A Trap Door to Hell

Common Sense
John Maxwell

It was a real groin sniffers' week. The paladins of the US media were up to their armpits in emotional frottage and editorial voyeurism. It was not entirely inappropriate for a week which included the anniversary of the death-by-paparazzi of Princess Diana. There won't be another cannibal media banquet like hers for a long time.

In the meantime, we had to make do with the poor, deluded John Mark Karr, caught like a wounded deer in the headlights of a speeding press, accompanied on his long trip back from Thailand by newsmen - and newswomen I presume - all hanging on his every gesture, as if he were some prince, taking no one knows how many photographs of his weak, expressionless visage as he was triumphantly headed home to face the music.

Except, of course, there was no music to face. Karr's notes were quickly wiped from the score when his DNA came back innocent and his sad and mad delusions were exposed for what they were. A more careful media might have listened more intently to the father of JonBenet Ramsay, who, interviewed when Karr was located in Thailand, counselled the press not to jump to conclusions, having himself experienced the results of such media cannibalism.

All the usual suspects were out in force, with CNN's harpy eagle, Nancy Grace, thwarted as she came in for the kill, thrown back on wondering whether there was in fact an intruder in the Ramsay house the night of the murder, in effect pointing fingers back at Mr Ramsay, notwithstanding his prior clearance by DNA.

The harpy eagle and King would be back for another bite of the cherry, with the arrest of the serial polygamist and alleged child molester Warren Steed Jeffs. There was Larry King interviewing two of Jeffs' victims, and to my mind, just itching to ask whether there was group sex and so on. I say this knowing that it is not a nice thing to say, but because of a prior experience with this doyen of necrophiliac interviewers.

A couple of years ago, two young women were abducted by a man who was killed by police after a wild chase in the countryside of some western state. Larry King, knowing that the abductor was dead and could not be charged with any crime, nevertheless made it his business to ask a hospital administrator who had care of the two young women, whether they had been raped.

The hospital administrator, bless him, turned King down flat, explaining that it was no business of King's or the press. But King persisted; in another interview, this time with a sheriff, he pestered the man until he was informed that yes, at least one of the girls had been sexually assaulted.

I still cannot figure out what was the importance of this fact to the general public or to Larry King, but later that night, again on CNN, a then famous woman anchor, Connie Chung, did the same thing.

As a journalist two thousand miles away, I felt soiled.

Transcontinental frenzy

The week's media excitement went transcontinental with the story of the Austrian girl who had been abducted eight years ago as a child of 10 and kept prisoner by another sick soul. The Austrian authorities were more discreet, and did their best to protect the young woman's privacy against the long, quivering noses of the press who wanted details of her abuse. We must presume that the child was kidnapped to be sexually abused.

We don't know, but what on earth did the press want to know about her abuse? Did she enjoy it? How often did he do IT? Was her abductor into weird practices? S/M? witchcraft? fetishism perhaps? The mind boggles.

Some reports managed to convey the idea that the young woman was being churlish in not stripping herself naked for the delectation and entertainment of readers and viewers. Fortunately, if Miss Kampusch is as sensible as she seems, we will never know.

But reporters appeared to have been amazed by the fact that someone who had been solitarily confined for nearly half her life, whose attentions had been totally monopolised by one adult for that time, whose very life depended on that person, could have chosen to 'mourn' the death of her jailer. Where have they been?

During her time in that dungeon she must have prayed for her captor's safe return, because if anything happened to him she would have perished alone and miserably. Pavlov's dogs were luckier.

Various worthy people have been trying to get the press to focus on less important matters, like war and the brutalisation of large sections of the human race. Messrs Rumsfeld and Bush, having shed their Field Marshals' uniforms, have taken up lecturing. Mr Rumsfeld is pretending to be an historian, attempting to slander peacemakers as cowards.

The appeasers of Hitler were, in fact, people like Mr Rumsfeld and Mr Cheney and some of the more corrupt examples of the British and American capitalist classes. They thought they could do business with Hitler, as Rumsfeld and his cohorts did with Saddam Hussein when he was fighting Iran.

Mr Bush, who still cannot pronounce the word 'nuclear', is nevertheless lecturing the world on what he calls Islamofascism, and in a speech on Thursday seemed to link all Muslin militants to Al-Qaeda, despite the fact that at least two of the groups he named are reputedly bitter enemies of Bin Laden's movement.

Mr Bush has now managed to smear most of the population of Lebanon as terrorists because, according to him, the resistance movement Hezbollah are terrorists and whoever supports them is a terrorist too.

The fact which is ignored by almost all the American and British media is that the resistance movements are direct responses to Israel. They arose because of Israeli provocation and brutality and they are fuelled by Israeli provocation and brutality.

Israel is painted as being the helpless victim of swarming hordes of terrorists, killing and maiming Israelis by the minute. The fact is that while CNN reports that two primitive rockets were fired into Israel on Thursday, Israel has been firing rockets and cannon and destroying houses and public works in Gaza every day. While the highly publicised war was in train in Lebanon, 200 Palestinians died in Gaza as a result of Israeli action.

The Israeli/Palestinian kill ratio is nearly 10 to one in Israel's favour. And nearly half the Hamas government has been kidnapped and now languish in Israeli prisons.

Palestinian officials say more than half of those killed in the past two months have been civilians - among them 39 children killed in July alone. Even the UN secretary-general, Mr Kofi Annan, has noticed.

After a visit last week to Gaza where he met with Palestinian officials in the occupied West Bank, Mr Annan said: "Over 200 Palestinians have been killed since the end of June. This must stop immediately. I have made my feelings known in talks with Israeli officials. Beyond preserving life, we have to sustain life, the closure of Gaza must be lifted, the crossing points must be opened, not just to allow goods but to allow Palestinian exports out as well."

What he means is that Israel should open the gates of the Palestinian concentration camp.

As I have pointed out before, what is happening in Gaza is nothing less than genocide - a continuing, persistent. murderous persecution of the people by intimidation, kidnapping and killing with a background of psychological warfare against a largely defenceless population. In the West Bank, more than a million people are squeezed into an area slightly larger than the Jamaican parish of St Catherine, and more than half of them are children or youths.

'Completely immoral'

In Lebanon, on the other side of Israel, another UN official, the human rights co-ordinator, Mr Jan Egeland, was more forthright than Mr Annan.

Jan Egeland said civilians were facing "massive problems" returning home, because of as many as 100,000 unexploded cluster bombs, most of which were dropped in the last days of the war.

"What's shocking - and I would say to me completely immoral - is that 90 per cent of the cluster bomb strikes occurred in the last 72 hours of the conflict, when we knew there would be a resolution," Mr Egeland said. "Every day people are maimed, wounded and are killed by these ordinance."

It does seem to me that there is something dark in the Israeli spirit these days. Knowing that a ceasefire was imminent, the Israelis went and hauled out cluster bombs dating from the Vietnam era and showered them on southern Lebanon. Whoever ordered this cannot be described as civilised, although the Israeli government has claimed that the cluster bombs are legitimate tools of war.

They are legitimate, if used against soldiers and military positions. They are illegal if used against civilians or civilian targets. The Israelis want to get rid of Prime Minister Olmert. There can be no better reason than this.

In southern Lebanon there are cluster bomblets on the roofs of people's houses, in their gardens and inside the houses themselves, in shops, parks and schools. The bomblets are neat little canisters, just the sort of thing an inquisitive child will pick up and blow himself to kingdom come or maim himself and others.

The United Nations has counted nearly 300 sites contaminated by the cluster bombs. By last week Sunday, after the ceasefire, the cluster bombs had killed at least a dozen people and injured many more. They continue to explode and kill and maim.

The United States says it is investigating whether Israel violated US guidelines for the US-made cluster bombs. Their use is prohibited in residential areas. But that is exactly where the UN technicians and the Lebanese children are finding them. What action will the US take? Don't hold your breath.

Four years ago in my column, I compared then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to Rehoboam, the ancient king of Israel who threatened his enemies that while "my father has beaten you with whips I will chastise you with scorpions".

I said then: "In his perverse search for a final solution to the 'Palestinian Question', Sharon may not manage like Rehoboam, to destroy Israel, or like Samson to destroy himself, but he has certainly managed to damage Israel's reputation as one of the world's more civilised nations".

His successor, Mr Olmert, has gone even farther down that path. It is a very long way from Theodor Herzl's Zionist ideal that Israel should be a light unto the nations of the world.

When Iran's President Ahmadinejab engages in his virulent rodomontade, calling for Israel to be wiped off the map, I don't believe that there is anyone who really believes that he means literally what he says.

He is using classic negotiating techniques, demanding far more than he expects in the hope that his opponent will be quicker to make concessions. The Egyptians once did the same. No sane person believes that Israel either should be, or can be erased. Two of Israel's four closest neighbours - Egypt and Jordan - have already accepted Israel's right to exist. Only the most fanatical fundamentalist can believe that the rest of the Arab world is ready to fight to the death to destroy Israel.

What has happened is that the Arabs, having been defeated thrice already by Israel, are not eager for further bashing which would come from Israel and from the United States if Israel were really in trouble. The Arabs and their fellow Muslims are not fools, nor are most of them mad.

But, if cluster bombs can provoke the normally docile Lebanese prime minister, Mr Siniora, to declare that Lebanon will be the last Arab state to make peace with Israel, one can imagine that Israel's continuing insults seem almost designed to provoke the Armageddon so devoutly anticipated by the fundamentalist religious lunatics in the United States.

Last week, Israel bought two more nuclear submarines.

As I said immediately after 9/11, terrorism is not the weapon of the strong, it is the last, desperate resort of the weak, the defeated and demoralised.

The real danger to Israel is that it has trained the weak and defeated to organise, à la Hezbollah, until entire populations become militant. When Israel refused to deal with Arafat, what they got in his place was Hamas. When they tried to control Lebanon they got Hezbollah.

Time is running out for the forces of reason and peace.