Why Julian Assange should not be lionised

Here is a little story about Julian Assange that has gone largely unnoticed amid the unending hymns of praise for the WikiLeaks founder. But it’s one Australians must remember.

ANALYSIS

Here is a little story about Julian Assange that has gone largely unnoticed amid the unending hymns of praise for the WikiLeaks founder.

Back in 2012, an Iranian man named Majid Jamali Fashi was hanged in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison.

His crime?

Officially, Iran said that Fashi “confessed” to assassinating one of their nuclear scientists at Israel’s behest.

But it is widely accepted that the real reason Fashi was killed was that his name was extrapolated from unredacted diplomatic cable released by Assange which described him being overheard mouthing off about Iran’s mullahs while competing at a kickbocking tournament in Azerbaijan.

Nor is Fashi the only collateral damage of Assange and WikiLeaks.

In 2016, at least five gay men in Saudi Arabia – hardly a place known for rainbow crosswalks – had their names splashed across the internet by Assange.

No one knows their fate, but there is every chance it included a very unpleasant knock at the door.

And when more than a decade ago Assange was accused of jeopardising the lives of Afghan translators and others who worked with US forces to topple the Taliban by not taking their names out of dumped documents, the then-at-liberty publisher didn’t seem to care.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange arrives at the US Federal Courthouse in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands in Saipan this week.

“Well, they’re informants,” Assange told shocked reporters at a press conference.

“So, if they get killed, they’ve got it coming to them. They deserve it.”

This chilling, charming narcissism is exactly why Assange should not be lionised.

The man is no beacon for the right of journalists to publish, or the right of citizens to know.

Just the opposite: He is a propaganda tool for the enemies of press freedoms, and everyone else’s freedom as well.

Hardly an equal opportunity offender, in 2017 WikiLeaks declined to publish a data dump said to reveal the internal secrets of the Russian government.

Assange even used to run a show on a Kremlin-backed Russian TV station where he had warm sit downs with the likes of the head of Hezbollah.

All this should give further indication, if any were needed, of where Assange and his outfit’s true sympathies lie.

Look, Julian Assange has been a bizarre sort of folk hero to a lot of the left for well over a decade.

It is no coincidence that the Biden administration cut a deal to let him free just as the White House was coming under brutal pressure from the American hard left.

This is the same reason why Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was so quick to glom onto Assange’s release, though the message sent to our intelligence partners that comes from celebrating someone convicted of disseminating classified information remains to be seen.

More recently, he’s become a bit of a cause célèbre among some segments of the right who believe he is exposing the secrets of a national security state that has gone too far.

But this is fundamentally a mistake.

Lisa Lynch, a communications professor at Drew University in the US, summed up Assange in a 2019 interview with Canadian media.

“Assange was always fundamentally a contrarian, and fundamentally deeply anti-American,” she said.

“I find Assange to have been a pawn in a lot of games.”

That’s no place for anyone on the right, or really, anyone who doesn’t want to be collateral damage when Assange inevitably starts spouting off against the West as a free man (take note Albo, Penny Wong, Kevin Rudd, and Stephen Smith).

Not that, when it comes to collateral damage, Assange seems to care much.