More from the delightful recently beatified Ms. Whalen. I've underlined the more comical stuff:
arabnews.com
NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana, 13 August 2004 — The Mahdi army is on the move again. It’s the Energizer Bunny of Iraqi urban militias. What makes it keep going and going and going?
Neocons insist it’s Shiite cleric Moqtada Al-Sadr’s deep hatred for America. But what if the Mahdi army and Sadr are fighting because they love democracy, particularly freedom of speech and freedom of the press? [Say what? The same guy who has an arrest warrant outstanding for personally murdering a fellow cleric? I daresay the defeated Energizer Bunny Sadr is about a lot of stuff, but freedom and democracy ain't in his vocabulary.]
What if some Iraqis don’t trust getting their news from the “occupier?” What if they are willing to fight and die for the right to talk their own talk?
[Wow. She really slipped her clutch here and in the rest of the article, from Energizer Bunnies and murdering clerics to the news??? WTF??? Ohh, I get it, she sells to Al Jazeera and Arab News. Makes a living on it.]
Is it just coincidence that last March’s Shiite uprising boiled over when then-US Ambassador Paul Bremer arbitrarily closed Al-Sadr’s daily newspaper, Al-Hawza, for “spreading anti-American views” and calling Bremer names?
Bremer accused Al-Hawza of “publish(ing) articles that prove an intention to disturb general security and incite violence against the coalition and its employees.” Specifically, Bremer objected to an Al-Hawza article claiming a Shiite town bombing killing 53 people came from an American rocket allegedly “fired by an Apache helicopter and not a car bomb.” An al-Hawza editorial claimed, “Bremer follows the steps of Saddam.”
And indeed, Bremer did just that, chaining and locking Al-Hawza’s gates. He also threatened to imprison and fine any Al-Hawza employees defying his order, and peremptorily arrested Al-Sadr’s chief deputy.
“No freedom of opinion,” one vendor told a reporter. “It is like the days of the Baath.”
Bremer’s blunder blindsided Washington, which was totally unprepared for the strength of the Iraqi resistance.
Fool me once, shame on me, Bush might say. But fool me twice?
Apparently, Washington is still riding that learning curve.
Is it still just coincidence that recent violence in Iraq, which the US military claims has killed hundreds of Iraqis, erupted when Iyad Allawi, head of Iraq’s interim government, shuttered Al-Jazeera, allegedly for news reporting “inciting hatred” and failing to show the “reality of Iraqi political life”?
Maybe Al-Hawza is a modern example of America’s first colonial newspaper, Publick Occurrences: Both Foreign and Domestic, published in 1690 for only one day before British colonial authorities shut it down.
Maybe Al-Sadr is Iraq’s equivalent of two American Founding Fathers of free speech, printer John Peter Zenger, and publisher and lawyer James Alexander, who in 1735 were both persecuted by colonial authorities.
Alexander and Zenger’s political newspaper, The New York Weekly Journal, audaciously and repeatedly criticized the newly appointed colonial governor, William Cosby.
Governor Cosby, like Bremer, issued a proclamation condemning the newspaper’s “divers(e) scandalous, virulent, false and seditious reflections.” Cosby ordered Zenger arrested and charged with “seditious libel.”
But The Journal’s unrepentant writers turned the charges against the hated British: The exposing of public wickedness, a duty to which every man owes to the truth and his country, can never be a libel. I have indeed often wondered that the inveighing against the interest of the people, and calling their liberty into question has never been made an express crime.
I know not what treason is if sapping and betraying the liberties of a people be not treason.
The Journal proposed a then-revolutionary idea — promoting “liberty of the press.” The loss of liberty would soon follow the suppression of the liberty of the press; for it is an essential branch of liberty, the best preservative of the whole.
Even a restraint of the press would have a fatal influence.
No nation, ancient or modern, has ever lost the liberty of freely speaking, writing, or publishing their sentiments, but forthwith lost their liberty in general and became slaves.
Two hours after The Journal published these sentiments, the British government shut it down. Cosby ordered all copies of The Journal publicly burned by “the common hangman.” And his hand-picked Chief Court Justice immediately disbarred Alexander, who’d planned to defend Zenger, from practicing law, leaving Zenger’s defense to Andrew Hamilton, whose burning oratory applies equally in modern Iraq as it did in colonial America, when love of liberty was fresh:
“(I)t is a right, which all free men claim, that they are entitled to complain when they are hurt. They have a right publicly to remonstrate against the abuses of power in the strongest terms, to put their neighbors upon their guard against the craft or open violence of men in authority, and to assert with courage the sense they have of the blessings of liberty, the value they put upon it, and their resolution at all hazards to preserve it as one of the greatest blessings heaven can bestow.
“(L)et us do our duty, and use our utmost care to support liberty, the only bulwark against lawless power, which in all ages has sacrificed to its wild lust and boundless ambition the blood of the best men that ever lived.”
Najaf and Fallujah are bloody places. If words can flow freely, the bleeding there may stop.
— Sarah Whalen is an expert in Islamic law and taught law at Loyola University School of Law in New Orleans, Louisiana. |
