From Heroes to Zeroes

There's just no pleasing Greg (Jerusalem Prize) Sheridan, foreign editor of Murdoch's Australian.

Back in 2009, Iranians were heroes:

"Everything that was good and decent and brave and creative about Iran was alive with hope in the days before the election, and in the heroic resistance afterwards..." (Don't pin your hopes on change in Tehran, 18/6/09)

And so photogenic too:

"The image of the beautiful young Neda Agha Soltan as she lay dying after being shot at a demonstration, almost certainly by Basij militiamen, for a moment transfixed the world." (West's hypocrites betray Iranians, 2/7/09)

And unlike Greg, whose (bleeding?) heart went out to those heroic young Iranians, a certain malign entity, comprising the likes of Louise Adler, Antony Loewenstein and Michael Leunig, which he labelled simply "the Left," was, in his words, more than "happy to accuse Israel of war crimes without the slightest evidence, but apparently unstirred by the murder of hundreds of innocent civilians in Iran." (ibid)

But that was then.

Now that these innocent young Iranian heroes are being felled, not by Basiji bullets on the streets of Tehran, but by Morrison's machetes in our very own Manus Island Guantanamo, they're just a pain in the arse:

"Whenever people are held in custody against their will, there is some danger. There is a particular danger in the case of asylum-seekers because among their number is a very tough group, substantially though not entirely Iranian, which is determined to make the centres unworkable and break the government's will..." (Calls for minister to resign are just absurd, The Australian, 25/2/14)

[See my posts: Behind the Iranian Refugee Exodus 1 (20/7/13) and 2 (30/7/13).]