Saturday, May 14, 2005
KILL THREAT FAILS TO CORRECT CARE DEFICIENCY
Australians don’t care about kidnapped Douglas Wood, argues The Age’s Jo Chandler. Her evidence? Well, if we really cared, we’d be happily negotiating with terrorists and demanding our troops withdraw from Iraq:
If the object of the exercise in kidnapping Wood was to rouse political or social passions over the presence of Australian troops in Iraq, as kidnappings of nationals did in Spain, Italy and the Philippines, it has failed.
The terrible images of Wood, an Australian citizen who has committed no crime, beaten and bowed, pleading for his life, have failed to galvanise Australians to call for a change in policy. Why?
Because we believe in the cause and aren’t about to be swayed by murderous blackmailers? Just a theory. To support her claim, Jo hunts down always-quotable talkback expert Peter Maher:
For a scientific reading of Australian attitudes, turn to media analyst Rehame. At the request of The Age, Rehame reviewed talkback radio sentiment this week and managing director Peter Maher was staggered by what he found. “Don’t get kidnapped in Iraq,” he says. “The public aren’t going to help you very much.”
He means “the public won’t back down on the war.”
What stunned Maher was that 65 per cent of callers supported the Government’s handling of the Wood abduction. Only four callers nationally suggested that Australia should pull troops out of Iraq. The tone is increasingly accepting of Australia’s involvement in the war. “It’s as if it is no longer an issue. It’s gone under the radar. I couldn’t get over it - so much so that I went back and asked my guys to check it again,” he says ...
“Poor old Dougy, I am staggered by this, I really am. I can’t get over the difference of opinion on this (Iraq) in 12 months. This is getting up near Tampa figures in terms of community support.”
The guy’s job is to monitor public opinion. Yet he’s staggered by support for policies that last year saw John Howard returned to office with an increased majority.
After reading transcripts of talkback calls, Maher wonders whether the community is growing harder, or more self-interested: if it doesn’t directly affect us, it doesn’t much matter. “It seems as a nation we’re changing so dramatically. As far as sympathy for these sorts of things - it’s not there,” he says. Was it ever? Maybe not, Maher admits.
Maher thinks we lack sympathy and are purely self-interested. The liberation of Iraq doesn’t directly affect us, in the short term; yet apparently we’re prepared to see it through, even at possible grievous cost to Douglas Wood and his family ... and potentially others, servicemen and civilian contractors alike. (Incidentally, the Asian tsunami didn’t affect us either. And we donated to tsunami causes like drunken Rockefellers.)
According to the one-dimensional Chandler/Maher Caring Index, American Sara Berg—sister of murdered Nicholas Berg—had no concern for her brother, because she supports the war and doesn’t want troops to withdraw; in fact, she wants them to continue killing terrorists:
Some things are unforgivable. What Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his many accomplices did to my brother Nick is unforgivable. It was not an act of war; it was a cold-blooded, premeditated heinous crime. To call it anything else suggests that it is an acceptable act of war, an acceptable response to America’s military action. It is not.
The world would be a better place if al-Zarqawi was no longer in it. He is pure evil. I don’t think someone like him is capable of any human feeling anymore. The only way to keep people like him from harming thousands of other people is to eliminate them.
Before this happened, I did not comprehend the magnitude of his evil and of people like him. But to experience the heinousness of what he did to someone as good and as innocent as my brother has totally changed my perspective. I don’t know how to respond in a humane way to such inhumane acts. I don’t think a humane response is necessary.
She’s right. It isn’t. Berg also has this message for the press:
What the media did to my family is also unforgivable. They made the worst week of my life infinitely worse. Decision-makers in the media need to make more humane decisions about what is a story and how they get it. Someone should have thought of a shocked, astounded and grieving family when they made those decisions. They spoke of their sympathy for us, but not once did they think the sympathetic thing to do would be to stop harassing us and allow us to grieve in peace.
More on this at the excellent Environmental Republican, source of the Berg link.