Assange is playing governing class for suckers

What a manipulative, melodramatic, malodorous circus. Julian Assange, the founder of the internet whistleblowing site WikiLeaks, is fighting extradition to Sweden, where he is wanted in connection with allegations of rape and sexual assault.

It is also widely thought that the U.S. authorities would rather like to have a bit of a chat with him — although they have so far said nothing officially about this — after WikiLeaks published thousands of classified U.S. military and diplomatic documents.

Claiming to be afraid that he would be extradited to the U.S. from Sweden, Assange has sought refuge for the past two months in the London embassy of Ecuador — from where he cannot set foot without being instantly arrested by the British police.

Posing as a champion of justice and human rights, Assange yesterday made a theatrical statement from the balcony of the Ecuador embassy in London’s exclusive Knightsbridge, for all the world like an Eva Peron of the ether.

Instead of the adoring multitude, however, all he addressed was a few bedraggled if noisy supporters, scores of police officers trying both to stop a riot and protect him from being shot, and phalanxes of the world’s media delighted by a dramatic story in the August silly-season.

Farcical

But this story is not just silly but farcical.

Assange is presenting himself as some kind of political dissident being persecuted by a UK and U.S. government witch-hunt against whistleblowers and freedom of speech.

How ludicrous is this? From his stage on the balcony, he unaccountably failed to mention the reason he is actually being sought — to answer claims of rape and sexual assault in Sweden.

Ultra-egalitarian Sweden is hardly a dictatorship. Both Britain and Sweden are democracies committed to human rights and Assange is not a political refugee. He is merely a man wanted on sexual assault allegations.

Ecuador, however, has no culture of human rights or freedom of speech. On the contrary, it jails political dissidents on trumped-up charges, regularly locks up journalists and shuts down newspapers or TV stations which criticise its president, Rafael Correa.

Yet this is the country that Assange is now hailing as the defender of freedom of speech and human rights — and which has granted him political asylum. A satirist could hardly have invented such an absurdity.

More farcical still, Ecuador has been helped to squat upon this moral high ground by the ineptitude of none other than Britain’s Foreign Secretary, William Hague.

The Foreign Office delivered to Ecuador a scarcely veiled threat that it might — with enormous reluctance, of course — rescind the embassy’s diplomatic status in order to seize Assange. If it expected Ecuador to roll over, it was immediately disabused. Ecuador hit back that any such move would be illegal.

Aghast British official types also queued up to observe that such a manoeuvre would expose British diplomats in sensitive parts of the world to the same kind of treatment.

This was already a diplomatic debacle. The blunder ensured that Ecuadorians were promptly worked up to a patriotic fervour against the perceived perfidy of Britain and the U.S.

Not since the Argentines invaded the Falklands has Britain had its tail so humiliatingly tweaked by a Latin American dictatorship.

Suddenly, Ecuador is on the lips of people who previously would have struggled to find it on a map.

Now it is puffing out its braided and bemedalled chest and whipping up wider Latin American hysteria against both Britain and America.

It takes quite something to enable a tyrannical banana republic, whose sole previous claim to fame was the export of the Panama hat, to prance and posture on the international stage as the upholder of freedom and international law. Well done, Foreign Secretary!

All this merry mayhem is, of course, being orchestrated by Assange, who continues to play the British governing class for suckers.

Hysteria

The first bunch of useful idiots who played right into his hands were the anti-establishment, anti-American, anti-West Left, otherwise known as the Guardian and assorted luvvies such as socialites Jemima Khan and Bianca Jagger, journalist John Pilger and filmmaker Ken Loach.

These exemplars of radical chic went to hilarious lengths to build up the WikiLeaker-in-chief into a cross between Mother Teresa, Gandhi and Jesus Christ.

Indeed, the Guardian actually said to Assange in the early days of its love affair with him: ‘We are going to put you on the moral high ground, so high you’ll need an oxygen mask.'

But the Guardian itself subsequently reached for the gas mask, as noxious fumes started to emanate from its erstwhile deity with claims of bad faith and revulsion at his apparently cavalier attitude towards the safety of the people whose security he had compromised. Then came the claims of sexual offences. Even then, with these unproven, but for feminists, devastating allegations hanging over Assange, it was remarkable how many Left-wingers persisted in regarding him as a victim of oppression.

Truly, the words ‘unspeakable’, ‘uneatable’ and ‘in pursuit of’ come irresistibly to mind.

Now Assange’s powerful friends seem to have all but peeled away or been struck strangely dumb.

Nevertheless, they can’t escape the fact that they helped create a monstrous figure.

For Assange is not merely a narcissist and exhibitionist. He has also inflicted real damage upon Western interests — and is thought to have caused a number of very brave individuals to have their security compromised and maybe even to lose their lives.

Some of the classified cables he published, for example, identified the names, villages, relatives’ identities and precise locations of Afghans who had co-operated with Nato troops. They also revealed the whereabouts of American tactical nuclear weapons, and risked jeopardising alliances between nations by publishing apparently compromising material out of context.

Exhibitionist

When it was suggested to him that what he had done might endanger the lives of American forces on the battlefield, Assange conceded that he and his associates might get ‘blood on our hands’. His dismissal of this as a ‘regrettable oversight’ displayed a stark absence of conscience or morality.

His defence of human rights is also highly selective. His statement yesterday absurdly fingered the U.S. and UK as the principal human rights villains in the world — with Russia thrown in as an apparent afterthought over the Pussy Riot trio jailed last week for criticising the Russian government.

But where is his outrage over the murders of Russian journalists and other dissidents? Why, above all, does he not identify as the worst offenders all those Third World dictatorships where human rights really are non-existent?

Moreover, in trying to evade justice by suggesting that the UK’s binding treaty obligations and due process of Swedish justice are in fact tools of political repression, he is showing the same kind of contempt for the rule of law as is displayed by true tyrannies around the world.

The suggestion that he is a champion of justice and human rights is therefore preposterous. He is rather an arch-manipulator of the media, an anti-Western agitator and an impresario of cant.

Meanwhile, for all the Ecuadorians’ anti-imperialist chest-beating, the uncomfortable fact for them remains that they are sheltering a man wanted to face allegations of serious sexual offences.  
Britain must now just be patient and sit this one out.

For his part, Assange’s options are extremely limited. Either he leaves for Sweden, or he stays in the embassy of Ecuador for as long as they are prepared to tolerate him — or he them.

They make a perfect match.

m.phillips@dailymail.co.uk