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How can Tariq Ali justify an apologia for terrorists?

By Jim Nolan - posted Thursday, 1 July 2004


Who to believe? – Ali, the cosseted international jet-setting faux revolutionary, or the genuine article? As those tricky imperialists would say – it’s a no-brainer.

Little wonder that the Iraqi comrades have a different view but it’s still no surprise that Ali ignores them.  After all, he has managed once again to discuss Iraq with not a mention of the 300,000 Iraqis who lie in mass graves thanks to Saddam.

The pitiable end point has now been reached by this postmodern Hitler-Stalin pact of ultra leftists and Islamists – no amount of genocide, mass murder, suicide bombing, be-headings, or assassinations should get in the way of opposition to the US “imperialists”.   The game was given away by Ali’s other comrade, John Pilger, who said recently on ABC television when giving his seal of approval to the “resistance”, we “can’t afford to be choosy”.

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Last year when Ali visited Australia – you remember, courtesy of Bush’s bull mastiff Blair and the British taxpayer – he pompously announced to one of the succession of fawning baby interviewers, that he would be writing a libretto about the Iranian revolution.

Now that Ali has at long last discovered torture (no scare quotes) – admittedly so far only when administered by imperialists – can we live in hope that his operatic confection will deal with the systematic human rights abuses under the mad mullahs?  Or will they too receive the gentlest cuffing from Ali’s ideological kid gloves as another band of doughty anti imperialists? No worries that the forces of secular democracy, not to mention the Iranian communists, were among the first victims of the mullahs’ very own theocratic republic of fear.

For Ali, unadulterated anti-Americanism trumps all. Remember, Ali was vehemently against Clinton and Blair’s maintenance of the no-fly zones which protected Iraqi Kurdistan for a decade. Protected against Saddam’s malignant terror, the Kurds created the free-est state in the Islamic world. Free, among other things, from the ravages of the UN sanctions which Saddam cynically turned to his propaganda advantage with the aid and comfort of the likes of Ali. Remember also Ali’s telling insight that the attack on the twin towers was a “godsend” for Bush.

Unlike the Bush family, which at last has abandoned the old “realist” foreign policy, Ali appears to be congenitally and intellectually incapable of abandoning his own attachment to the famous nostrum that “he [insert human rights abusing dictator here] might be a son of a bitch but he’s our son of a bitch”. As the Canadian journalist Mark Steyn pointed out, the fatal flaw in this old approach is demonstrated by reversing the terms of the proposition – he might have been our son of a bitch but he’s still a son of a bitch.

The real implication of Ali’s tired position adds up to no more than a recipe for more tyranny, mayhem and murder and no hope for the Iraqi people, as the Iraqi Communist Party recognises only too well.  Despite Ali’s twists and turns, he would take Iraq directly into a maelstrom of terror at the hands of Abu Musab al-Zarkawi. Terrorist, jihadist executioner, murderer, the hideous al-Zarkawi has a new mantle thanks to Ali and the bankrupt intellectual opponents of a better Iraq in the name of a fantasy “anti imperialism” – he’s just Ali’s son of a bitch.

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Article edited by Margaret-Ann Williams.
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About the Author

Jim Nolan is an old fashioned social democrat and Sydney Barrister with an interest in Human Rights. He is a long-standing member of the Australian Labor Party.

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