In England
last century we were always taught
instinctively not to trust a man who spoke
fluent French. Now I think the rule must
be not to trust an Iraqi who speaks
perfect English. 
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November
11, 2004 (Wednesday)
London
(England) TODAY is the third day of the
American (oops, "coalition") offensive against
Falluja in Iraq. We know only what we are told by
the media, who are embedded only with the invading
army, and not represented on the defending side at
all. Even on the BBC, the facts vary wildly. The
invaders have ten, fifteen, twenty thousand troops.
Or less. Or more. They are encircling the city.
There are gaps through which the top men have
escaped. Their commander is al-Zarqawi. But
others voice the suspicion that he is a figment of
the CIA's PsyWar operations -- after all, he was
the ringleader on the Nick Berg beheading video
(except that he wasn't, as the Internet knows). There is however a unanimity as to terms and
designations which suggests that what Joachim
von Ribbentrop's foreign office used to call
Sprachregelungen, and are now called
style-sheets, have been sent out to the
newscasters. The defenders (labeled "terrorists" by the
invaders, as even insurgents sounds too
respectable) are said variously to number a few
hundred, or two, or ten thousand, depending on the
point the pundit is trying to make. They are just
wild guesses. More mystifyingly, the number of
Iraqi troops collaborating with the American
invaders varies from two to four thousand, although
one television anchorman, on BBC2, used the figure
"two hundred" which seems more likely. In which case the
"terrorists", who yesterday claimed to have
captured twenty of the latter, have captured
one-tenth of the Iraqi collaborators, whose
likely fate might as of this moment seem grim
unless they are to be held as pawns for later
negotiation. The battlefield commanders have in their own
interests ordained that the media are not to be
present inside the bomb-blasted and terror-stricken
(what used to be called "shocked and awed") city.
Bodies littering the streets make bad press for the
democracies responsible for having thus transported
them from life to death. The rest is darkness. The British Broadcasting
Corporation appears to have telephoned professional
people in the wrecked city at random, and secured
eyewitness accounts, and these are not reassuring.
I rather doubt that the major American networks
will have displayed the same enterprise.  
PRESIDING over this entire grisly but as yet
invisible spectacle are the historic figures of Mr
Illiterate Bush and Mr Sanctimonious Blair
(above), each of whom we have seen,
straight-faced but stuttering on the television
newscasts, and even proclaiming on the steps of the
White House and in the chamber of Britain's ancient
Parliament, that in invading the once-peaceful city
of Falluja, the "coalition forces" are but doing
the bidding of Iraq's sovereign prime minister, Mr
Iyad "Vidkun" Allawi. To call this spectacle undignified, would itself
be undignified; "unedifying" might be better. Or
even criminal, as in war-crime, because those of us
familiar with the darker recesses of European of
history recall a certain Austrian minister, Mr
Arthur Seyss-Inquart, who was prevailed upon
to courier a letter to Adolf Hitler inviting
him to send his troops into Austria in March 1938;
and a certain Slovak minister, Father Tiso,
who sent a similar letter to Berlin, at Hitler's
bidding, pleading with him to send the Wehrmacht,
at that time the world's mightiest army, into
Prague in March 1939. That made it all legit',
d'you see? If there is any justice in the world -- and do I
hear a hollow, mocking chuckle coming from its four
corners? -- I pray that the complaisant Mr Allawi,
if not his paymasters, may one day suffer the same
fate as Messrs Seyss-Inquart and Tiso, a fate which
involved a rope and a trapdoor, when that war was
over.  
WHO is Allawi, this latest in a long line of Iraqi
hoods? Is this the same man whom three
independent eye-witnesses described only weeks
ago as entering an Iraqi police station and
executing in cold blood half a dozen "suspects,"
Soviet-style, with a bullet in the back of the
head, suspects whom the local authorities had
merely rounded up for questioning. This fine
democratic leader screamed at the watching police
officers, "This is how to do it!"
In England last century we were always taught
instinctively not to trust a man who spoke fluent
French. Now I think the rule must be not to trust
an Iraqi who speaks perfect English (or, in the
case of Ahmed Chalabi, American). I groan for the day when an intrepid British
television interviewer puts it squarely to Allawi
or any of his fellow-Quislings like this: "May I compliment you on your excellent
spoken English? Much better than Saddam's. But
then of course you and your pals spent many
years in England, didn't you! That's right, in
the pay of the British Intelligence service,
MI6. Being groomed for just this job. Isn't that
what people call a stooge? How does it feel to
be a hired stooge, Mr Allawi?"And isn't it right that after you got your
training, you were infiltrated back into Iraq,
and carried out car-bombing operations on behalf
of MI6 and the CIA, which killed numbers of
innocent people, in an attempt to destabilize
the Saddam administration?" Now isn't that what old-fashioned people used to
describe as a terrorist, and sometimes still
do? Is this unpleasant specimen really the best man
we could find for the job? Meanwhile, our own leaders have turned the
English language, of which Allawi and his cohorts
have such a fluent command, on its head.  What do you normally call a handful of brave
young men who, armed only with primitive AK-47
automatic rifles and a few grenades, knowingly
sacrifice their lives to defend their cities from
invasion by a mighty foreign armada, borne in from
across the oceans, of Abrams Mark I tanks, armoured
infantry carriers, humvees, self-propelled guns,
howitzers, helicopter and AC-130 gunships,
2,000-pound bombs, rockets, and the rest? "Heroic
resistance fighters?" No, they, the defenders, are the
terrorists. That word has a useful ring, because it
ties implicitly into President George W
Bush's "war on terror," and thus into the
still-mindful specter of two tall buildings
collapsing in New York's business district in
September 2001. Perversely, what do you call the ten, fifteen,
or twenty thousand professional and well-armed
soldiers, otherwise brave men from the prairies of
Illinois and the plains of Colorado, whose job it
is to invade the city and kill (as their commanders
boast) every single "dumb" defender:
liberators. As something of a wordsmith myself, I find it
repellent, and I will not go along with it. I am
just sorry that our journalists do, because
historians won't.
AT 9:55 am there is a call from an anonymous
North London voice. "Arafat today, you tomorrow."
(I take it that Yasir Arafat has died.)
Another death threat. What a hero. I ask him to speak up, several times, as I tell
him I'm getting a bit deaf, and haven't caught what
he's saying, and I keep asking him to repeat it,
adding after the fifth or sixth time that he should
stay on the line just a bit longer to give the
police time to trace the call. He drops the phone.
Nice types we have in this city now. [Previous
Radical's Diary]  
Controversial
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denier gets help from Colorado University" |
Irving
compares U.S. actions to Nazi strategies during
World War II-
David
Irving's speaking tour
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Jewish
attempts to stop him speaking in New Zealand
Sept 2004
Website
dossier on the origins of anti-Semitism -
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about the ADL and Denver:
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Denver
Couple whom ADL portrayed as Anti-Semites keep
Judgment
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Website
dossier on the Anti-Defamation League
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David Irving