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The Guantanamo detainees and the left: not in my backyard, thank you
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For years one of the issues that became a rallying cry for the left, which they used endlessly to excoriate the Bush Administration, was the awful injustice visited upon the terrorist detainees housed at Guantanamo Bay. Calls by European leftists to close the facility formed the basis of a rabid anti-Americanism. When he announced, during his trip to Europe, that he would close the prison, Obama was hailed by many Europeans as their New Messiah by obliging them their fantasy.
Now that Barack Obama has been forced by the painful security realities such a decision entails (not to mention the opposition of his fellow Democrats), has any European country offered to take any of those innocent souls housed at Guantanamo?
Hardly.
Janet Albrechtsen of The Australian, skewers those on the left, who for years characterized many of the Guantanamo inmates as merely wayward souls wrongfully imprisoned, yet who now have an inexplicable aversion for having these detainees housed in their own countries or neighborhoods:
Notice how easy it is to say “shut down Gitmo”, but how hard it is to say “bring the detainees home to us”. Those in Europe who were the biggest blowhard opponents of Guantanamo Bay have also lost their tongue. Gitmo is a first-class lesson in reality biting.
Albrechtsen notes the stunning hypocrisy of leftists on this issue:
Now comes an even trickier question. How do we measure the hypocrisy of those countries, such as Australia, that said no to a request from Republican George W. Bush to take detainees and are now considering how to respond to a similar request from Democrat President Obama. If they say yes to Obama, having said no to Bush, they surely rise to the top of the hypocrisy class. If they say no to Obama, they at least get marks for being consistently hypocritical by demanding Gitmo’s closure but refusing to take any of the inmates. We await the Prime Minister’s decision
It is both great fun, as well as revealing, to watch the left squirm on the Guantanamo detainee issue. The left has no answer to the charge of hypocrisy, as it is a charge that is incapable of refutation. Instead, when the issue of the inherent dangers involved in relocating the currently housed inmates arises, the best that those on the left can offer by way of reasoned argument is to change the subject: the "real" issue they say, is the illegal War in Iraq, the perpetration of war crimes by the Bush Administration, "laws" (unspecified) against "torture" etc., etc.
The Guantanamo detainee issue is yet another object-lesson in the intellectual shallowness of the agenda of the left. While they enjoy flattering themselves as morally superior by cloaking complex and insoluble issues, such as Guantanamo, in high-minded, noble, and righteous phrases such as "justice", "international law", and "compassion", in reality, their moral absolutism cannot obscure the hypocrisy and deceit that forms the basis for many of their specious positions.
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