<< NEWS BRIEFLETS ~ MAIN ~ 17th CENTURY PURITANS ONLINE >>
YOU CAN'T SPELL "GIULIANA" WITHOUT "I" (TWICE)
The Age’s Tony Parkinson reviews the case of celebrity hostage Giuliana Sgrena:
This week, Dutch journalist, Harald Doornbos, wrote of a chance meeting with Sgrena and her colleagues as they flew into Baghdad to cover the conflict. A seasoned war reporter, Doornbos found himself unnerved by the attitudes he encountered.
Sgrena scolded him for agreeing to be embedded with US troops. When he raised with her the dangers of ambushes and hostage-taking when roaming Iraq unescorted, she had replied: “Oh no. That won’t happen. We are siding with the oppressed Iraqi people. No Iraqi would kidnap us. You don’t understand the situation.
"We are anti-imperialists, anti-capitalists, communists. The Iraqis only kidnap American sympathisers. The enemies of the Americans have nothing to fear."Doornbos told them they were out of their minds.
Sgrena plainly is. Just consider her absurd regard for self:
I wanted to tell about the bloodbath in Falluja through the refugees’ tales. And that morning the refugees and some of their “leaders” didn’t listen to me. I had in front of me the evidence of what the Iraqi society has become with the war and they threw their truth in my face: “We don’t want anyone. Why don’t you stay home? What such interview can be useful for?”. The worst collateral damage, the war killing communication, was falling on me. On me, who had risked it all …
Me, me, me, I, I, I. Shut up already.
UPDATE. Sgrena’s truth keeps changing:
The Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena, who was wounded by American fire last Friday soon after being released by kidnappers in Baghdad, has said that she does not think that the Americans were trying to kill her. “I never said that they wanted to kill me,” she said on a television talk show, “but the mechanics of what happened were those of an attack."
Stupid mechanics! No wonder the car wouldn’t stop.
Unbridled self-centeredness at it’s worst.
If the Italians had any sense they would have left her with the head-choppers.Tim- I haven’t found an on-line version of a Gregory Cochran article entitled “Bush’s Napoleon Complex”. I kid you not. It’s supposed to come out in the 28th March of the American Conservative Magazine and it tries to draw a direct comparison between Napoleon and the Peninsular Wars vis a vis Bush and Iraq. I guess it shouldn’t be ChimpyMcBushHitler anymore...just call him Napoleon! Good G*d!
If anything deserves a proper Tim Blair fisking...this one does.
Posted by Bucky Katt on 2005 03 11 at 01:31 PM • permalinkre: “And that morning the refugees and some of their “leadersâ€? didn’t listen to me. I had in front of me the evidence of what the Iraqi society has become with the war and they threw their truth in my face”
Geesh! “They threw their truth in my face”?????
I don’t suppose their truth means anything at all, having been mere eye witnesses, whereas she is an all-loving, all-concerned Communist journalist! What an ego! :(
Posted by mamapajamas on 2005 03 11 at 03:19 PM • permalinkWow. Nothing went right for this woman, did it? She found out that being an anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, communist enemy of America didn’t protect her from being kidnapped. Then the Iraqis she talked to didn’t feel like giving her the anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, Islamofascoid propaganda she was looking for. And then, when her government had to fork over an obscene amount of treasure to rescue her, she was shot at by the baby-eating Americans who, naturally, were keeping watch on that road specifically to get her.
Some days it doesn’t pay to get out of bed.
The US sent most of the residents of Fallujah packing before they went in there so there would not be mass civilian casualties. This silly woman is talking to people in camps and trying to get them to go with her program.
A feminazi no less. In case she hasn’t noticed radical Islam is not into equal rights. She should have kept her ass home and out of the way.
Don’t be naive, Rebecca. The “kidnapping” was arranged before she left Italy.
Posted by Jack from Montreal on 2005 03 11 at 06:59 PM • permalinkThis is just off the news services:
The award-winning war reporter, who works for Communist newspaper Il Manifesto, was abducted as she conducted interviews outside Baghdad University and held for a month.
Many Italians have been irked by her descriptions of her kidnappers. She said they were not killers and that she might have over-dramatised her videotaped appeal from captivity for Italy to withdraw its 3000 troops from Iraq.
She sobbed in the video and begged her family and the Government to do something to save her life.
“Sgrena, I think, should perhaps be more careful. She has said a load of nonsense, speaks somewhat carelessly and makes careless comments,” Mr Castelli said.
She puts the ‘u’ in putana
As they said of John Lennon’s assassin, if he’d aimed a little to the left he would have been a hero.
Posted by Jim Geones on 2005 03 11 at 09:11 PM • permalinkI see it all now - this is why the dastardly Americans left her alive! So that she’d make herself, and by extension her cause, look really, really bad by running off at the mouth and looking like an ungrateful, clueless, entitled brat! Those cunning fiends! Is there no shame to which the Minions of W will not stoop?
Has anyone seen the hundreds of bullets which she ‘picked up by the handful’? Or are they all rattling around inside her head?
Completely off topic - Andrea Harris, Administrator, are you out there? I throw my words into the ether in hope that you will hear me...AH, I am having the devil’s own trouble logging on sometimes. Username and password are accepted, I get redirected, post, and then - yes, only then - I notice that ‘Login’ still shows at the bottom of the screen. Is there an incantation I should be reciting? Am I holding my mouth the wrong way as I type? Please, any assistance would be welcome. Yours always.
Posted by SwinishCapitalist on 2005 03 11 at 09:49 PM • permalinkSwinishCapitalist: I’m not sure what the problem is. Are you running a firewall? You may have to turn it off when logging in or adjust your settings. Also, try refreshing the browser. Sometimes browsers call up cached pages (in this case the one with the “you have not logged in” message) instead of the one with the open comment box.
Oh yes—and before hitting “submit” you have to jump up from your chair and spin three times around on your left heel widdershins while chanting “Ngha! Y’leh hhnnnh Rlal Ga!” Oh wait—better not do that, that’s the chant to call up Great C’thulhu from the abyss where He lies dreaming.
Posted by Andrea Harris, Administrator on 2005 03 12 at 03:44 AM • permalinkIn heaven the cooks are Italian, the policemen are British, and the mechanics are from Germany. In hell the cooks are from Britain, the policemen are from Germany and the mechanics are from Italy!
Actually the joke I usually tell involves the French and not the Italians but it still works!
One last shot: FIAT = Fix It Again Tony!
Posted by Marcus Aurelius on 2005 03 12 at 04:07 PM • permalink
Page 1 of 1 pages
Members:
Login | Register
| Member List
A Marxist propagandist indulging in pathetic “Woe is me” narcissism? Say it ain’t so!
I wonder what sort of blatant leading questions she asked these unnamed Iraqis? Did she insult their intelligence? Did she try to tell them they were better off under Saddam’s boot?