NEWS of the death of terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was received with delight by Iraqis in Baghdad, but greeted with pursed-lipped disapproval by the cynical doomsayers in the commentariat, such as the London Independent's widely-known Robert Fisk.
These people carp constantly and never see anything positive in anything done by the forces ranged against the jihadists.
Fisk, a former colleague, and others of his ilk, express their vehement condemnation of foreign intervention in Iraq, but what they mean is Western and, in particular, US intervention to overthrow Saddam Hussein's murderous regime.
They don't assign the same abhorrence to foreign terrorists such as Zarqawi, who have been responsible for murdering greater numbers civilians at wedding parties, in mosques, and in towns and villages than those unfortunately killed accidentally by Coalition forces.
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Fisk responded to Zarqawi's death by belittling the al-Qaeda leader's skills with weapons and heaping scorn on perceptions of him as a major terrorist adversary. Killing him, he implied, was no big deal. He was, said Fisk, a "Jordanian corner-boy who could not even lock and load a machine gun".
Certainly, the thug showed some incompetence in handling his automatic AK47 in out-takes from his most recent PR-video. Zarqawi fiddled with the safety catch and awkwardly squeezed off a few single shots . . . but he managed to behead US businessman Nicholas Berg in 2004 with little difficulty, setting a grisly pattern for other terrorists from the Philippines to Pakistan.
This "corner-boy", as Fisk would have it, was also responsible for the huge truck bomb that destroyed UN headquarters in Baghdad, killing 22, including top UN envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello, and wounding more than 150 others. The explosion so traumatised UN staff that they fled Iraq.
Some "corner-boy", indeed, but then Fisk inhabits some strange corners, at least in his own mind, such as the intellectual corner he found himself in when questioned by the ABC's Lateline host Tony Jones in April. Incredibly, he claimed the West was responsible for creating people such as the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya and Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt.
Jones alluded to Zarqawi's penchant for producing promotional videos of terrorist atrocities. "Robert Fisk, can I interrupt you there? I'm surprised to hear you say some of these things because isn't it (Abu Musab al-Zarqawi) himself who put these images . . . on the Internet, including making a beast of himself by earlier putting on the Internet images of him with a mask on beheading Nicholas Berg, for example?"
"Well, no. I mean, we don't know that was Zarqawi," Fisk replied. Jones, himself an employee of the organisation that, until last month, refused to concede that that the Palestinian groups Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah were terrorist organisations, then asked: "Robert Fisk," he said, "you wouldn't like us to ignore them (the terrorists), would you? We're journalists, we have to acknowledge their existence and dreadful things they have done. We can't just ignore the fact that they exist?"
Trapped in his corner, Fisk spluttered: "No. Absolutely not. You're right."
There are many risks and penalties associated with the self-loathing that besets those in the intellectually bankrupt political corner Fisk inhabits, as he demonstrated when he was set upon by a gang of Afghan street thugs in 2001.
Even as young men smashed stones into his face, he couldn't blame anyone but the West. "I understood," he wrote, "I couldn't blame them for what they were doing. In fact, if I were the Afghan refugees of Kila Abdullah, close to the Afghan-Pakistan border, I would have done just the same to Robert Fisk. Or any other Westerner I could find."
Such deluded rationalisations for acts of terror are usually the province of poisoned peace activists such as the deluded Cindy Sheehan and her supporters, and no doubt they cheer the evil-doers cowed in cold, isolated caves on the Afghan-Pakistan border, in Somalia and on the run in Iraq.
Sane individuals see something else in the slayings of innocents at work in the World Trade Centre Towers, or riding public transport in London and Madrid or holidaying in Bali. Sane people recognise cold-blooded murder for what it is.
If, as some predict, Zarqawi is celebrated in death as a martyr, it will only be as a martyr to an abominable cause.
This "corner-boy" joins the Austrian water-colourist Adolf Hitler, the Georgian ex-seminarian Josef Stalin, and the Chinese library assistant Mao Tse-tung in a special hell reserved for the most evil monsters.
Those who celebrate them join them in their infamy. Fisk and those who seek to deny the importance of Zarqawi's killing are delusional and do a grave injustice to the repeatedly demonstrated desire of the Iraqi people for peace in their benighted country.
akermanp@sundaytelegraph.com.au
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