminate.
But the cake was taken by Paul Foot, a well-known British journalist and fanatical Trotskyist who also works for the Guardian. (Now do you see why it’s called red?) Foot’s journalistic absurdity would have been hilarious if it were not for the thousands of New York dead. He attacked the atrocity on the grounds that these “acts of terror divert the attention of the masses away from collective action.” As a fanatical Trot Foot’s callousness is explicable once we realise that Trotsky was an ardent practitioner of mass state terror.
This creep supported the bloody suppression of the 1921 Kronstadt uprising in which thousands died. It was Trotsky who was elated by the “militarisation of the working class” which he also slyly called “socially regulated” labour. Those who resisted this “militarisation” were murdered. I guess this tells us all we need to know about Mr Paul Foot. (I remember the very self-righteous Mr Foot from the sixties. I didn’t like him then and I like him even less now).
On the 20 September the Age presented us with Edward Said (Step back from the brink). More than 6,000 thousand New Yorkers massacred in one terrorist act and Said accuses President Bush of wanting “more drum-beating”. Said deserves an article all to himself. Suffice to say that he has been exposed as a liar and a fraud. He is also an ardent supporter of the PLO and supports it aim to exterminate Israel. None of these things were referred to by the paper’s editor.
No matter what Gawenda claims, his rag has been outrageously dishonest. For him to argue that the likes of Foot, Said, Terkel, etc., provided the readers of the Age with an honest and well informed alternative view of the terrorist assault on America is to lie through his teeth.
Now we’ll have a quick look at Murdoch’s Australian, which was no where near as bad as the Age. War based on faith not guns (14/9) Tony Judt, director of the Remarque Institute, New York University, referred to American “military bombast”. Perhaps I’m missing something here, but I don’t recall any “bombast” and the way Iraq, Syria and now the Taliban are behaving strongly suggests that they don’t believe it’s “bombast” either. His final paragraph contained remarks about “showy hardware and vain boasting” and that it “may be left to a future president” to “grasp an uncomfortable truth”. Ordinarily these snide comments wouldn’t warrant a response if it were not for the circumstances and that the editors at Murdoch’s Australian are nearly all anti-American.
Saturday the 15 September was a goof crop for commentary. There was CIA arms fuelled international jihad by Michael Binyon of The Times, another Murdoch paper. Binyon actually fingered the Soviet invasion as the event that made bin Laden and the Taliban. Then it went downhill. US can’t beat this foe alone by Roy Eccleston had him attacking Bush over so-called global warming and biological weapons. Like most journalistic know-alls, Eccleston knows very little. His next piece, Presidential tears raise concerns contained a snide attack on Bush in which he suggested that the president’s emotional response to the atrocities might make people “wonder if whether he is capable of handling the immense pressure.” An adjacent story, (Clinton pays tribute to citizens’ silent rebuke AFP) read like a Clinton press release.
Pleasure and pain by Catherine Taylor was what I call a nasty piece of work. In her view “Palestinians are concerned terrorism in the US will encourage even greater support for Israel’s aggressive suppression of their struggle for statehood. There are already signs those fears are real. On Thursday Israeli tanks entered Jericho.” Pardon me little Miss Taylor, but Israel actually agreed to 95 per cent of Arafat’s demands. I guess the remaining five per cent, which amounted to national suicide, was just too much for those selfish Israelis to swallow. In addition, it’s the Palestinians who are calling for the extermination of the state of Israel. The so-called Palestinians can have peace any time they want it. All they have to do is abandon their neo-Nazi attitude to Israel and behave like civilised people. It’s that simple.
And then we had the toad-like Philip Adams. And what did he have to say? Zilch. More than 6,000 massacred in one foul act and not a peep from the self-appointed conscience of The Australian and the arch enemy of bigotry, except leftwing bigotry. Instead, he began his column with an attack on America’s attempt to hold back the bloody communist conquest of South East Asia, a conquest he supported and still does. Once again Cambodia was dragged up. This is pretty sickening considering that this multimillionaire socialist still refuses to publicly recognise the fact that Pol Pot was a communist. Contrast this with his 1 September article called Beware: bigotry is back. And it sure as hell is.
John Zubrzycki headlined his 18 September story the ‘US has disturbed sleeping monster’ which he took from Peshawar’s pro-Taliban Mashriq. There is definitely something wrong with this twit. Over 6,000 New Yorkers murdered and he’s quoting Mashriq. It would have been much smarter to have quoted Admiral Yamamoto who said after the attack on Pearl Harbour: “I fear we have awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve.” If Zubrzycki had more than two brain cells he’d know which one to fear. He also accused the US of abandoning Afghanistan after the Soviet defeat.
This damned-if-they-do-and-damned-if-don’t approach to America ignored the several hundred million dollars that America gave as aid to the Taliban. The Taliban’s economic and socially destructive policies were also overlooked by Zubrzycki. As an illuminating aside, The Australian’s Melbourne editor, Cameron Stewart, implied that Australia needs to beef up its intelligence operations, which is true. What’s interesting here is that Stewart and Zubrzycki anti-American and hostile to domestic intelligence operations.2 But that’s leftwing journalism for you.
I could go on but I fear have already stretched readers’ patience. However, I feel that my main point has been made. The strong anti-American and anti-Israeli undercurrent that is felt in so many articles and news stories clearly reveals the malevolent influence of the left in the Australian media. Unfortunately, The New Australian is the only outfit that is trying counter that influence. It looks as if we’re going to remain the only outfit.
1Our leftwing fifth column also includes academics and activists who assiduously work to undermine our institutions and alliances.
2Soviet sabotage, spies and America's Australian base will reveal what Stewart and Zubrzycki really think about intelligence gathering and the US alliance.
Note: The Age and the Guardian refuse to run stories on Castro’s international terrorist links and his drug-running activities, not to mention torture and murder.
So true. so true. so true.
The media should post a "warning label".
A new one. Honest!
Palestinians who remained in Israel were granted citizenship, and Israel absorbed a million-plus Jewish refugees who were forcibly expelled from the defeated Arab countries. Palestinians who had left were not allowed to return, considered by the Israelis a potential "fifth column" that could endanger the fledgling country, still in a state of war.
The Arab countries of Jordan and Egypt occupied the balance of what had been Palestine, including most parts of what would have been the Palestinian state.
In Gaza, the Egyptians built camps and confined the Palestinians. Similar action was taken in Lebanon and Jordan, and confinement in those camps was used to foment the sort of hatred among the occupants that, over decades, defies logic and history and justifies to them the terrorist acts taken at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Arab countries and their despotic regimes have encouraged the continuation of poverty, ignorance and intolerance among their people in order to serve their own purposes, mainly their continuation in power. Palestinians are victims of Arab leadership, not of Israel or the United States.
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