Julian Assange: When Rape Doesn’t Matter
It is a sign of just how low the international left has sunk since the loss of the Soviet Union and the attacks of September 11 that they are willing to defend genocidal dictators and alleged rapists, all in the name of vapid anti-Americanism. This reactionary faction has become so farcical that it now resembles parody, as a recent comment piece in The Guardian by Mark Weisbort pointedly demonstrates.
For the sake of clarity, Julian Assange is wanted by Swedish authorities on suspicion of rape, sexual molestation and unlawful coercion. Assange has refused to go to Sweden to answer these suspicions, stating that the allegations are part of a smear campaign. Indeed, Assange has gone through the British courts up to and including the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom to avoid facing these serious allegations. When it became clear that he would have to leave the UK, Assange fled to the Ecuadorian embassy in London seeking political asylum, arguing that if he were to fly to Sweden, the government there would extradite him to the United States on other charges.
You might not know any of this if you read Weisbort’s article, however. After all, it does not use the words ‘rape’ or ‘sex’ once. Rather, Weisbort argues that “the Swedish government has no legitimate reason to bring him to Sweden, this by itself is a form of persecution”. Rather, it can be inferred from Weisbort’s musings that these sexual molestation and rape allegations are mere fabrication, a cover for a wider plot to organise “a second extradition to the United States, and persecution here for his activities as a journalist”.
That Assange is anything but a journalist — uploading unredacted documents in doing so placing countless lives in jeopardy and undermining the security of the United States of America — is besides the point. Or rather, it is precisely the point. After all, Weisbort argues, the United States is responsible for the deaths of “3 million Vietnamese or more than one million Iraqis” plus “millions of others displaced, wounded, or abused”. How can the United States talk about human right, Weisbort infers, when “prior to the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, millions of African-Americans in the southern states didn’t have the right to vote, and lacked other civil rights”?
Never mind that the United States is a nation founded upon the ideas of liberty, autonomy, and secularism. Never mind that no nation has done more to advance these causes and protect human lives than the United States, from the Second World War to the liberation of Libya. Never mind that Ecuador — the nation which has indeed granted Assange asylum — is the very definition of a banana republic: a partly free state where the leadership has fostered a political “climate of intimidation”, aligned itself with Hugo Chavez, and attacks actual journalists for exposing “pervasive” corruption. Never mind, apparently, that Julian Assange may have raped two women in Sweden and that he is scared to answer these allegations.
All is fair, it would seem, when it comes to the war against the United States, one that the international left has already lost.
