Giuliana Sgrena and the limits of alliances of convenience

Jack Kelly provides the background

Excerpt:

Giuliana Sgrena does not lack a sense of self-importance. The 56-year-old journalist for the Italian communist newspaper Il Manifesto thinks she knows so many deep dark secrets the U.S. military tried to shut her up permanently.

Sgrena went to Iraq to report on the heroic resistance to the American imperialists. Dutch journalist Harald Doornbos rode in the airplane to Baghdad with her.

"Be careful not to get kidnapped," Doornbos warned Sgrena.

"You don't understand the situation," she responded, according to Doornbos' account last week in Nederlands Dagblad. (Excerpts were translated into English and posted on a Dutch writer's Web blog.) "The Iraqis only kidnap American sympathizers. The enemies of the Americans have nothing to fear."

Sgrena left her hotel the morning of Feb. 4 to interview refugees from Fallujah, the resistance stronghold captured by U.S. Marines in November. The interviews didn't go well.

"The refugees ... would not listen to me," she said. "I had in front of me the accurate confirmation of the analysis of what the Iraqi society had become as a result of the war and they would throw their truth in my face."

Sgrena's feelings were hurt that the refugees could be so curt to her: "I who had risked everything, challenging the Italian government who didn't want journalists to reach Iraq and the Americans who don't want our work to be witnessed of what really became of that country with the war and notwithstanding that which they call elections." (Maybe it reads better in Italian, or maybe she just can't write worth a damn.)

She got nabbed on her way back to her hotel. Sgrena told her captors she was on their side, and suggested they kidnap an American soldier instead. But the U.S. government doesn't pay ransoms.

I say:

This excerpt should speak for itself, but since people are often deliberately obtuse, I'd best spell out the implications:

1. The enemy of your enemy is *not* your friend. Leftists such as Sgrena are deluded on many levels, not just the political. They misapprehend basic human nature, if they think the Islamofascists have any regard for them.

2. The sheer arrogance Sgrena exhibits is *not* a personal quirk. All Leftists I have ever encountered are this way.

3. Even in Fallujah, a former stronghold of the regime that once oppressed and terrorized at least 80 percent of Iraq, they will "throw their truth" in a Communist bitch's face.

4. The Left is on the way out. Worldwide.

5. The Left is badly out of touch with reality.

6. Never pay ransom to kidnappers. Especially if the kidnappee is someone you can easily do without.

7. Never negotiate with terrorists. This is a corollary to the principle: never negotiate with those who have no honor.

Oh, and in case anyone is coming late to the party, Sgrena's account of the incident has been falling apart for quite some time now. Leftists are liars, as a matter of principle. The trouble is, as in Sgrena's case, they lie so often and so hard they start to believe their own lies.



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