An orange alert for the lefties

An orange alert for the lefties

The facts defy attempts by conspiracy theorists to blame the US for the world's evils, writes Miranda Devine.

In the minutes before he was beheaded in Iraq this week, Kim Sun-il is shown on videotape kneeling quietly in an orange jumpsuit, blindfolded with an orange cloth. In a scene becoming painfully familiar, five hooded men are standing behind the 33-year-old South Korean, one holding a sword. The videotape was aired on al-Jazeera television, Reuters reports, although the portion showing Kim's head being sliced off was not.

What will Richard Neville and his fellow conspiracy theorists say about this latest terrorist atrocity? Was it actually another plot by "high-level US Government operatives" to distract attention from their own evil deeds?

After the American Nicholas Berg, 26, was beheaded last month in similar fashion, also while wearing an orange jumpsuit, Neville wrote in this newspaper that there was something "fishy" about the videotape. The timing of Berg's slaughter was just too convenient for the West, he thought, because it distracted attention from the Abu Ghraib prison abuses that were so dominating the media. Neville also claimed there wasn't enough blood in Berg's decapitation, and that his scream was "wildly out of sync, sounds female, and is obviously dubbed".
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Even the white chair Berg sat on was "identical to those in the photographs of the Abu Ghraib prison tortures", wrote Neville, while conceding, "such chairs are probably common in Iraq". Really. Another suspicious sign was that one of the terrorists wore "bulky white tennis shoes".

Also fishy was the fact that Berg was wearing an orange jumpsuit, "of the kind familiar from Guantanamo Bay", wrote Neville, meaningfully, before summing up with a question: "Who killed Nick Berg, and why?"

Where has Richard Neville been since September 11, 2001? Fanatical Islamic terrorists killed Nick Berg, just as they killed poor Kim Sun-il, and the 49-year-old American Paul Johnson jnr, who, amazingly enough, was also wearing an orange jumpsuit when he was beheaded on video in Saudi Arabia last week.

Or maybe all three men were really beheaded by the US Government to make those nice terrorists look bad.

And maybe Mariane Pearl, who came to lunch in the Fairfax boardroom last week, is an actress, hired by the CIA, to pose as the widow of Daniel Pearl, the 38-year-old Wall Street Journal reporter who was the first terrorist victim ritually beheaded on TV, in Pakistan in 2002.

Conspiracy theorists are, of course, fringe dwellers, but they serve a purpose, pushing the boundaries of cynicism, feeding into the anti-West infotainment industry personified by the obese American filmmaker Michael Moore.

They need to raise wacky doubts to keep their world view intact, because every televised beheading is a setback for the left. It is a reminder of who the real enemy is (hint: not John Howard or George Bush) and who the intended victims are (Christians, Jews, moderate Muslims, anyone who gets in the way). It is a reminder that the war between the civilised West and fanatical Islamic terrorists is real, not a war against an abstract noun, and a lot more complex and intractable than the "Blood for Oil" and "Neo-Con Warmonger" slogans would have you believe.

The consensus in the media is that Iraq has been an unmitigated disaster, and a self-fulfilling liability for Howard and Bush in their upcoming elections. Every terrorist atrocity is somehow placed into the Iraq-is-a-disaster matrix, with blame apportioned accordingly, not to the terrorists but to the governments of the coalition, which should have left Saddam alone. Thus, when Islamic terrorists bombed commuter trains in Madrid in March, who was blamed but the Spanish government, which had joined the US coalition in Iraq and was voted out of office as punishment three days later.

In this matrix, the images of American soldiers abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib cancel out the images of the twin towers collapsing on September 11. The Republicans in the White House are more dangerous than al-Qaeda.

Yet, despite the terrible press, our side is, in fact, making significant progress in the challenges which are part of the war on terrorism.

Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai presides over a fledgling democracy in a country liberated from Taliban oppression. In Iraq, with less than a week until the interim government takes over ahead of elections in January, the move to democracy continues, despite car bombings and assassinations. One sign of progress is that a quarter of the seats in Iraq's national assembly assembly are reserved for women.

But perhaps the most telling sign is what you could call the "refugee indicator" of success. Last week, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Ruud Lubbers, reported that the number of refugees worldwide had dropped to its lowest level in a decade, falling by 18 per cent to just over 17 million.

From the first quarter of last year to the first quarter this year, there was a 25 per cent drop in the number of people seeking political asylum in the developed nations, The Boston Globe reported. That's mostly because people are now less likely to flee Afghanistan and Iraq.

The UNHCR also found 81 per cent fewer Iraqis claimed asylum this year than last year, and is now preparing for the return of more than half a million Iraqis. "Nearly 5 million people ... over the past few years have been able to either go home or to find a new place to rebuild their lives," Lubbers told the BBC. "For them, these dry statistics reflect a special reality: the end of long years in exile and the start of a new life with renewed hope for the future."

More than half a million people also returned to Afghanistan last year, something Lubbers said was "phenomenal [and] underscores the benefits of sustained international attention". International attention as in wiping out the Taliban, and removing Saddam.

Refugees have registered their approval by voting with their feet. But there must be a conspiracy theory to explain it away.

(SMH.com.au)