Channel (4) your energies someplace else ...

By Rajpal Abeynayake

(September 06, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) That Channel 4 video. As somebody said, it’s a topic that should be squarely flung in the garbage. However, people such as Kumar David insist that the issue needs some sort of airing. He shall get his wish.

If somebody says “Kumar David is a fool’’, I don’t see any reason why we should consult an IQ expert to ascertain the veracity of the claim. (Unless of course he insists.)

Likewise, I don’t see why a discredited TV channel airing obviously doctored videos should be given any credibility. Does this mean that each time some TV station in the West airs something about Sri Lanka, that we should scurry to see if it’s authentic, as Kumar David suggests? Would we have anything else to do with our time?

If Kumar David agrees that we should ascertain the veracity of it, each time somebody may make a claim that “Kumar David is a fool’’, I too would accept the line of argument that we should analyse the Channel 4 video footage seriously.

The contention of the Davids of this world who make the argument for ‘analyzing’ the video footage, is that it may very well be authentic. These people haven’t obviously heard of “context”. Channel 4 hilariously breached all standards for honest and halfway credible reporting by admitting that the video cannot be “independently verified’’ (Translation - they don’t know a thing about it except that somebody gave it to them), and by inferring that the video is probably authentic because it was not given by a Tamil Tiger group but by an independent group called “journalists for democracy”.

This is, for instance, like saying that if an Irishman says Gordon Brown is a rotten fella, it’s not immediately credible, but if a Britisher says Gordon Brown is a rotten fella, then Brown really has to be rotten to the core.

This kind of logic ignores the fact that there may be millions of Brits who would want to say that Gordon Brown is rotten —- even if he is not - for their own partisan reasons. Why, Conservatives say it all the time, and now even most of the Liberals say it, almost every hour on the hour.

Logically evaluate

See? Not that I’m saying Gordon Brown is not rotten — judging by his recent past behavior, he very probably is. But we need to teach the Davids of this world how exactly to logically evaluate the brazen idiocy of the Channel 4 presentation, and in that cause, if we need to go back to logic for dummies, so be it.

What’s galling about the David kind of proposition is not that it’s being posited, but the fact that they think we Sri Lankans in general are dumb enough to actually buy it.

Kumar David insists as if it was sacrosanct papal edict that that the clip should be laboratory analyzed, and that any other reaction is viscerally racist as it merely debunks the West etc., I say go right ahead and analyse it —- different laboratories will probably have different opinions. Who is to say clearly with all the technology in the world that one clip of this nature was certainly doctored, and another was certainly not? To ask to do that would be like asking somebody to distinguish one Jaffna mango from another Jaffna mango simply by tasting two; though different experts will vouch for the various varieties, nobody will be accepted as the ultimate authority that can give the last word on the subject.

This is why people have been given brains. It’s because we’ve been given brains that we can tell apples from oranges without having to actually take a bite each time we are presented with two of the different kinds of fruit.

No, but the core intention here is to try and somehow stick the Sri Lankan forces and by extension the government —- by resorting to sheer unrelenting casuistry and by any sort of hook or by crook — in a slew of mud.

Those who insist on “analysis’’ know it’s a no win. If three experts say the video is not authentic, there will probably be an equal number to say it is. Seriously, is anybody supposed to find out by looking at the footage, whatever the technology at their disposal, whether it was shot in Mullaithivu or some part of India or Indonesia or Thailand, for instance? Of course experts might be able to say whether it was shot making use of a camera phone or a hand-held video device - but then, if they say it is a video camera and not a phone, the next thing you know, they will say that some soldiers actually carried video equipment in those frontlines...

Doctored

The sleight of hand, and the raw malice in intent, is seen by the inability to accept first principles. The first principles are that if the video is not professionally presented i.e.: if it is not properly sourced (which it is most definitely not; i.e. “of course it cannot be independently verified”) , if it is from a television organization that has a history of doctored videos (the sort of establishment Channel 4 definitely is, as indicated in last week’s editorial in this newspaper..) and if the general character of the narrative is that it seeks overtly to take an absurdly contrived line (“the video was smuggled out’’ —- oh really, did the customs even ask?), there is no point wasting two seconds over such a piece of worthless unprofessional garbage.

But no, all that the Davids of this world can say when such arguments against the video are mooted, is the blanket “ah, but this is all racist froth”.

There is nothing that can be done if these people have abdicated their respectability and do not want to see elementary reason, for motives best known to them. If all they can come up with is the knee-jerk “this is racist’’, obviously we Sri Lankans and the rest of the world need to move on without them.

In sum, Sri Lanka is no longer prepared to be bamboozled by Diaspora con-artistes and their other remote minions and puppets. We know the Guantanamo Bay abuse videos were authentic because the abusing female GI was positively identified and named because of the clarity of the pictures.

So, the United States had better not project its failures and its regular scenarios of abuse (...latest, the identified Afghan guards and US tormentors), which the US establishment cannot possibly escape from, at us Sri Lankans.

I do not for a moment say that there weren’t some human rights violations particularly during the last phase of the Sri Lankan conflict. The war would have seen some violations, very probably. Bus bombing, child-bayoneting LTTE human rights violators would not have been squashed without some. But it’s the low point even in moral bankruptcy to angle for googlying and doosrafying the Sri Lankan forces by presenting some incredibly dubious “footage’’, which is so dubious it can be dismissed out of hand for all the reasons foregoing. But more importantly, Sri Lanka is ready to move on — and that era when the Davids of this world could stymie and bamboozle this country’s progress, particularly after a debilitating war against a heinous terrorist group, is now over.

It’s finis, kaput, curtains. Nobody in this country is going to take that sort of baloney anymore.

[ The writer, editor of Lakbima News,where this piece appears]

-Sri Lanka Guardian