Monday, July 11, 2005
SUBHUMAN SHIELD
Gerard Henderson on divine, loving, compassionate, and kind Australian human shield Donna Mulhearn:
Last week’s Australian Story on ABC TV told the self-indulgent tale of leftist activist Donna Mulhearn who presented herself as a self-proclaimed human shield at the start of the second Gulf war. She and her comrades sought to position themselves near some important Iraqi targets to thwart air attacks by United States, British and Australian forces, which were designed to topple Saddam Hussein’s murderous regime.
Despite advising George Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard that they would stay in Iraq throughout any conflict, the human shield movement soon fell apart. Mulhearn told Australian Story that she quit 10 days after hostilities began. She knew she “wouldn’t cope with seeing an American soldier walking into Baghdad” and, after all, her ailing mother wanted her back home.
But enough of Henderson’s savage right-wingery. Let’s hear from the lady herself:
Who I am is a human being with divinity within and an immense capacity to love and express compassion and kindness and justice.
I’m going to be sick. Anyways, here’s an example of Donna’s “immense capacity to love and express compassion and kindness and justice” following a Baghdad bomb attack that killed an Iraqi but left its targets—US soldiers—unharmed:
The crowd started to get angry and emotional and chanting anti-US slogans. The soldiers were there, this was a convey that was going down the main street, the roadside bomb was aiming to hit the vehicles in that convey. The vehicles were damaged, the windows were smashed and the soldiers were very shaken up but none of them were injured. As well as the man on the ground, there were at least three other people who were seriously injured with serious wounds. I saw their bodies being put on to the back of a truck, very deep wounds in, in their legs, in their arms. I saw the blood, limbs just attached to bodies, and everyone was angry at the soldiers. And I wanted to know what the soldiers were feeling at this moment because I was just fascinated at this situation. Here are the soldiers, who were being screamed at by these people and they had their guns out, they were pushing these people around, and it was a scene of chaos and anger and emotion and I wanted to know what these soldiers thought because they started pushing us around too. And I went up to one of them and I said, ‘How do you feel? How do you feel right now?, I said, ‘You’re meant to be dead. They didn’t want to kill this man, they wanted to kill you. How does that make you feel?’
So much love! Strange thing is, Mulhearn claims she left Baghdad before US soldiers arrived (“I don’t think I would have handled it well, and I was told later by others that I was right and I wouldn’t have handled it well”). If so, how come she witnessed a convoy of them “going down the main street”, giving Mulhearn the chance to scream her demented abuse?