Fisking Phillip Adams

In the wake of the London bombings, moonbat-extraordinaire Phillip Adams saw fit to release yet another lie-filled column.
IT'S a quiet, ho-hum, run-of-the-mill day in Iraq. Just a few bombs will explode in Baghdad.
Because as we all know, more than "just a few bombs" explode on a very large minority, or even a majority of the days in Iraq. Ambiguity and vagueness is a tool Adams uses a lot - how many is "just a few bombs"? He won't say, because he doesn't know.
Only a few dozen will be killed or maimed. Fifty or 60 max. With the victims predominantly locals - only a couple of US soldiers among the casualties - they'll hardly rate a mention. Won't crack it for the Nine Network or ABC news. Perhaps a brief para in tomorrow's broadsheets.
The Nine Network is not a decent source for news. As for the ABC, did they cover violence in Iraq from two days ago? They did, twice. Broadsheet The Age covers it. However, violence yesterday? Couldn't find a thing on it, anywhere, in major news publications. Probably because the majority of the dead yesterday were terrorists.
Oh, almost forgot. There'll be about 20 kidnappings today. This has been a big racket in Iraq for a year or more with thousands of locals snatched off the streets.
I wasn't able to find any evidence of this. Although I'm sure Indy Media has it, if that's the case.
Nothing political about it, nothing religious. Just a grab bag of businesspeople and schoolchildren to be held for ransom. So many children are kidnapped these days that parents are keeping them home.
Once again, no evidence for this is presented, and none could be found.
Will these incidents be reported in the US, Britain and Australia? No, they won't. Not news.
Two points to be made here: firstly, you've got Lexis Nexis at your work, Phil. Learn to use it. Secondly, if the killings and kidnappings happen all the time, then it ceases to become news. News is things that aren't normal, that affect the readership. People have seen endless wall-to-wall coverage of violence in Iraq, to the point where it no longer makes a difference to them. The media oversaturation of Adams's ideological allies in the media has cut interest in the death toll.
Just further symptoms of a totally dysfunctional society. Unless, of course, if one of the kidnapped is one of us. Then all media hell will break lose.
Not one of Phillip Adams's columns that I can remember ever addressed a kidnapped Australia, Brit or American. He certainly didn't touch Douglas Wood.
Yes, what happened last week in London was appalling. But...
This is a standard leftist refrain - "Terrorism might be bad, but..."
But it happens every day in Iraq. It has since the coalition of the willing, of which Australia was such a willing member, came thundering in more than two years ago.
State Department figures talk about 4.54 million refugees and 1.26 million dead under Saddam. Think about all the starving children, Phil! That problem is gone. A genocidal maniac with more blood on his hands than any other human alive is on trial, and another country gets to have freedoms and democracy. But of course, none of the positives, or pre-war negatives, compares to the true eeeeevilness of Bushitler, right?
Things were crook before but have been far worse since. Pinned down by sanctions, inspections and fly-overs, still licking his wounds from the 1991 Gulf War, Saddam Hussein's greatest crimes were long behind him. The mass graves were history. But since the coalition? Cemeteries are booming again.
Cemeteries didn't boom under Saddam, because the victims were in over 300 mass graves. Meanwhile, children no longer starve to death. But who cares, right Phil?
Mind you, you don't read much about the local death toll. The body count for Iraqi troops, let alone Iraqi citizens, is censored.
Censored? That's a huge word to be using considering
Washington allows us to know -- and then reluctantly -- only that nearly 2000 Americans have died.
The Associated Press runs a daily count, and there are almost 100 articles from the last week by them and Reuters on dead US soldiers. However strangely, September 11 killed more Americans at 27,600 times the rate. I don't see a daily count being updated even when no more people died that day for September 11.
Unlike those humdrum bombings in Baghdad, the slaughter in London was big news. And let's be clear about it: the people who died in the subway tunnels and on the bus were victims of the Iraq war. They died because of Blair's London Bridge, the one he built from the Thames to the Euphrates.
They were? If they were, then there's your widespread coverage of the Iraq war going on again. But how does that explain much larger terrorist attacks in 2002, 2001, 1983, 1983, 1979 and other unrelated attacks in 2004, among hundreds of other terrorist attacks by Islamic extremists? It doesn't. Your link-everything-to-Iraq makes no sense unless your concept of history only goes back two years.
Had he not misled his nation into that murderous folly of an invasion, the people would have walked off the trains instead of being carried off on stretchers. Or had their body parts collected in bags.
Then what would have stopped all the other attacks? Getting out of Iraq, eliminating Israel and all Jews, leaving Afghanistan and submitting to Sharia law? Yeah no thanks.
Blair's response? The same rhetoric, the same mock-heroics, a renewed commitment to the political and strategic idiocy of George W. Bush.
The same idiocy that brought democracy to two countries and has kick-started a democratic revolution throughout the world? I wish I was that bigger idiot.
You can hear his spin doctors thinking: "If we play this right, we'll improve in the polls."
This at least gives Bush's spin doctors something over Adams, who clearly wasn't thinking when he churned this drivel out.
You can hear the same thoughts from John Howard's people, who will rely on the new political correctness of conservatism: that it's uncouth to link terrorist attacks in London, Madrid or possibly Sydney with the chaos unleashed in Iraq.
It's not uncouth per se, it's more that it's like blaming Labor's failure to win any of the last four elections on a backbencher. It could well have had something to do with Iraq, but it was not solely because of Iraq. See above terrorist attacks stuff.
As many in Britain are pointing out, they didn't need some Islamist loonies to focus attention on Blair's sorry role in the Iraq fiasco, that a clear majority have long deplored his duplicities, his misleadership. His bridge too far. But No.10 still says the same things, day in, year out, as if hoping through Pavlovian repetition to wear down the public.
Kinda like how the media used death, quagmire, death and "civil war" claims incessantly in an attempt to convince everyone there wouldn't be an election in Iraq?
Ditto here, as our Prime Minister and Foreign Minister try to blur the linkages with Iraq. They stress that Islamists are attacking our values, our way of life, our love of freedom in these murderous stunts.
Christopher Hitchens argues far more convincingly they just hate everyone who isn't them.
And everyone, most of all Howard and Alexander Downer, knows this is twaddle.
Everyone, most of all Phillip Adams, knows he's full of it. Phillip Adams doesn't know he's full of it, he believes he's right. Howard and Downer, and a majority of Australians, believe they're right. Nice way to put thoughts and words into people's heads and mouths.
The selection of targets is largely based on involvement in, and enthusiasm for, Bush's new world order.
Which is why there have been no attacks on American soiled since September 11, which was planned from May 1998. And what about Al-Qaeda's attack against Morocco? The facts destroy your argument, Phil. But then you already knew that.
The PM tells the truth when he says he cannot promise that our cities are safe from terrorism. He tells the truth when he confirms that an attack on Australia within Australia is not only possible but probable.
And of course, Phil can stop all terrorism!
But he lies when he denies that it is his foreign policies that have made our lives more dangerous.
I never knew that killing terrorists and creating democracies was bad for my health.
The great divide between those who supported the invasion of Iraq and those of us who opposed it is as wide as ever. We seem to live in different universes, with both sides using the London bombings to support their positions.
The right have been saying this for a long time.
The pro-war forces in politics and the media look at the mayhem and say: "Told you so." The critics of the war and the way it was conflated with the war on terror say: "Told you so", too.
The left uses any world event to justify its view. Even if it goes against them. Bush wins an election? Must be stolen. Election in Iraq? Must be fraudulent. Saddam on trial? Bush=Hitler!
They say the latest brutalities prove their case, that the Iraq war had to be fought to light the flame of democracy in the Middle East and that our efforts must be renewed. We say that what's happening in Baghdad and now London is inevitable, that the invasion has not liberated democratic forces but detonated more hatred, much of it directed against US hegemony and hubris.
"[T]he invasion has not liberated democratic forces". Then what would you call Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, Palestine, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan and all the other places that have had made huge strides towards democratic elections as good as any in the world? Oh yeah. Phil doesn't talk about elections either.
And against those countries, such as Britain and Australia who rushed to Washington's colours. But Howard can't see it. He can't afford to.
Once again, see previous terrorist attacks pre-March 2003, and then wake up. Phillip Adams is still convinced that terrorism started with the Iraq war. His deliberate neglect of history and ignorance towards the threat of militant Islamic extremists shows a naivete you'd expect from a moonbat. Sure enough, Adams is the biggest moonbat in mainstream Australian media, which is why he continues to blame all the problems in the Western world on Bush's presidency and the Iraq war, despite all these problems having existed well before either.

(Cross-posted to The House Of Wheels.)

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