Obviously the iraqi jihadists think martinkus id more useful to them alive than dead.
He is a useful idiot to them, although he would fancy himself as a friend!
SBS coverage of the war and its hatred for GWB is truly obsessive.
They now resort to translating vitriolic anti american "documentaries" from french TV, such as the World according to Bush, which attacks bush as a religious bigot under the control of the "zionist lobby".
it is truly discusting journalism.
it is clear that martinkus was held for too little time to have develloped the "swedish syndrome" and was already anti american.
It is well known he has socialist marxist views, ideal credentials for an SBS filmmaker.
Baghdad is becoming nothing more than a watering hole for disgruntled, western hating , left wing journalists, repeating the status quo of ramallah and the former yougoslavia.
no wonder any Iraqi GOOD news is instantly covered up and unreported.
THe down side for the Jihadist murderers is that there will soon be no Journalists "worth kidnapping left.

Posted by: george at October 21, 2004 7:17 AM

I personally do not believe this Terrorist apologist WAS abducted, I believe the whole story is a scam designed to give this Terrorist apologist some free publicity for the murdering Savages that he and his employers are more ideologically aligned with.

Why would they Kill him? SBS & ABC, hey they are the Australian branch of Osama's Terror Inc.public relations department.

By the way to show just how concerned Australians were with this apologist's ordeal, last night Wenesday 20 October on his employers Television network (SBS) on the Dateline program
he was interviewed about his horrific ordeal.
Sydney has a population of 4 million people (there abouts) of those 57,000 were interested enough in his claims to watch the interview.

We were not born yesterday Mr Matinkus.

Read more about Mr Martinkus here, I am sure you will find his previous activities interesting .
RSole.

http://heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,11121636%255E25717,00.html

ANDREW BOLT

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How to keep ahead
Andrew Bolt
20oct04

John Martinkus could have been beheaded but was safely released. In Iraq's propaganda war, some journalists are better alive than dead.

AUSTRALIAN journalist John Martinkus said he was going to be killed by the Iraqi terrorists who grabbed him on Sunday – until he convinced them he was on their side.

"I was not hurt and treated with respect once they established my credentials as an independent journalist who did not support the occupation," the SBS filmmaker told Reuters.

An SBS producer, Mike Carey, confirmed on 3AW yesterday that Martinkus told the terrorists he sympathised with them – "as you would" to save your life. As I sure would, too.

And then, added Carey, his captors got onto the internet to check him out.

Did they? I guess they liked what they saw, then, or Martinkus would be as dead as the two Macedonian brickies who were beheaded in Iraq that very weekend.

In fact, it would have been easy for the terrorists to think Martinkus, brave as he is, was more useful to them as a sympathetic reporter than a dead infidel.

What's more, his release on Monday, 20 hours after being kidnapped in Baghdad, while great news, is just the latest warning that the terrorists trying to kill democracy in Iraq think Western journalists are useful idiots, if not friends.

You might consider that, the next time you read Iraq is going to hell, the terrorists there are really "the resistance", and the American "occupiers" are hated and should pull out.

Martinkus was in Iraq to film another documentary for SBS, which has run an undeclared jihad against the United States and the liberation of Iraq.

Not so undeclared, actually. Just before the war to topple Saddam Hussein, the then SBS deputy chairman, Neville Roach, publicly begged "journalists . . . in every article, every editorial, every report, (to) highlight the murder and mayhem that our nation is about to release".

So frenzied has its demonisation of this war since become that SBS this year twice showed a French "documentary" – The World According to Bush – that claimed US President George W. Bush was a religious crazy, "idiot" and "political whore", who was conned into attacking Iraq by a handful of "calculating" Jews, even while secretly pocketing pay-offs from their Muslim enemies.

The terrorists who snatched Martinkus would have loved it.

Of course, the work of Martinkus himself is far more honest and responsible. But it's also clear his sympathies follow the SBS line and are not, it seems, primarily with the Americans and Iraqis trying to make Iraq democratic.

In fact, Martinkus has appeared recently at rallies and film evenings organised by anti-war groups and the far-Left Socialist Alliance.

He also spoke at this year's Melbourne Writers Festival, arguing Iraq was worse off for having been freed and his book, Travels in American Iraq, makes Iraq's liberation seem an occupation instead – and one heading for civil war.

But worse, in a Bulletin article Martinkus described even Ansar Al Sunna, an al-Qaida-linked terrorist group responsible for suicide bombings and on-video beheadings of both Iraqis and foreigners, as merely "one of Iraq's many resistance groups", breezily claiming its members were just "ordinary Iraqis frustrated and humiliated by the occupation".

Resistance? An al-Qaida ally that blows up scores of Iraqis and beheads even Nepalese cooks and Turkish drivers is a resistance, like those brave men and women who fought the Nazis?

Martinkus's captors would have loved that best of all. No wonder they let him go.

But some of his colleagues in Iraq are even more useful to the terrorists. Take Michael Ware, the Australian journalist now working for Time magazine.

Ware, who is often interviewed by the ABC, has such close links to Iraq's worst terrorists that they use him to pass on their propaganda to the West – snuff videos of civilians and hostages being shot, beheaded and blown up.

Ware knows how he is helping these killers – or "militants", as he calls them. "They're trying to tell the Western public, `This is what your boys are dying for, this is what they are up against'," he told CNN.

"They are letting us know that, `We can kill your boys and we are not going away'."

It is only because he is useful to the terrorists by passing on their tapes and threats that Ware survives, as he admits.

"I've seen into their eyes. I find them terrifying. I mean, these are very committed men. And at any moment they could turn on me. I could suddenly be decided he's more valuable to us on a video being terrorised than he is, you know, discussing our movement and what we're showing him."

Other journalists also seem to owe their lives to being similarly useful.

Nine weeks ago, two French journalists – Christian Chesnot and George Malbrunot – were kidnapped by Iraqi terrorists who are yet to let them go.

France, which tried to save Saddam from the Americans and has done nothing to help Iraq's democrats, has seemed to have so far kept the two men alive through negotiations.

But Yasser Arafat, the terrorist boss of the Palestinian Authority, helped by calling for the release of these journalists, assuring their captors they'd helped the Iraqi and Palestinian causes.

Why is it that so many terrorists think Western journalists in Iraq are on their side and not on America's? Or on free Iraq's?

Mind you, it's not entirely new. Saddam Hussein, too, could count on journalists to push his cause. Many correspondents then in Baghdad seemed too scared to tell the truth about his rule or too silly to realise the Iraqis praising their dictator would die if they didn't.

After the war, CNN admitted having censored reports of Saddam's brutality to protect its Baghdad staff, and the ABC's Mark Willacy conceded he'd also faced a dilemma: "Do you fully report what you're seeing and what you're hearing or do you hold back in case you get deported?"

Most bizarrely, at the height of the war Peter Arnett, then of America's NBC network and Melbourne's 3AW, went on Saddam's TV station to claim America's "first war plan has failed", and praise Iraqis for being "responsive to the Government's requirements of discipline".

Sadly, what was true then seems just as true today. Reporters in Iraq tend to see the worst of America and the best of its enemies.

But don't take my word for it. Ask the interim prime minister of freed Iraq, Iyad Allawi, who last month accused Western journalists of not reporting progress in Iraq, saying: "The winning, it's unfortunate, is not being portrayed in the media."

Or better still, ask the terrorists just how useful our journalists are to them.

bolta@heraldsun.com.au

Posted by: RSole at October 21, 2004 8:06 AM

LETTERS
The Australian 21 October 2004

Arrogance from SBS journalist
21 October 2004
THE comments of reporter John Martinkus ("Google search saved SBS man", 20/10) are outrageous. There is no mistaking the arrogance in his remarks – the disgusting disregard for the deaths of British hostage Ken Bigley and US civilians murdered by terrorists.
There is no excuse for anybody hacking those poor men's heads off. But Martinkus seems to be making excuses for their executioners.
Furthermore, there is no justification in Martinkus stating that these terrorists "do not indiscriminately kill". Is he excusing their actions? Does he not realise these people indiscriminately kill Iraqis daily? Was the killing of the Nepalese civilian workers reflecting some sort of noble cause?
The safety of other captives in Iraq will be jeopardised if Martinkus continues his cavalier comments discriminating between certain foreigners working in Iraq. Everybody in the free world needs to be condemning the actions of terrorists, not making excuses for them and not providing comfort and encouragement to them.
This episode reflects SBS's leftist international agenda. For example, their erroneous and irresponsible documentaries on Yugoslavia during and after the 1999 NATO/Yugoslavia war illustrated their anti-US and Western positions. Who will forget Martinkus's undermining of Australia's mission in Timor?
SBS should sack this fool and have a good hard look at where their loyalties lie.
Steve Pratt
Isaacs, ACT
(Mr Pratt, a former CARE Australia worker who was held hostage in war-torn Yugoslavia for more than five months in 1999,)

IT is necessary only to read the statements of SBS journalist John Martinkus, to understand why the Iraqi terrorists decided that he was not so much an enemy as a sympathiser, as would be expected of someone working for SBS.
He has been quoted as being opposed to the occupation. He says that the terrorists are not savages because they had a reason to kill others, such as the two Americans and one Briton recently, but didn't have a reason to kill Martinkus.
Oh well, that's OK then. As long as they've got a reason, one can hardly describe the slow beheading with a knife, on camera, of fully conscious people who had committed no crime as the work of savages, can one?
Richard Moss
Chisholm, ACT

JOHN Martinkus claims that his terrorist kidnappers were somehow sophisticated because they decided not to saw his head off as they had done with Ken Bigley. Why do you reckon that is John? Does the term "useful idiot" spring to mind?
Andrew Murphy
Kangaroo Point, Qld

Posted by: RSole at October 21, 2004 8:23 AM

Too bad he wasn't beheaded actually. It wouldn't have been any great loss. I know that sounds harsh, but I saw the look on his face last night on the news. It was revolting. Smug, arrogant prick. I hope people think hard about his attitude and words. The message is clear: bend over for the mass murdering terrorists and you'll be okay. You'll have no pride, no self-worth, no honour, but you'll be alive. This is the reality of Islam for the non-Muslim.

Thank God Labor lost the election here!!!!! Martinkus is the poster boy for Labor governance.

Posted by: feralee at October 21, 2004 8:40 AM

So the terrorists did a Google! Well so did I, and what did I find? "Review of "Deliverance" by John Martinkus"
Martinkus attacks the Indonesians and by implications Islam.
This is what Binny had to say:
"The crusader Australian forces were on Indonesian shores ... and they landed on East Timor which is part of the Islamic world," bin Laden said in the video recording, broadcast by the British Broadcasting Corporation."
Now if the kidnappers had any knowledge of Bin Ladens views and the fact that Martinkus opposed him and the Islamists, should have guaranteed that Martinkus would have been turned into mince meat. The only other option is that there are two Martinkus's, the other one the good guy.

Posted by: tipper at October 21, 2004 9:41 AM

More on the Savages favourite scribe.
RSole.

ANDREW BOLT
________________________________________

Siding with savagery
Andrew Bolt
22oct04
http://heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,11140893%255E25717,00.html

JUST when I feared I'd been too hard on SBS journalist and activist John Martinkus, he opens his mouth.

Martinkus, unlike many other hostages, was freed this week by the terrorists said to have snatched him in Baghdad on Sunday.
And on Wednesday I noted that he said he would have been killed if he hadn't persuaded his captors he was on their side and hated the American "occupation".
Once the terrorists checked out his anti-American writings on the internet, they let him go, seeming to believe he'd be more useful to them alive – as useful as too many Western correspondents are.
They didn't have to wait long for a reward. On arriving back in Sydney, Martinkus declared that freed Iraq was "on the road to s---". The terrorists are winning.
But, worse, he seemed to excuse the terrorists who recently, on video, sawed off the heads of three screaming Western civilians.
"They're fighting a war but they're not savages," he protested. "They're not actually just killing people willy-nilly. They talk to you, they think about things. There was a reason to kill (British hostage Kenneth) Bigley, there was a reason to kill the (two) Americans (kidnapped with Bigley). There was not a reason to kill me."
I think we've now heard what that reason not to kill Martinkus was. Is there much he says about Iraq that wouldn't cheer the terrorists who let him live?
The question now is: why does SBS pay a journalist – and with our money – who thinks that hacking off the heads of civilians is not the work of savages, but of "militants" in a "resistance" who "think about things"?
Surely, if we want to hear foul excuses for evil, the terrorists themselves would talk to us free?

Posted by: RSole at October 21, 2004 12:33 PM

This idiot Martinkus, is a typical SBS left wing reporter.

And you know the irony of it all?

He was "Offended" yes he was "personaly offended" that Alexander Downer (our Foreign Minister) said that he was "in a dangerous part of Iraq" and should not have been there.

Yes he was "Offended" by those remarks.
Can you beleive this conceited imbecile? offended by those remarks?

After arguing with many on the left and what they are offende by and what they close their eyes to and even justify, I personaly see that this idiot is a classic example of the diseased immoral a-moral state of mind that many in the left media suffer from.

Posted by: Joe Bananas...in Pyjamas at October 21, 2004 6:56 PM

Andrew Bolt like tin blair is an example of a tiny minority of clear thinking honest journalists her in Australia.
Heavily outnumbered by the ranters of the left given kilometres of column centimetres in the MSM.
They struggle endlessly to reveal the foolishness of the likes of Ramsey, Manne and Philip Adams.

My heart goes out to them for their integrity.
ANd yes Andrew, time for the SBS to be taken to task over its recruitment policies by John Howard.

Posted by: george at October 21, 2004 8:26 PM

The "Freed" SBS Journalists employers track record.
The Cult of Multiculturalism has a lot to answer for.
Yours faithfully,
RSole.

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SBS: TV for liars
Those who hate Jews and love lies would have enjoyed watching SBS this week. The rest of us have every right to feel betrayed.
28jul04

WE pay SBS to be "multicultural". We also expect it not to tell lies. So SBS has doubly betrayed us by showing a two-part "documentary", The World According to Bush, that is spit-flecked in its Jew-hatred and frenzied in its lying.

Here's a film that accuses American President George W. Bush of being a religious crazy, controlled by "calculating" Jews yet also paid off by their Muslim enemies.
He is a "liar", "political whore" and "idiot" whose grandfather was "Hitler's banker", and whose father personally installed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

Bush himself now runs "an organised mafia".

Has the SBS run anything more insane and shameful?

Worse, the credits on last night's final episode of this film by Tunisian-born William Karel even thanked SBS for its "collaboration".

Last week I wrote about Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, and wondered: didn't the Left care about its lies?

Well, no. Some reviewers said that even if Moore was dodgy, he "provides a service", as the Sydney Morning Herald's political editor put it. But The World According to Bush was, another admitted, "more accomplished, professional".

It is? Let's check a few of its "accomplished" lies.

The World According to Bush first sneers that Bush is so Christ-crazy that he prays in public - shocking to intellectuals who worship atheism. His team "kowtows to religion, to extreme religion", spits one of the film's "experts". And it has an "anti-Muslim bent", adds another.

Cut to footage of Ed McAteer, a "Christian Zionist" extremist who claims every grain of sand in Israel belongs to the Jews.

What we're not told, of course, is that McAteer -- made to seem Bush's mentor -- actually condemns him for wanting a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its joint capital. But why spoil a conspiracy story?

Indeed, several "experts" then claim neo-conservatives led by a Jew, US Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, "are pulling all the strings" in America.

Wolfowitz is "abusing America's power" to work for Israel, and is helped by another Jew, defence analyst Richard Perle, "one of the three most dangerous people" in the US. "These people" are "calculating and manipulative".

A former CIA agent, Robert Baer, lists the four who actually run their idiot president: "Richard Perle, Doug Feith, Bernard Lewis the academic, Paul Wolfowitz."

In fact, Lewis is just a historian with no government job, Feith a Pentagon official a few rungs from the top, and Perle a private citizen who hasn't met Bush since he became president. But who cares, when we've got here a list of . . . Jews.

The film doesn't label them all as Jews, but a wink's as good as a yellow star to a bigot. Baer helps by explaining that these men aimed to "crush Saddam Hussein for the benefit of Israel . . . A pretext, that's all they needed".

Pretext? Cut to footage of the September 11 attacks.

Another ex-CIA man, Robert Steele, then reappears to snarl: "General Clark has said publicly on 9/11 . . . the White House called him and said, 'Pin it on Iraq'."

Actually, it was not General Wesley Clark but anti-terrorist chief Richard Clarke who was asked by Bush, not the "White House", to "see if Saddam did this", not "pin it on Iraq", as Richard Clarke reports in his book.

General Clark, who ran for the Democrat nomination for November's US election, has also denied any such request was made of him by the "White House" or Bush, whatever this film may claim: "No one from the White House asked me to link Saddam Hussein to September 11."

But that's the kind of "evidence" this film uses.

Take, for instance, former US ambassador Joe Wilson.

Wilson says on the film he was sent to Niger by the CIA to check reports Saddam had tried to buy uranium there for an illegal nuclear weapons program. "There was nothing to the story," he declares. His visit proved "this information was false".

So he was shocked when Bush later claimed in his State of the Union address: "The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

This, Wilson and other anti-war activists, have long screamed, was a "lie".

But the liar was Wilson. Niger's former prime minister Ibrahim Mayaki had actually told him an Iraqi team indeed visited Niger in 1999 in what Mayaki thought was a mission to buy uranium -- Niger's main export. Niger's former mining minister even told Wilson another lot of Iraqis tried to buy 40 tonnes of uranium a year earlier.

As the US congressional inquiry into September 11 said last week, Wilson's reports "lent more credibility" to the CIA's belief that Saddam was searching Africa for uranium. The Butler inquiry into Britain's intelligence services agrees this belief was "well-founded".

Wilson's unmasking as a liar has received almost zero publicity here. Instead, his far more popular lies get yet another airing on the SBS.

So do Internet conspiracy claims that the Bush family has long armed the world's worst killers. They've "dined with the devil", as this film puts it.

Grandfather Prescott Bush is called "the secret banker for Adolf Hitler", and accused of having companies -- seized during the war for "trading with the enemy" -- which ran a Polish mine using slaves from Nazi concentration camps.

In fact, Prescott Bush held one of 4000 shares in a Dutch-owned bank in the empire of German tycoon Fritz Thyssen. Thyssen was indeed an early backer of the Nazis, but denounced Hitler before the war for persecuting Jews and Catholics and was locked away.

Meanwhile, the Nazis invaded Poland, seized Thyssen's mine there in 1939 and used slaves from Auschwitz to work it after 1940.

Prescott Bush is innocent. SBS has defamed the dead.

The living, too. One "expert" then says, without contradiction, that "George Bush (the father), when he was vice-president . . . actually set up Saddam Hussein, actually backed him, actually put him in power".

More lies. Bush wasn't elected vice-president until 1981, two years after Saddam, long Iraq's true boss, made himself president.

Then we're told Bush Sr "armed and financed Saddam", sending biological materials for weapons to "Saddam's military laboratories", while Bechtel built "the factories that would enable Saddam to produce WMDs" -- biological and chemical weapons.

The truth to this popular lie? As a US Senate inquiry found, America's Centers for Disease Control and the non-profit American Type Culture Collection did send Iraq biological materials in the 1980s, thinking they would be used there as they were in other countries - to develop treatments for animal and human diseases.

These were sent not to "military laboratories", but mostly to universities and health officials, who secretly passed on some to scientists working on Iraq's WMD. You know, on the weapons this same film also claims "never" existed.

United Nations weapons inspectors have said the US officials responsible were simply "naive", and no evidence suggests any worse.

As for Bechtel, it won a bid to build two legitimate petro-chemical plants in Iraq that could have made by-products used in mustard or nerve gas. But Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait cut short Bechtel's work.

Nor did the US "arm" Saddam. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute found more than 80 per cent of the weapons Iraq imported from 1973 to 2002 came from the three nations which tried hardest to save Saddam -- Russia, France and China. Germany was also the biggest supplier to Iraq's chemical weapons program, say UN records.

US "arms sales" to Iraq amounted to just four helicopters two decades ago -- all sold to private buyers, but seized by Iraq's military.

The film doesn't even try to prove its smear that Bush's "political career" was "funded" by bin Laden's rich family -- which includes some 50 half-brothers and sisters, estranged from the terrorist chief. And there is no proof.

It instead distorts evidence to "prove" the usual Big Lies -- that Bush "stole" the election, bin Laden relatives were allowed to fly out of the US after September 11 when everyone else was grounded, and so on.

What a sick brew. Its flavour is best caught when author Norman Mailer is asked if the war at least gave Iraqis a sniff of democracy.

"They don't deserve democracy," he sneers.

So how did our SBS come to spend our money on such wicked bigotry and lies?

bolta@heraldsun.com.au

privacy terms © Herald and Weekly Times

Posted by: RSole at October 22, 2004 5:22 AM

Why is this woman crying ?

She has probably done more for Iraqi muslims than any cabal of muslim Terrorist’s apologist’s and that GANG of “enlightened” ones at the UN have ever done.

She is crying because she does NOT work for Australia’s SBS Ethnic Broadcasting Service ( code for muslim Terrorist’s Public Relations network in Australia)

If she did she would have been released by now because her Terrorist captors would “done a Google “ on her and like Mr Martinkus SBS Australia she would have been found to be on the “RIGHT “ Side of the War against Terror and released.

After her release she would have been able to tell the “WRONG” Side of the war against Terror, how her captors were NOT Savages.

These guys ... (are) not stupid,"

They're fighting a war but they're not savages

They're not actually just killing people willy-nilly.

They talk to you, they think about things

Come on Mr. Martinkus or anybody at SBS can’t you tell your friends at Terror Inc. to release this NON SBS employee, or does she have to be a member of a certain “club” before she can expect the same kid glove treatment from Terror Inc. as did Mr Martinkus? Come on SBS Call your mad dogs off you never know when they might just bight the hand that APOLOGISES for them do you ?

Yours faithfully,

Kevin.

Tape shows female hostage crying

From correspondents in Baghdad

October 23, 2004

http://dailytelegraph.news.com.au/story.jsp?sectionid=1274&storyid=2131700

THE kidnapped director of CARE International in Iraq appeared on a videotape broadcast today, weeping and pleading with British Prime Minister Tony Blair to withdraw troops from Iraq "and not bring them to Baghdad" because "this might be my last hour".

The appeal by Margaret Hassan was aired by the Arabic television station Al-Jazeera three days after she was abducted by gunmen on her way to work in western Baghdad.

"Please help me," she begged. "This might be my last hour. Please help me. The British people, tell Mr Blair to take the troops out of Iraq and not bring them here to Baghdad. That's why people like myself and Mr Bigley have been caught. Please, please, I beg of you."

British hostage Kenneth Bigley was decapitated on a video posted on October 10 on an Islamist website. Hassan, an Irish-British-Iraqi national who has lived here for 30 years, said she did not want to "die like Bigley".

An editor at Al-Jazeera, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the network received the tape today but refused to say how or where. He said the tape included only Hassan's statement.

The tape did not include any claim of responsibility nor did it show any of the kidnappers.

Bigley's murder was claimed by the Tawhid and Jihad group of Jordanian terror mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, blamed for numerous car bombings and beheadings of foreign hostages in Iraq.

The US military believes al-Zarqawi is based in Fallujah, an insurgent stronghold west of the capital.

AP

Posted by: RSole at October 22, 2004 12:30 PM