Abu Ghraib has given our leftist journalists a club with which to beat President Bush and the war to overthrow Saddam. The same rotten crew who never seriously protested Saddam’s vile tortures and mass murders are now using the reprehensible behaviour of a handful of rogue troops to discredit the liberation of Iraq

To top it off, the same faux journalists insist on painting the liberation as a failure, despite the destruction of Saddam's vicious regime. So addicted are these lying scribes to their America-hating mindset that murderous terrorists are now routinely described as “resistance fighters” or the “Iraqi resistance”. Allied troops are dismissed as the “occupiers”. I’m sure you get the subliminal message: Iraqi resistance = French resistance; occupiers = Nazi invaders.

And just as I predicted, these journalistic creeps brought in America’s Vietnam experience. We’ve now had My Lai and the Tet offensive used as historical analogies, proving without a doubt just how stupid, as well as bigoted, these jerks really are.

But Vietnam is relevant in the sense that it exposed the hypocrisy and political bigotry of the media. A bigotry and hypocrisy that has only deepened over the decades, with the result that these journalists are now trying to do to the Iraqi people what was done to the South Vietnamese and the Cambodians — and that is betray them.

Cameron Stewart (a journalist on Rupert Murdoch’s Australian) exemplifies what I mean. Although Stewart [now an associate editor] is not reporting from Iraq he has the same mindset as those who are. On 14 March 1998 he reported that Hugh Thompson and Lawrence Colburn had been awarded the Soldier’s Medal for saving the lives of several My Lai villagers.

That they had been publicly recognised for their bravery and humanity was certainly to be welcomed. That it took so long is a disgrace. What is also a disgrace is the way journalists like Stewart used the My Lai massacre to indirectly support Hanoi’s gangster regime. They did this by completely ignoring the systematic atrocities and massacres that were carried out as a matter of policy by Northern troops and the Viet Cong.

In Iraq the same mentality has buried Saddam’s crimes, whitewashed terrorists, ignored allied successes, taken the misbehaviour of a few out of context and used it to subvert the allied presence. In other words, the great majority of journalists have sided with terrorists. And this is exactly what they did in Vietnam, which brings me back to the odious Cameron Stewart.

Though Stewart pointed out that the My Lai massacre took place on 16 March 1968 he callously ignored the Hue massacre that took place on 30 January 1968. A Viet Cong-North Vietnamese force occupied the city and in an act of premeditated mass murder put several thousand civilians to death.

After the communists were driven from the city about 3,000 bodies were found in mass graves, most of them were still wearing their festive costumes in celebration of Tet. It was later found that many of the victims had been buried alive.

Even though this was the most brazen of Hanoi’s war crimes many journalists opted to downplay it down or ignore it, just as they are now ignoring terrorism in Iraq. Unfortunately for the South Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians the My Lai massacre gave the left an opportunity to finally swill the embarrassment of the Hue massacre down their collective memory hole where it now largely remains, a grim testimony to their immorality, hypocrisy, blind political bigotry and capacity for hatred.

That the dreadful events of Hue were not an isolated incident, unlike My Lai, has been heavily documented, not that Stewart and his ideological ilk ever bothered reporting that fact. Uwe Siemon-Netto, a German reporter, vividly described what he saw in a village in 1965 after the Viet Cong had finished making an example of it:

Dangling from the trees and poles in the square were the village chief, his wife, and their twelve children, the males, including a baby, with their genitals cut off and stuffed into their mouths, the females with their breasts cut off. Ordering everyone in the village to watch this calculated act of sadism "hey [Viet-Cong] started with the baby and then slowly worked their way up to the elder children to the wife, and finally to chief himself....it was all done very coolly, as much an act of war as firing an anti-aircraft gun.

Netto stressed that this was not an isolated act but part of the North’s policy of terrorism. As he puts it: “It became routine . . . . Because it became routine to us, we didn’t report it over and over again. We reported the unusual, like My Lai”.

And what else did Stewart and his band of trendy lefty reporters refuse to report? How about the 50,000-100,000 peasants murdered in the North by Hanoi (Robert F. Turner’s Vietnamese Communism: Its Origins and Development. And that doesn’t include the 300,000-500,000 who starved to death. (It seems that communism and famine always go together).

Then there was the mass murder of 100,000 South Vietnamese civilians after Hanoi, with considerable help from western journalists, conquered the South (Jacqueline Desbarats’ Repression in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam). And lets not forget the tens of thousands who perished in Hanoi’s Gulag as well as the 250,000 or more who drowned at sea.

This is the bloody regime that Western intellectuals and journalists still support. And this is why, even now, they refuse to condemn it for its barbarities while sliming President Bush and Prime Ministers Blair and Howard for liberating Iraq from Saddam’s sadistic clutches.

Ridden with guilt, Siemon-Netto publicly apologised in Encounter, an English magazine, in 1979 for not reporting the truth about communist atrocities. That was 25 years ago and yet we are still being plied with pro-Hanoi propaganda by journalists like Stewart who is still doing what Siemon-Netto had at least the decency to apologise for.

The fundamental difference between our present gang of journalistic poseurs and Siemon-Netto is that they will never have the common decency to apologise for their disgusting actions. To left-wingers like these My Lai and Abu Grhaib are not considered in a moral context but in an ideological one. If it were otherwise they would, without hesitation, have put them into a proper historical perspective.

What concerns our present band of ideologically motivated journalists is not what is done but who does it and to what ideological use the action can be put. My Lai allowed them to sanctimoniously condemn America and justify their support for the conquest of South Vietnam by a bunch of bloodstained totalitarian thugs. They are now trying to pull the same vile stunt in Iraq.

By still refusing to condemn the Hanoi regime they are not only endorsing its past atrocities they are collaborating with its present oppressive policies. True, these journalists don’t pull any triggers, but they certainly make it easier for Hanoi’s murdering goons to do so.

(International Christian Concern reported that the Hanoi regime recently murdered 280 Christians as part of its crackdown on Easter worshippers. So while practising Christians are being murdered holier-than-thou journalists are saturating us with stories of American ‘brutality’. The same two-faced journalists who shoved to one side the food-for-oil scandal are now sanctimoniously attacking the US military).

By deliberately providing 24/7 coverage of Abu Ghraib while ignoring the context and censoring terrorist crimes these journalists are encouraging terrorists to murder allied troops and Iraqis who support a democratic Iraq.

Bear in mind that these same journalists and their editors refuse to continually show pictures and videos of people being forced to jump to their deaths from the Twin Towers, the mutilation of American contractors and the decapitation of Daniel Pearl and Nick Berg. The list of pictures and videos not to be shown or written about also include Saddam’s many victims.

This is not an empty accusation. Even as I write the slimy Washington Post is sitting on videos and pictures taken of Saddam’s torturers at work which it refuses to publish. Nevertheless, these hypocrites still have the gall to continually stick Abu Ghraib pictures on the paper’s front pages. If this doesn’t tell us whose side these lefty creeps are really on — nothing ever will.

To compound their sickening double standards journalists have whitewashed terrorists as “militants”, “the Iraqi resistance” and “Iraqi fighters”. But why should we be surprised. After all, this crew also invented vicious lies about Jenin and Fallujah.

As George Orwell would have said: “These reporters are objectively pro-terrorist”.

Senator Zell Miller, a Democrat, summed the situation up with: “Why is it that there’s more indignation over a photo of a prisoner with underwear on his head than over the video of a young American with no head at all?” Because the young man in question was an American and a Jew, is the brutal answer.

The Iraqi war has shown that the media are morally depraved and anti-patriotic to the point of being treasonous. It has also shown us that these journalists are driven by an implacable hatred of America and a deep and abiding contempt for the truth.

Editor: I do not deny that there are journalists who genuinely strive to report the facts irrespective of their own personal biases. For these professionals there is no higher calling than the Truth. One finds such individuals in China and Iran where some have suffered imprisonment and even death. So when spoiled Western journalists cave in to Muslim thugs and when they abuse their positions of influence by writing lies they are deliberately spitting in the faces of real heroes who have taken terrible risks and have even made the ultimate sacrifice.

Is it any wonder I despise most journalists.

Gerard Jackson is Brookes’ economics editor

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