Lake House is missing a gem of a journalist cum political scientist cum spin doctor. Appoint Dr Dayan Jayetilleke as chairman, a post once held by that irrepressible liar and sycophant Lucien Rajakarunanayake and he will spin eternally cobwebs and all.
by Pearl Thevanayagam
(November 29, London, Sri Lanka Guardian) This guy is a genius only second to GLP, the professori in manufacturing lies and spinning yarns out of them. He is also the court jester masquerading as a patriot and even President Rajapakse would cringe at his obvious bending-over-backwards technique to ingratiate himself into the President’s favours. So far, the President is not yielding but Dayan lives in serendipitous hope of securing the DPL posting promised to him.
Worse than the lies is his pre-occupation with hallowed institutions of learning. The Late Neelan Thiruchelvam is not just a politician; he is the Harvard educated son of M.C. Thiruchelvam. So is Dr Jehan Perera but he does not stuff his credentials down our throat every time he writes.
But then Dubya went to both Harvard and Princeton and look at the mess he left behind. Compare him to Jimmy Carter the son of a peanut farmer who left White House with his name intact and he is now a roving ambassador for peace in the Middle-East and other countries in conflict.
John Burns, the Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times journalist described Prabhakaran as "the Pol Pot of South Asia", says Dayan. And we all know the editorial policy of NYT; support Wall Street, conglomerates and Republicans.
Dayan in his article, The big lie: Framing the Sinhalese as fascists, further states, As bad as Colombo administrations can get, I have yet to read of a single one described by any analyst of international repute as "among the post World War II era’s most ruthless and bloody" or as paralleled only by the European fascist movements of the 1920s and 30s"!
Remember ‘89/90 when the Colombo administration annihilated over 50,000 youth and murdered Lankan’s first journalist Richard de Soysa, remember July pogrom of 1983, and of course the 20,000 civilians killed in the Eelam war. Were these atrocities by the state not reported by journalists and media of international repute including The Economist, The Guardian, Telegraph, International Herald Tribune, networks like CNN, BBC and Al Jazeera. Or does Dayan think these are not trustworthy news organizations.
Further down the article he has this to say, While some, like K. Pathmanabha, Rajani Tiranagama and Kethesh Loganathan have been murdered by the Tigers, others are still around, ranging from Devananda, Siddharthan, Sritharan, Karuna and Pillaiyan to Prof Ratnajeevan Hoole and Dr Mutukrishna Sarvanandan.
How can one compare Dr Sarvanandan to Douglas, Prof. Hoole Karuna and Pillayan. There is only one conclusion I can arrive at with regard to Dayan’s rantings. It is that he wants controversy and the websites which publish his stories want readers’ response which would expose his façade.
Imagined continuities take time to subside. Is this man for real? What is imaginative of the 70,000 lives lost in the ethnic war? What is imaginative of the 37 journalists murdered by the state? And what better show of oligarchy than there is other than that our leader appropriated all the independent commissions including the judiciary under his purview with one stroke of a pen across a constitution.
Lake House is missing a gem of a journalist cum political scientist cum spin doctor. Appoint Dr Dayan Jayetilleke as chairman, a post once held by that irrepressible liar and sycophant Lucien Rajakarunanayake and he will spin eternally cobwebs and all.
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