Elite's pitiful excuse for evil22aug04IN POLITE society today,...

Elite's pitiful excuse for evil

22aug04
IN POLITE society today, no one -- not even terrorists or rapists -- is evil.

Unless, of course, they're one of us and conservative. Like, say, John Howard. Or a priest.

You want examples of this mad conceit of our cultural elite? Here are a few from just this week.

Let's skip the refusal of the ABC and SBS to call a terrorist a terrorist, daintily referring to them instead as "militants".

Let's talk instead about Anu Singh, who served just four years in jail for a murder seven years ago.

An Age profile of her this week told how Singh was helped by a "quiet and spiritual friend" -- spiritual? -- to buy the Rohypnol and a hot-shot of heroin she then used to kill her boyfriend.

Singh, now a criminology graduate, says she was mentally ill at the time, and is cross with novelist Helen Garner for having just written a book about the murder without talking to her first.

She added, and The Age highlighted this quote: "The unfortunate thing about her book is that it seems to perpetuate this notion that people who commit crimes are bad, are evil."

If it does, it is a rarity -- and may explain why Garner's book is controversial. How hard we have pretended that crimes are not committed by evil people, but by people who have had evil done to them.

Indeed, a good Samaritan today would rush to the bleeding man by the road and exclaim, "Heavens! The man who did this needs help."

That's why we read this week of a Queensland rapist who wants to be taken out of solitary confinement, and whose record, in part, is:

Rapes a 14-year-old girl, and is jailed. Released, and imprisons a 14-year-old. Rapes two boys in a watchhouse, and escapes and rapes another boy. Released, and commits sex crimes. Released, and is accused of rape. Released, and rapes a girl and two women.

If we readily accepted some people are evil, would this man -- or Victoria's Mr Stinky, Raymond Edmunds -- have been freed so often to rape or to kill?

Another example: Bob Ellis is an author, popular in the Left, who writes speeches for New South Wales Premier Bob Carr.

He is now oozing from one ABC studio to the next, selling his book, Night Thoughts in Time of War. Naturally, the far-Left Age ran a hunk of it without gagging, not even over this passage:

"In most war propaganda a bogyman kills or tortures children . . . It's all so vulgar and creepy. I mean I assume Saddam, a ruthless, ambitious fan of Stalin, did bad things and killed a lot of people in his time. But kill them pointlessly? I don't think so. He was too shrewd for that; to shrewd to make enemies needlessly."

This apologia for mass-murder -- "but kill them pointlessly? I don't think so" -- recalls how Age writer Ken Davidson opposed toppling Saddam, saying he might be "a monster", but "arguably . . . Iraq can only be held together by a monster."

In a healthy society, a lout like Ellis would be thrown out on his ear. But when he shovelled his act into Jon Faine's ABC 774 morning show, he shovelled with friends.

In the studio with him was Terry Lane, a former priest turned ABC star, who wrote during the Iraq war that he wanted "the army of my country . . . to be defeated". Here's how Lane described his comfy chat with Ellis in his Sunday Age column: "I like Ellis . . . Ellis has read that Saddam is fastidious, clean, genial, humorous, patient and 'ready to be contradicted'."

For Lane the real problem seemed not Saddam, but the "lies" of our evil leaders. He concluded: "When they say 'Saddam was a very bad man' why should we believe them?"

Why? I'd hope it was because Lane cared as much about stopping genocide as he did about pillorying John Howard -- or at least enough to find out for himself that Saddam indeed killed countless people in the most horrible of ways.

Another example. Some $185,000 of our taxes went to make a film on David Hicks, now held in Guantanamo Bay after being caught fighting for Afghanistan's Taliban.

The President versus David Hicks, showing now, reads out Hicks's letters home, describing his training in terrorist camps as "one month learning, then one month fighting", and lauding terrorists who fight "the friends of Satan". Hicks also condemns Jews and hopes "the Western-Jewish domination is finished so we live under Muslim law again".

These are letters that Age reviewer Adrian Martin laughably praised as "a mixture of homely familiarities and passionate declarations of his newly-adopted lifestyle". Martin then damned US President George W. Bush, not Hicks, as "belligerent" and "merciless".

These are also letters that SBS called "eloquent" and the film's distributor "poignant". It's astonishing -- this whitewashing of evil and blackguarding of those fight it. I would laugh if it wasn't so serious.