Samizdata

Turn on your TV now. If you are in Britain ITV is the right station to watch – never mind missing Bob The Builder on BBC2 – just do it, OK? You have just missed the sight of a Baghdad citizen in traditional Arab dress hitching up his robe to make a universally comprehensible pelvic gesture towards a picture of Saddam Hussein, said picture held up by another guy who has just finished whacking it with his shoe – oops, no, he hasn’t finished, more whacking left to do. They don’t think he’s coming back.

I gather the minders didn’t turn up at the press hotel today; like the rest of the Iraqi state apparatus they have melted away. Now the whole of Baghdad looks like the world’s worst organised car boot sale. Horns honking, people smiling, waving, jumping, shouting and looting every official building in the city. I just saw a lady carrying off a vase almost bigger than she is. Chairs seem to be popular, as do tyres. One practical-minded lad has gone for a large bottle of olive oil. Heavens, is nothing sacred? One reporter said that the mob had nicked all the UN vehicles and were driving them around.

I tell you, it’s anarchy out there!

Only – ahem- not our sort of anarchy. I am a minarchist most of the time, but on Tuesdays and Thursdays I am an anarchist, and I am a little bit worried about our good name. I can certainly cheer on the guys who have doused a mural of Saddam with petrol and set it alight; deconstructive art, I call it. Nor do I begrudge most of the looters their spontaneous redistribution of the ruling kleptocracy’s wealth back to the people. But it’s not all innocent fun: reports speak of shops being cleaned out as well as palaces, and that will be hard for those whose wealth and lives were tied up in those shops. Expect also to see the pent-up anger of the people bursting out into mob violence which will harm the innocent as well as the guilty.

When a drug addict undergoes the “cold turkey” cure, he will sometimes go into convulsions. This is the anarchy of cold turkey.

I urge you to read a post by Stephen Pollard. He links to a Guardian articled headed, breathtakingly, “Welsh pensioner turns freedom fighter”. Why do I say “breathtakingly”? Because the freedom-fighting of the woman profiled by the Guardian, Anne Gwynne, consists of the fact that she went to ‘Occupied Palestine’ the better to be chummy with the families of two suicide bombers who killed twenty-three Israeli civilians. Or who “went on the mission to Tel Aviv” as she winningly puts it, before adding, “They are such lovely families and very proud of their sons.”

The woman herself is of a recurring though despicable type: the White Liberal Murder-Groupie. OK, you’ve seen her like before, swooning over the Khmer Rouge or the Black Panthers. We are up to about Mk VIII by now, with Improved Extra Gush Factor. Let us wash our minds of her and move on.

But the Guardian’s commentary hits a new low, and the Guardian once had some honour to lose. Did you know that it was once the Manchester Guardian, provincial in the best sense, standing for a tradition of Nonconformist self-improvement? Think on that and then re-read that headline describing a woman who pants to to further help the killers in their bloody work: Welsh pensioner turns freedom fighter.

Then look at the first sentence: Anne Gwynne is conducting her own war on terrorism. Mrs Gwynne did not write that, the reporter, Chris McGreal wrote it. Probably didn’t think about it much.

Did I say “the Guardian’s commentary” just then? Silly of me, it isn’t a commentary. The nearest it comes to an effort at any of that “dig deeper, ask the tough questions” stuff reporters and analysts are meant to do is this:

Twenty-three people died in those bombings in Tel Aviv in January, including many poor foreign workers. Was it wrong?

The answer given, pretty quickly, is “Nah, ‘course not.” Note how McGreal had to drag in that fact that many of the victims weren’t Israelis in order to make even a debating-point case for sympathy. Beyond that one limp line there is no justification offered for the term “freedom fighter” or for calling Anne Gwynne’s activities “her own war against terrorism.” In contrast great detail is offered of the sufferings of the Palestinians (which is as it should be) – but not the slightest scepticism as to whether Anne Gwynne is telling the whole truth. Could McGreal not have made some interjection, asked a few challenging supplementary questions, for instance, when confronted with lines like this: “I used to think it was all excuses, but they [Israeli soldiers] actually believe this shit. We have nothing to kill them with, just a few AK-47s.”? Perhaps he was never going to give the answer I would have given, namely, “Your pals with the bomb-belts seem to slaughter well enough, dearie,” but one would think that the traditions of the Guardian would demand some note of distance, of qualification, of un-acceptance?

An apologia, even when desperately, heartbreakingly wrong, is a sort of bridge between evil and good, an acknowledgement that there is something here that needs explaining. But Chris McGreal saw no necessity for any elaboration. Tip-tap-tip went the swiftly typing fingers and out came the words “freedom fighter”, “her own war on terrorism”, praise as easy and insouciant as a local reporter putting in a good word for the latest charitable efforts of the Womens’ Institute or Rotary Club. As Stephen Pollard concludes, “Ms Gwynne’s evil views are not merely presented without criticism or proper questioning; they are endorsed. And that is, in its own way, also evil.”

[This post originally appeared on my own blog. I have also posted it here because of Blogger problems and to make it as widely known as possible what sort of attitudes the Guardian considers acceptable in its reporters.]