It's Not Just Alan Jones 2

Sometimes I feel like I'm playing whack-a-mole here. One minute up pops Paul Sheehan at Fairfax. Then, no sooner have I whacked him, than up pops Greg Sheridan at News Ltd. Here's the latter writing over a week ago about those bloody Muslims and their crazeee "innate anti-American hatred":

"Here is a hard truth. Islamist extremists didn't hate America because of Bush. They hated Bush because of America. And now they hate Obama, because of America." (Soft power reaps only a hard fall, The Australian, 22/9/12)

According to Sheridan, it doesn't matter what Obama does, there's just no pleasing these buggers:

"[Obama] beat up on Israel, even at one point refusing to be seen in public with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu... But none of it won anything from the Middle East."

Obama beat up on Israel?! What, by withholding the super-brat's pocket money? No, by avoiding its leader (for a nanosecond).

Pakistan's "moderate" Benazir Bhutto, Sheridan asserts, was killed because she got too close to the US. By Muslim extremists, of course! "Something similar happened with Bashir Gemayel in Lebanon some 3 decades ago." And then the moral:

"In many of these Muslim countries it can be dangerous to be an enemy of America but absolutely fatal to be America's friend."

IOW, no matter the historical context, Muslims are not only a menace to themselves, but those who side with the Americans are practically signing their own death warrants. Except that this doesn't seem to apply to America's man in Ramallah, Mahmoud Abbas, or America's man in Beirut, Saad Hariri, or America's man in Amman or Riyadh or... need I go on?

But it's not Sheridan's patent nonsense about the anti-American DNA swirling through Muslim veins that concerns me here. It's his reference to the 1982 assassination of Lebanese President Bashir Gemayel that's got me going.

Gemayel, a Christian, was assassinated by Charles Chartouni, a Christian. The assassination was planned by Gemayel's right-hand man, Elie Hobeika, another Christian, in co-ordination with atheist Russians and the secular Ba'athist Syrian President Hafiz al-Asad. It had nothing whatever to do with Muslims, extremist or otherwise. And that's according to veteran US journalist Barbara Newman who claimed, in her latest (2005) book, Lightning Out of Lebanon: Hezbollah Terrorists on American Soil, that Hezbollah was more dangerous than al-Qaida, a view that should warm the cockles of Sheridan's heart.

Apparently, Sheridan hasn't read Newman's earlier (1989) book about Gemayel, The Covenant: Love & Death in Beirut. Why, Zionist Barbie's even thanked a much younger Benjamin Netanyahu in its pages for "telling me that if I did not tell the truth about Bashir, then no one would."

Greg?