The Predictable becomes the actual...

This could obviously be said of the terrorist attacks themselves but it seems like the media and establishment parties also had "properly prepared" for an event like this. Blair's response has been typically worthless and hypocritcal, as has that of the other G8 leaders - apparently Bush opposes the death of civilians, surely a great comfort to the grieving Iraqi widow/mother. It always amuses me at times like this just how much emphasis the media places on the hackneyed "outrage" of the ruling classes. Did anyone really expect Jacques Chirac to say, "at last zee roast beef got taken down, how you say, a peg or twoo"? If you took the BBC's coverage seriously, the fact that the G8 leaders opposed Al Qaeda would be agreat revelation. No, the "condemnations" and indeed the sympathy with the victims should be seen for what it is, a charade. Blair and Bush mourn when it is politically expedient to do so. The deaths of un-people in Fallujah has, as Chomsky mught put it, no status with our rulers.

As a socialist and a humanitarian, I mourn the loss of all innocent life - trite I know, but nevertheless true. However, unlike the complicit media and the mendacious elites, civilians deaths are not on a graded scale of grief-value. The Iraqi child starved by sanctions; the New York firemen; the Afghani farmer, the Iraqi girl in Bagdhad; the the Palestinian grandmother assassinated by the IDF, they all have status.

The question should not be who cares most about the dead, who is more outraged than whom, the question should be, who consistently opposes "mass murder"? Is it Blair? No. Is it Bush? No. Is it Hitchens, Aaronovitch and the morons over at Harry's Place? No. Is it, god forbid, Rupert Murdoch and the Sun? I think not.