Tuesday, June 21, 2005
BUCKS TO BE MADE
Richard Ackland on Douglas Wood, businessman and kidnap victim:
The hero of the day is now a product being ripened by a platoon of PR agents, managers, stylists and personal trainers. There’s a buck to be made with this boy.
Not that Douglas Wood doesn’t understand how to trot out a volley of cliches all on his own: “It’s great to be an Australian … God bless America … Any chance of a VB? … It’s bloody good to be home … How are the Cats going? … Waltzing Matilda.”
Not bad for a guy who’s lived away from his proud homeland for 25 years.
And Richard Ackland on David Hicks, Jew-hater and conflict-seeking idiot, who himself long ago left Australia:
John Howard says the military commissions will deliver a fair trial for this Australian. The Attorney-General, Philip Ruddock, thinks so, too. This stands in bleak contrast to the caution Howard urged in respect of the Corby case: “It is tremendously important that people be circumspect in what they say.”
Of course, Howard didn’t say of Hicks, as is his expressed sentiment for Corby: “I do feel for him, the whole country feels for him.” Possibly that is because there are no huge ratings and TV shows with worms to be drained out of Hicks’s dreadful plight.
Hicks went to the Middle East to kill people. Wood went to the Middle East to work. (Oh, and speaking of “bucks to be made”, consider the $433,000 of taxpayers’ money that funded a Hicks-friendly documentary.)
UPDATE, via Aaron at Free Will:
The military raid that freed Douglas Wood was “stupid” because it had almost certainly cost the lives of two Iraqis taken hostage with him, Australia’s most senior Muslim cleric claimed yesterday.
Returning to Sydney from his mission in Iraq to help free the Australian engineer, Sheik Taj Din al-Hilali said the raid that rescued Mr Wood from a Baghdad house last Wednesday foiled negotiations with the kidnappers to release Mr Wood with his Iraqi driver and a local engineer.
Those negotiations were going so well that al-Hilali had earlier abandoned Baghdad for Cairo.
(Via reader Dan L.)