Excellent comment re WikiLeaks

By John Birmingham in the Brisbane Times December 7th:

I had dinner once with Salman Rushdie. Meh. Big deal. Everyone in publishing's had dinner at least once with The Rush. Which means that we all had the interesting experience of dining under armed guard because of the fatwa hanging over him.

It's Allah knows how long since that vicious, sex- and death-obsessed old scrote Khomeini dropped a death sentence on Rushdie for having the temerity to commit a thoughtcrime against his barbarous form of religious derangement. And in that time, despite the damnable inconvenience of it all, and a significant lobby both inside and outside government in favor of letting the mad mullah's hitmen have their way, the West as a whole has mobilised the resources of the various states through which Rushdie has passed to safeguard him from mullah-sanctioned murder.

What a long way we've fallen then, to a position where various spokeswhores of the American Right - some of them occupying positions of state power - can call for the assassination or extrajudicial kidnapping of an Australian citizen with nary a word of protest from our own government or dissenting opinion from the opposition.

I speak of Julian Assange, of course. The weirdest Bond villain ever, putative head of the WikiLeaks collective, and possibly the only celebrity Australian not to have an invite from Oprah.

Sure, I have issues with WikiLeaks. I don't buy into the leftist groupthink that Assange's creation is an untrammelled good. The most recent release, the US diplomatic cables, is more embarrassing than threatening to US interests, although even this tranche of documents raises the prospects of unintended consequences. For instance I wouldn't want to be that Aussie businessman the Chinese grabbed up the other day given that Beijing will now be looking for a way to humiliate Kevin Rudd and the Australian government for his advice to Hillary Clinton on handling the rising Chinese superpower. Nor would I want to be one of the military or political actors in the hot seat on the Korean peninsula trying to decide how North Korea will react over the medium- or even short-term to the revelation that China is willing to see the Kim regime collapse.

But in the end Assange remains an Australian citizen and he is due the protection we offer to all our citizens when they are threatened by rogue actors, even states, because their actions have upset somebody in power somewhere. It doesn't mean he gets a free pass on the allegations against him in Sweden, but it should mean that at the very least those moronic politicians and media celebretards in the US who've been calling for his murder should be getting a visit from one of our consular officials, preferably an ex-SAS or Commando Regiment old boy, to have a quiet word in their shell - like about how seriously we take incitement to murder our fellow little Vegemiters (Australians).

After all, as Salman Rushdie knows, anybody anywhere can pull a trigger.

By the way, today the Australian Federal Police have announced their conclusion that neither WikiLeaks nor Julian Assange has committed any crime under Australian law, in spite of our prime minister pronouncing the release of secret cables as "illegal".

You stuffed up there, Julia.

Remember he's an Australian citizen, innocent till proven guilty of a crime under some law that actually makes sense.

An Australian citizen.
That's meant to mean something.
At least to our own government.