El-Hillary's politics of delusion

THE announcement from Lakemba's ranting sheik Sheik Taj el-Dene Elhilaly that he plans to run or endorse candidates for NSW state seats at the March 24 election, and from former US first lady Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton that she is running for president in the 2008 race, give new dimension to celebrity candidatures.

In Hilaly's case, it's as if a gross inmate from the Big Brother house has discovered how to attempt a comeback from expulsion. In Clinton's case, it's more a matter of making the best of a bad hand and hoping that no one will actually look at her record as a public figure. In both instances, the constituents in the respective electorates will be required to be lobotomised, except for the fanatical believers. The deluded Hilaly would cut a comic figure with his faithful Sancho Panza, Keysar Trad, were it not for the fact that there is a group of mumbling fools who believe his garbage about doe-eyed virgins waiting hopefully to be delivered from their innocence by successful suicide bombers in an Islamist paradise. Even the ever-helpful apologist Trad, with his litany of excuses for the sheik's mangled English, is not as innocent as he seems nor deserving of the uncritically warm reception he inevitably receives from the media. Indeed, his writings in the Nida'ul Islam magazine a decade ago seem to be the model for many of his master's more hate-filled utterances. Pieces like this, for example: "The criminal dregs of white society colonised this country, and now they only take the select choice of other societies, and the descendants of these criminal dregs tell us that they are better than us. "And because we are not elitists, we tolerate them. "Yet they want us to assimilate, perhaps they will only become satisfied when we each die our hair red, wear blue/green contact lenses, and operate a fish and chips shop, otherwise, we would not be truly assimilating, would we?'' Of course, ordinary Australians didn't get a chance to exercise an option to take Hilaly. He was foisted upon the nation by the former federal MP for Bankstown, Paul Keating, against the wishes of the Immigration Department and despite adverse security reports. But why spoil yet another of Trad's fantasies with the truth? Clinton, 59, now a senator from New York, has occupied a far more public position in the US than Hilaly could ever wish for in Australia, but her life has for the most part been little more than an extension of her ever-loving husband's. By throwing her hat into the ring, she invites inspection of that lengthy record, including the years she and Bill spent in the governor's mansion in Arkansas, or at least the years she spent there. Bill seems to have been occupied elsewhere for considerable amounts of time, comforting the lonely. Even before the book on the Clinton years in the White House is opened, there are land deals to be pored over, the Arkansas literacy program and other state issues to be explored. The Washington years are in a very different league. From the very get-go, the Clintons practised a mix of hillbilly and student politics that awed even those who had experienced the hot-gospelling Carter administration. The first lady's practical experience was limited to working on a disastrous health policy program that never delivered, while she managed to project an aloof ice-queen image that in retrospect was probably just a reaction to her husband's ever-widening circle of close friends. Even so, given the chance to make a difference, she didn't. While she may be the Democrats' frontrunner in the opinion polls, the party is far wider than it is deep, and she will have to overcome an ingrained dislike of her that runs across much of the US. There is also the challenge posed by the new boy on the block, the Illinois Senator Barack Obama, who is being seen as the charisma candidate. Obama, 45, the son of a white American mother and a Kenyan father, was the first African-American to be elected president of the Harvard Law Review and has been feted as potentially America's first black president. Except that for some in the black political establishment, including such publicity seekers as the Reverend Jesse Jackson and the Reverend Al Sharpton, a demagogue caricatured devastatingly in Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities, Obama may not have what it takes to warrant their endorsements. A week ago, Britain's Sunday Times asked Jackson, the first black candidate to run for president, to endorse Obama. He declined. Sharpton, who joined the Democratic presidential primary race in 2004, said he was considering another presidential run of his own. Ageing left-wing calypso singer Harry Belafonte, an influential civil rights activist, warned Americans needed to be ``"areful'' about Obama because: "We don't know what he's truly about.'' Obama's problem, apparently, is that though he is politically a small "l'' liberal, his parentage distances him from African-Americans who claim a more authentic African slave heritage and use it to work the race card on liberals paralysed by white guilt. Perhaps Hilaly and Trad can send him a few of their scripts. On second thoughts, perhaps not - after all, he does want to portray himself as a serious man of politics.