Brazenness and effrontery
An online petition has been launched for the urgent cause of defending Iraqi academics from murderous violence. The signatories include Noam Chomsky. Tony Benn, Harold Pinter, Bianca Jagger, John Pilger, and, from the Stop the War Coalition, Andrew Murray and Lindsey German.
But there's an oddity: the petition at no point identifies the assassins. The reason appears to be that if Chomsky and co stated their charge openly they would be ridiculed. So they insinuate it instead by means of a quotation from an authoritative source:
Already on July 14, 2004, veteran correspondent Robert Fisk reported from Iraq that: "University staff suspect that there is a campaign to strip Iraq of its academics, to complete the destruction of Iraq's cultural identity which began when the American army entered Baghdad."
Bogus chronology (what does Fisk imagine the state of "Iraq's cultural identity" - and especially free academic inquiry - was before American troops arrived in Baghdad?) is transmuted into teleology. And by this alchemy, the petitioners hold the US responsible for the death squads:
As an occupying power, and under international humanitarian law, final responsibility for protecting Iraqi citizens, including academics, lies with the United States.
You see, the Americans are the real killers, because they are not exercising power strongly enough to defend Iraqi civil society from those determined to destroy it. They are not confronting effectively the motley collection of Jihadists and Baathists that seeks to extirpate the emergence of democracy in Iraq. These are the forces commonly described by the Stop the War Coalition and its controllers, the Socialist Workers' Party, as the "insurgents" or the "resistance", and whose victory is earnestly sought by the same people.
I am accustomed to the sophistry of this wing of the anti-war movement, which manages to find an American hand behind every evil worth mentioning, and avoids mentioning evils where no such hand can be identifed even with the use of the most strained analogies. But for brazenness and effrontery, this case (brought to my attention by Francis Wheen, to whom my thanks) has few equals.
