Madame Defarge Award nominee
This week's Madame Defarge Award nominee is Seumas Milne, The Guardian's in-house insurgent. "This election could plunge Iraq further into the abyss" said the headline on his egregious apologia for tyranny and terror yesterday. "Rigged polls held under foreign occupation have a notorious pedigree," goes the subhead. An excerpt:
"But most crucially of all, whatever the turnout and relative votes for the different lists, the result cannot and will not reflect the popular will over the most important issue facing the country: the occupation. Opinion polls show most Iraqis want foreign troops to leave now. But none of those with a chance of being elected — all compromised by their links to the current administration — supports such a demand. Without foreign troops, they would fear for their own skins."
Those unacquainted with Milne's history will think that his concern for democracy is genuine, but a reading of the record reveals otherwise. Back in December 2001, Milne the anti-imperialist was mourning civilians killed during "a coward's war":
"Champions of the war insist that such casualties are an unfortunate, but necessary, byproduct of a just campaign to root out global terror networks. They are a world apart, they argue, from the civilian victims of the attacks on the World Trade Centre because, in the case of the Afghan civilians, the US did not intend to kill them... what has been cruelly demonstrated is that the US and its camp followers are prepared to sacrifice thousands of innocents in a coward's war."
In July last year, however, Milne the militant was rationalizing civilian deaths during "a real war of liberation":
"The resistance war can of course be cruel, but the innocent deaths it has been responsible for pale next to the toll inflicted by the occupiers. Its political strength lies precisely in the fact that it has no programme except the expulsion of the occupying forces. Jack Straw said this week that the resistance was 'opposed to a free Iraq' — but its campaign is in fact Iraq's real war of liberation.
Did you get that? "Innocent deaths" are "cruel, but...". Have you ever read such a brazen defence of barbarism? The horrific bombings being carried out by Iraqi, Iranian and Syrian terrorists in and around Baghdad are the most vile of crimes with the victims overwhelmingly Iraqis trying to build a better society, but to Milne this cruelty can be fobbed off with a "but". And what did Milne's heroic "resistance" achieve yesterday? According to the BBC:
"In other violence, gunmen have killed six people and abducted a Turkish businessman in an ambush outside a Baghdad hotel.Up to 10 gunmen opened fire on a minibus that had come to pick up the businessman — identified as Abdulkadir Tanrikulu — from the Bakhan Hotel.
The dead were local employees of Mr Tanrikulu who had come to collect him in the minibus."
Yes, Seumas Milne is worthy of The Guardian and worthy of the Rainy Day Madame Defarge Award.
