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Politics : Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Kerry -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: longnshort who wrote (23011)	5/16/2004 11:14:48 AM
From: lorne	Respond to of 81568

....." He won't even risk visiting America, not even to seek out his brother-in-politics, the Left-of-Centre Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, because he knows that not only will no senior figures from the Bush administration bother meeting him, but even Senator Kerry would not give him the time of day."...... Devil's work done in the name of God By PIERS AKERMAN May 13, 2004 dailytelegraph.news.com.au THE chant of Allahu Akbar – God is Great – is heard in every mosque around the globe. Yesterday it echoed from millions of personal computers as viewers logged on to a sickening video showing a screaming Nick Berg having his neck sawn through while his captors proclaimed their deed in the name of Allah. The video was first posted on a website linked to the international terrorist group al-Qaeda. The film of the execution is not dissimilar to that which appeared after Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl had his throat cut by terrorists in Pakistan two years ago. As the al-Qaeda site slowed under the number of hits it was receiving, al Jazeera, the terrorist propaganda television outlet, ran a video it said showed two masked murderers from Islamic Jihad showing the head of a slaughtered Israeli soldier. The soldier was one of six men killed in a bombing which has been claimed by Hamas and the al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, which is linked to Fatah, the movement headed by the Nobel Peace Prize winning terrorist leader Yasser Arafat. The terrorists are even now seeking to ransom the body parts of the killed soldiers. Last month, terrorists in Iraq videotaped the murder of their Italian hostage Fabrizio Quattrocchi but al Jazeera refused to air the tape. After Quattrocchi was forced to dig his own grave, he is seen being hooded by his captors and pushed to his knees so he could be killed. However, he attempts to wrest the hood from his head and shouts: "I will show you how an Italian dies!" The Arab network, which had no qualms about showing the burnt bodies of slaughtered US contractors and butchered Israelis, claimed it didn't show the Quattrocchi video because it was too graphic. Perhaps it doesn't like showing brave Westerners. If there needed to be a graphic example of the barbarity that international terrorists are capable of, the Berg video showing this young American having his head sawn off by a knife-wielding assailant to the insistent Islamic chant, is it. As a demonstration of the reality that the gulf between the Arab and Western worlds could hardly be any wider, the television news in America was still preoccupied in large part by the Senate inquiry into the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by US guards at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison. In the Arab world, bloody slaughter is cheered. In the West, civilised law prevails. Left-wing Western commentators blinded by their hatred of America have claimed that the humiliating treatment meted out to a few prisoners by a handful of poorly-trained, ill-disciplined guards has placed the US administration in the same league as Saddam Hussein's murderous regime. The conga line of Labor's ageing cheer leaders, Phillip Adams, Kerry O'Brien, George Negus, have been beside themselves with their displays of outrage at the Abu Ghraib pictures, though they were all released as part of a US Government inquiry. PERHAPS the latest grisly video will convince these doomsayers that there is no moral equivalence to be drawn between the brutality of the masked murderers invoking Allah and the liberation of Iraq by brave men and women determined to bring freedom to a people broken by a brutal dictator. There are two sides to this war. A good side and a bad side. Australia, under Prime Minister John Howard, is firmly on the good side. The Opposition Leader, Mark Latham, doesn't know which side he is on. He deplores Australia's involvement in the war against terror, unless it is being waged safely at home. He won't even risk visiting America, not even to seek out his brother-in-politics, the Left-of-Centre Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, because he knows that not only will no senior figures from the Bush administration bother meeting him, but even Senator Kerry would not give him the time of day. Mr Latham has known for months that he would be given the cold shoulder in Washington but has laughably chosen to blame the need to respond to Tuesday's Budget as the reason for his decision to weasel out of attending the important Australia-US dialogue in the US capital next month. The former failed mayor of Liverpool can tough it out with a terrified taxi driver but he can't front at an important meeting of political and business leaders because they have already seen right through his adolescent anti-US stance and rightly don't think he has much to contribute. WHILE some of our fighting men and women are displaying extraordinary bravery and determination in the field, in the air and at sea in the Gulf, Mr Latham and his crew of moral shirkers are seeking the intervention of the corrupt elite of the United Nations, who for more than a decade turned a blind eye as Saddam Hussein stole billions from the organisation's oil-for-food program. The Abu Ghraib photographs are demeaning and reflect damningly upon those Americans shown with their Iraqi charges, but in the West we have a free press which competes to show such material. There is no free press in any Arab nation except the fledgling media being given a chance in the newly-liberated Iraq. There is no religious freedom across the Arab world, no unfettered liberty, nothing to resemble democracy – there is only murder committed in the name of God filmed for the 6 o'clock news. If this is a war between the civilised and uncivilised worlds, it's time it was acknowledged as such. This awful video epitomises the world of darkness we face. Now is not the time to cut and run. Those who argue that Australia should not be fighting against such depravity and should stand idly by, like the Spaniards, betray what we stand for as a nation