Calling Siva a terrorist doesn't make these guys journalists
Who needs Wimal Weerawansa?? Taraki's murder has brought such masters of unreason into the arena that we hear Weerwansa is feeling forlornly left out these days. JHU denigration of Sivaram has reached a peak with a monk being of the opinion that "Sivaram should have been arrested when he was around''. That's to take Weerawansa's spit-reasoning ("spit on NGO traitors'' he screeched into the microphone a fortnight ago…) and build on it to an extent that Weerawansa himself may be looking for more innovative ways to slander people. Weerwansa doesn't like monks who are made in his spitting image, we hear.

A monk (and incidentally someone known to me also) called Sivaram a terrorist journalist because he edited Tamil net which has a discernible LTTE bias - - but does this by inferential logic make most people on the Sinhala side of the divide army journalists??

The silly season is really upon us and it makes people ask whether there is going to be another round of unknown gunmen assassinations, and at this we need to prick up our ears. The JVP called for a Select Committee to probe NGOs, which has made the civil society lobby groups, arm-in-arm with comrade journalists, want to gleefully take the opportunity to father Sivaram's murder on the JVP.

These are old tactics with new labels - -- and the best reference is the 80s and 90s decades where the Kobbekaduwa killing and the Kumaratunga assassination were all heaped at the door of the incumbent regime, until the truth was out years later. When Kumar Ponnambalam was killed the rumour in Colombo was that the LTTE did him in - -and when years down the road it transpired that an ex PSD man had pulled the trigger, things had moved-on so much that everybody had forgotten whether the late Ponnambalam was black or white - - which is also a very difficult detail to forget in his case.

The President however should be advised that her Presidential Secretariat should open a new unit to handle the damage-control aspect of having the JVP in the coalition. Mano Titawella now makes a day job of this. At a recent press conference he paid a handsome pooja to the "all of the NGOs working in the tsunami,'' saying that he is unable to comment on "political things'' when asked about the JVP mowing down the NGOs regularly and calling for people to gargle their spit into "any NGO man near you.''

Philosophically no society is ever fully high-functioning it is said; no society is ever right -- and in the age of Socrates, it was said that every society eventually led a man to his death, which then cleansed that society by way of catharsis. Jesus was such a martyr.

Riachard De Soysa's death was seen as being similarly cathartic to this country. But one catharsis is quite right for a society, two even. But imagine a society that does catharsis to the point of perpetual diarrhoea?? There can be no catharsis in that - it being only an indication on the contrary that we as a country are in deep faecal matter -- as we have to be, literally, if we are in a perpetual state of discharge…

The JVP it’s now being said is temperamentally in the killer mode, which means that Fatwas have been passed on many anti national elements, journalists and NGO wallahs, and this was said to be coming, after the church burnings of last silly season when Ven Soma died and a complete frenzy was witnessed in the patriotic fringe.

But why should an exclusive lien on stupidity be given to the alleged JVP patriotic axis when there are such a bunch of jokers that we do not know which one to pick as the real simpleton of the pack?

The fringe intellectual reaction to the Sivaram killing for instance, is such an exercise in playing into the hands of the LTTE, that theoretically the killing of Sivaram would have been a masterly stroke for the LTTE propaganda machine.

One fringe reactionary writes for instance, "no one would dispute that Sivaram largely enjoyed the charity of those who his politics sought to vilify and liquidate.'' Why does this guy want to withdraw this "charity'' now, in that event by saying posthumously that Sivaram gave information to the airport attackers??

The writer's tack is that Sivaram was no journalist, that he was only a propagandist who was economical with the truth. Talk about seeing the speck in the other's eye and not the board in your own. This same guy (Malinda Sen we shall call him with apologies to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) then trots out the usual hokey on Sivaram which is that he gave information to the airport attackers and that he lobbied Lloyds to withhold insurance cover after the airport attack etc.,

If such allegations can be made without a shred of proof after a man is six feet under, that's being economical with the truth for a cause, and everyone knows that this writer's cause is not the same as that of the late Sivaram's..

It’s the same thing then -- propaganda masquerading as journalism, but by vilifying Sivaram as a propagandist, inferentially this guy gives himself the certificate of investigative reporter and neutral journalist of the year, qualifying for the Lily-White Award for Real and Unalloyed Comment.

I say if Sivaram was a terrorist journalist -- this guy is an army journalist. Anybody has a right to be an army journalist as much as anybody has a right to be a journalist espousing the Tamil separatist cause/a.k.a terrorist cause, in some eyes. Almost everybody who wrote about Siva said that he was an extremely good one even if he was a propagandist - - and how many of us can say the same about our new-fangled army journalist Malinda Sen?

Somebody said every newspaper offers the news -- and the rest is all advertising. Sivaram did a lot of advertising for his cause, as this other guy does for his own cause. Objectively, I daresay any commentator is an advertiser in that sense including this one - - but Siva's advertising was of a sophisticated calibre, it was keen analytical and professional. This is as opposed to the obtuse and self-incriminating own-goal variety of the army journalists who can barely hide their glee at the fact that Siva's "charity'' has been finally withdrawn now by Sinhala society - - and he has finally, thankfully, been taken out. Now we are even with the LTTE - we don't extend the charity of a right to life to journalists, just like them. I envision one happy army journalist sitting there with a ten gallon smirk on his face.

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