Terry Glavin: His half-witted admirers consider him a liberal-left truth-teller. But he’s no friend of truth. He’s a friend of tyrants.
He’s idolized by the extreme right and the extreme left. He’s been praised to the skies by Russian strongman Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump. He’s beloved of a constellation of celebrities, from the 1960s’ era personalities Yoko Ono and Bianca Jagger to the counterculture documentarist Michael Moore and 1990s’ Baywatch pin-up Pamela Anderson.
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, a longtime Assange admirer, got things started with an inside-job claim that the U.S. was masterminding everything in order to have Assange punished for “exposing evidence of atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan.” The highbrow outrage about Assange’s arrest on offer from the creaky avant-garde oracle Noam Chomsky quickly reached a pitch every bit as fervid as the lamentations bellowed by the lowbrow far-right conspiracy theorist and Infowars crackpot Alex Jones.
President Lenín Moreno was also decidedly unimpressed with Wikileaks’ threats to expose embarrassing information about him should he object too forcefully to the boorish behaviour of his weird and unhygienic Knightsbridge tenant. Those threats, by the way, were acted on, with the release of hacked photographs, from Moreno’s own cell phone, one of which showed Morino eating lobsters in bed.
None of his ardent admirers could stand in the way of the Metropolitan Police visiting this indignity upon Assange. Not even Assange’s longtime friend Israel Shamir, the Russian Jewish convert to Orthodox Christianity who has made a living for himself as a holocaust denier who calls Jews “a virus in human form.
In plain-as-day evidence that Assange is nothing like the liberal-left truth-teller his legions of half-witted admirers need to believe in for some reason, Assange never made any secret of his support for the right-wing United Kingdom Independence Party’s dream of a Brexit breakup with Europe. From the first days of Donald Trump’s race for the Republican presidential nomination, Assange was openly and desperately wishing for Hillary Clinton’s defeat.
Assange will be sentenced in the coming weeks for jumping bail, and for that he faces a possible prison term of 12 months in a British prison. And then there’s the matter of the extradition request Sweden had formally filed all those years ago. The statute of limitations has run out on the sexual-assault charges that one of Assange’s Swedish accusers alleged. But the rape allegations involving a second woman are still available for prosecution until next year.
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