There really is some strange stuff appearing on Drum/Unleashed on the ABC website.
Today’s is a piece by Michael Head a law teacher at University of Western Sydney under the title Stoking Fears of Terrorism. The thesis is that the Howard government and the subsequent Labor governments have provoked fear of terrorism “To provide a pretext for anti-democratic ‘terrorism’ laws and to justify its participation in the US-led military occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.” A raid just before the election on homes of Kurdish Australians was timed to show that the Labor government was tough on terrorism, we are told.
Head seems to be close to the Kurds in this country and writes:
“the PKK is not a terrorist group, but a political organisation. While the PKK has been involved in actions targeting civilians in Turkey, successive Turkish governments are responsible for the armed conflict. The Turkish military and allied fascist gangs have a long history of terrorism against the Kurdish minority and other political opponents.”
He goes on:
“By the time of the 2007 election, the anti-terrorism laws became discredited by the exposure of a series of frame-ups involving alleged Muslim terrorist suspects, including Mohamed Haneef, Itzar ul-Haque, David Hicks and Jack Thomas.”
Now, we can be uncomfortable about the reach of the antiterrorism laws (I am) but to argue that the PKK is not a terrorist organisation because the Turkish government started the violence and that Haneef, Hicks and the others were framed are views you might expect from a conspiracy-theorising partisan, not a scholar.
Nothing wrong with conspiracy-theorising partisans either, but I don’t believe a university teacher should use his job title when running those theories. I could also say that the ABC website could publish better stuff than this but The Drum/Unleashed (I still don’t understand the difference) is now probably beyond salvage. Leaving aside bias, the quality of the stuff being run would look bad on an amateur blog.
