David Burchell, Iranian greens, leftists, and argument as the destruction of straw dogs ...

Here at the pond, we're trying to build up an audience for David Burchell at The Australian, because never has such an orotund rhetorician stalked the land delivering humbug and tomfoolery since ... well, perhaps since John Macarthur did over William Bligh but found Lachlan Macquarie a tougher nut to crack.

Here's the header from the latest Burchell exegesis: Deafening silence from Left as Iranians protest.

It seems to have escaped Burchell's notice that The Australian would be an ideal location for a Deafening Ruckus from Left as Iranians protest. But of course the Oz is infested with noisy squawking loons of a right wing kind, no room for deafening Leftists, while moderate leftists scribble things for New Matilda, shortly to fold its tent and steal into the night (but which won't stop you from reading Are the Iranian Opposition Terrorists, by Jennifer Bennett).

In short, in his usual way, Burchell is perpetrating a canard or displaying his ignorance. We like to think he's doing both. But oh the word power on display. That's why we like to call Burchell's scribbles an exegesis, since Burchell is clearly an exegete adept at hermeneutics.

Crueler folk call him a wild and woolly pompous prattling blatherer:

It is surely one of the great paradoxes of this age that while many of our cleverest minds have fallen headlong in love with peoples whose causes are more or less entirely alien to us, we can find no stirring in our hearts for peoples whose greatest hope is to become . . . well, more like us.

Thus we artlessly dispatched our hearts on a sentimental journey to Gaza designed for our benefit by the canny Islamists in Ankara and their bloodstained allies in Gaza; people who, in any other context, would treat our Western soft-heartedness and woolly-mindedness with undisguised contempt.

We? Our hearts? Our benefit?

Who knows who Burchell's talking about, since the invention of fictional leftists and macabre straw men and weirdly ritualised straw dogs and strange exotic hoochie koochie voodoo dolls is a key part of Burchell's art. When self is woolly-minded and a windbag rhetorician, it is essential to label others as woolly minded too.

And yet our hearts have no space whatever for the thousands of young Iranian students who, on Saturday, defied the threats of their government, the beatings of the extra-legal militias, and the pusillanimity of their erstwhile leaders, merely to ask for the right to have their votes treated with dignity, rather than being fabricated out of some dodgy Russian software in Iran's Ministry of the Interior.

To the best of my knowledge, not one single person has died at the hands of Iran's green opposition, even as thousands of their number have been arrested, hundreds sexually and physically tortured in prison, and dozens murdered in loneliness, often in the most squalid and humiliating of circumstances. Their cause has been Gandhian, almost to a fault. ("The students will die, but they will not accept humiliation", they chanted at Tehran University.)

Our hearts again? As in royal plural on this offensive Queen's birthday? (Long live the Queen and may she rule over the British and bugger off from Australia).

As always, Burchell speaks for everybody when really he's only speaking for himself, and when he does that he always veers towards the incoherent and the splenetic.

And only a couple of pars in, it's at this point that even a rube begins to work out that Burchell doesn't have the first clue as to what he's talking about. Is he, for example, when talking about student resistance to the Iranian government, talking about the MEK/MKO/PMOI, aka the People's Mujahedin of Iran, as many would consider the PMOI the main group in the National Council of Resistance in Iran?

Is he talking about a group that the United States designated as a terrorist organization, while the European Union only got around to removing the PMOI from its list of terrorist groups in 2009?

Does Burchell have the first clue, or actual interest in anything he's purporting to scribble about?

Of course it's hard to do anything about unhappy Iran - Burchell seems to think that scribbling is all that needs to be done - but is he a member of Amnesty, and does he participate in its current endeavours in relation to Iran? (One Year After Massive Political Dissent in Iran, Government Crackdown Widens with Hundreds Unjustly Imprisoned; Torture and Executions Widespread, Says New Report by Amnesty International). On the other hand, it seems Phillip Ruddock remains a member of Amnesty, so where's the hope?

But back to Burchell and his straw dogs:

And yet their plight leaves us entirely cold. Who knows: if they strapped bombs to themselves, or professed a secret admiration for the racial policies of the Third Reich, would they then become sufficiently exotic to pique our jaded imaginations, and would we then love them a little more?

Dong dong! Godwin's law broken, and by the fifth paragraph too. By now I'm too jaded to note the royal imperative ours and the we's ...

Fearless Western journalists, we are told, boarded the Gaza flotilla at hazard to their lives, the better to pen florid descriptions of the predations of the Israeli "hyenas"; sentences that could presumably have been written with equal vigour and no less accuracy from the comfort of their computer terminals.

Yet presently there is not one solitary Western journalist, willing to risk the wrath of the Iranian security forces to file a report from Tehran in the open air. And so the job is left to the Iranians themselves: to the anxious young students whose wavering phone cameras record those fleeting snippets of history, floating like sea-wrack across the YouTube ocean in 15 or 20-second fragments. And to the exiles and expatriates, like the courteous, serious-minded and courageous London Guardian stringer Saeed Kamali Dehghan, who have spirited their way back into the country, at genuine hazard to themselves, before the people whose stories they need to tell have disappeared.

There's a job for fearless Western journalists happy to have the shit beaten out of them by the Iranian VEVAK? Dare we suggest Burchell shows us how it's done, with particular attention to the avoidance of conflating an incident relating to Gaza with the matter of Iran?

If it's all down to the woolly minded deafening silence from Australian leftists, what about the woolly minded bleating from The Australian's columnists?

Or will Iranian protests continue to be heard in The Australian to the occasional murmur of polite interest from Burchell safely ensconced at a computer terminal (unless quill and ink remain the preferred desk bound methodology)?

Dehghan' s new documentary For Neda - recorded secretly in Iran, using interviews from the family of the young murdered bystander Neda Soltan - will air on US and British television on the anniversary of Neda's death this Wednesday, no doubt to murmurs of polite interest. Perhaps the most touching aspect of this heartfelt documentary is its portrait of a young woman (not in the least political, at least in the Western intellectual sense of the word) who wanted merely to live her life, true to herself as best she could be, and at peace with the world, much in the same manner as any thoughtful Western teenager.

Yep, and there was Gabby Haynes in New Matilda, shortly to fold, back in November scribbling about Fight Or Flight in Iran, and evoking memories of Marjane Satrapi's 2007 film Persepolis.

It's hard to know what's more offensive. Burchell imagining that leftists don't know or care about what's happening in Iran, or that somehow it's up to these imaginary leftists to somehow sort it out. In much the same way, one presumes, that leftists are responsible for North Korea, and must somehow end that dictatorship of loons.

But that's what happens when you use people's lives and fates as random insensitive weapons with which to assault other people, dressing those other people up as nameless ideologues so you can despatch them in the name of your own ideology. It's random abusiveness, more akin to professional masturbation than insight, and naturally it makes use of sentimental imagery to show how fiendish the other side is:

And yet, even before she was gunned down at random by a twitchy sniper, her efforts to follow her own star had been thwarted by laws which view Western popular music as corrupting, Western casual dress as lascivious, and an uncovered head or arms as the grossest of moral provocations. In the Iranian moral-spiritual imagination Neda has already been adopted as a martyr. And yet our Western hearts seem curiously closed to her. Could this be because she reminds us too much of ourselves?

Yep, it's hard to call it anything else than professional wankery.

What on earth to make of those last two sentences. Our western hearts are closed because she reminds us too much of ourselves? What on earth does it mean? Who could have the foggiest clue, when pretentious portentousness is the whole point of the game? Is he remembering four dead in Ohio, and Neil Young's music? Who knows.

And meantime, images and stories about the slain woman littered the western press as the anniversary of her death came round. And who could support her callous slaughter or the regime that did it?

Well of course it wouldn't be long before that radical Muslim Barack Obama is wheeled into all this so he can take full blame, along with all those closed hearted leftists:

As well as the Iranian elections, and the death of Neda Soltani, we should perhaps recall a third ill-starred anniversary. It was, after all, just one week before the Iranian elections that US President Barack Obama rose in Cairo to deliver an oration on the relations between the US and the Muslim world: a speech, full of generous sentiments and carefully balanced praise and blame for all parties, which for some weeks made him the darling of the political class all over the world. Who knows: perhaps Obama was being merely naive when he spoke encouragingly of a new and optimistic climate of negotiation with the regime in Tehran, even though we must suspect that this signal aided the regime in its decision to overturn the following week's election result, rather than simply to flee to Syria, as they feared they might have to do.

Indeed. The last thing we need is optimism or negotiation, or even negotiations which managed to produce the recent new set of UN sanctions against the Iranian regime.

And who knows: perhaps it was the same generous spirit of liberal self-criticism that drove the President to describe the wearing of the hijab as a "right" for Muslim women and to criticise only those governments (such as France) which have sought to ban it, and not those (such as Iran) who deem it to be a compulsory attribute of womanhood. Even though the right not to wear the hijab is perhaps the single most eloquent principle of the Iranian opposition's cause.

Who knows, could it have had something to do with Obama personally calling to apologize to the two Muslim women from Michigan who were barred from sitting near him during a campaign rally because they wore Islamic head scarves? Such is the paranoia, fear and loathing about Muslims in the United States. Because the extreme right in America continues to characterise Obama as a dangerous Islamic revolutionary and socialist nee communist?

Or does Obama take seriously the constitution of the United States of America, which is, it goes without saying, different from that of the French? Even conservatives at the New York Post (Banning the burqa) understand this:

The First Amendment would likely make a broad ban on the burqa in the United States unconstitutional, though some states have restricted its wearing for such activities as obtaining a driver's license. But it would be a false tolerance to suggest that we should treat the burqa as a symbol of religious freedom.

That's the problem when you take freedom seriously and want to minimise the role of government. It means loons can be free to oppress themselves.

But back to Burchell:

Some years ago a senior scholar of Muslim affairs described to me in passionate terms the difficulty she has raising the problems of Muslim women with Australian journalists, given that she doesn't cover her head, and so is intuitively taken by well-intentioned folks to be insufficiently Muslim. (In the same perverse way, as a Muslim feminist, she sometimes finds herself invisible to non-Muslim feminists, to whom she also appears insufficiently Islamic.) Conversely, as the Iranian feminist Azar Nafisi has pointed out, the same garments which in Iran are intended to make women invisible in the public sphere serve only, in a delicious paradox, to make them ever-more visible, since "no infraction is too small to escape notice", and since "every private gesture of defiance is now a strong political statement".

Actually, and of course, this is just another example of Burchell's ostrich head in the sand way of conducting his argument, because The Punch has had a field day with the "ban the burqa" movement from way back when, as have all the Murdoch rags, and there are so many references, it would be too exhausting to catalogue them all.

Why it was way back in January that here at the pond we demanded all women be made to wear the burqa, in response to the likes of Miranda the Devine deploring the decline of moral standards in the west.

We keeded, we keeded. When it comes to the burqa, we're very French, mais naturellement. But when you can manage to ignore the vigorous discussion of the burqa/burka in the Australian media in the past six months, clearly you're in cloud cuckoo land.

Still, thanks to Burchell, we now learn the gear has practical uses:

In one of those stolen phone-camera fragments from Saturday's rally, at Tehran University, one of the demonstrators runs towards the camera. Her bright green hijab has been twisted around to cover her nose and mouth, providing protection from tear gas, and a necessary cloak of anonymity. It's an image whose irony, sad to say, would be lost on President Obama, as well as on some of our otherwise clever souls. In that respect, as in others, those brave young Iranians put us all to shame.

So speaketh the armchair revolutionary nee right wing radical and twee ironist. We now await Burchell's learned position on Iranian women soccer players and their desire to wear headscarves (They Just Want to Play Soccer).

One thing's clear however. If all the Iranian greens get is the kind of crocodile tears delivered up by Burchell, they'll be waiting a long time for freedom.

And now for a reading, this time from an early smuggled out draft script of the new version of Straw Dogs. Yes indeed there's real heresy afoot here. Sam Peckinpah's film, based on The Siege of Trencher's Farm, and set in bucolic Cornish England, is being re-made with Alexander Skarsgard and Kate Boswroth, and is now set in Blackwater, Mississippi.

The world has gone mad. Personally I blame David Burchell and his policy of appeasing whoever he's appeasing this week:

AMY (cynical): Here in the South, heroes come from one place. That football field.

DAVID: Like the men fixing our roof?

Amy nods. Just like those assholes fixing our roof.

DAVID (CONT’D): It’s sad. Bunch of straw dogs.

AMY: “Straw dogs?”

DAVID: (beat) In ancient Chinese rituals, dogs made out of straw were used as offerings to the gods. During the ritual they were treated with the utmost reverence. When it was over and they were no longer needed they were trampled on and tossed aside. They become nothing.
(beat) When their football careers are over that’s all these kids become. Straw dogs.

When the Iranian green latte sipping inner urban liberals have served their purpose - trampling on western "leftists" - they'll be tossed aside. Straw dogs.

(Below: a few straw dogs, up there with Burchell's straw leftists).