The misconceived David Hicks crusade 
Posted By Mirko Bagaric on December 11th, 2006
Crusading for David Hicks is the moral equivalent to attending to a bee sting instead of a gun shot wound.
A near world record for misguided compassion and warped moral prioritisation. That’s the best way to describe the Bring David Hicks Home rallies that occurred across the country over the weekend.
No right is absolute, even the right to a speedy or fair trial and some rights are more important than others. Moreover, the interests of Australians are no more important than those of non-Australians. They’re the central reasons that you should be commended if you were one of the 20 million Australians who didn’t attend the rallies. David Hicks deserves a little sympathy but he isn’t the focal point upon which we should start making the world a better place.
The main reason that there is so much unnecessary suffering in the world is people only worry about things that directly concern them or they can relate to. That’s why the moral codes that we live by are nothing more than self-interested preferences as opposed to principled values.
The Hicks crusade is a stellar example of that. The only reason that the free Hicks lobby got off the ground is because he is an Aussie and a high profile one at that. The level of injustice and suffering experienced by Hicks is piffle compared to that being endured by millions of other people around world.
Moreover, most of the 30,000 people that die of hunger of readily preventable causes daily had no choice in their plight. This is unlike Hicks who voluntarily decided to leave our opulent shores and engage in violent means of expression.
Hicks undertook military training in Kosovo, where he supported the Muslim forces. Prior to September 11 he also trained at a camp run by the al-Qaeda. He was captured by the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan in November 2001 (after America had declared war on the Taliban) as he was guarding a tank for the murderous Taliban regime. The Northern Alliance then handed him over to the Americans.
He was charged with aiding the enemy and attempted murder but these charges were dropped when the military commissions that were due to try him were declared unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court earlier this year.
Don’t think for a moment that there is any point of major principle associated with the Hicks protests. In the end, it is just unbridled nationalism, which is a polite name for racism and ultimately one of the main causes of war and unrest in the world.
There are over 400 other inmates in Guantanamo Bay. Aren’t they equally entitled to be dealt with expeditiously? Where’s the campaign to release them? A call to dispense benefits and burdens on the basis of a person’s race is fundamentally ethically flawed.
Sure Hicks’ right to a fair trial is being flouted, but still he got a far better deal than ‘suspected’ all round bad guy Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who earlier this year had two bombs half the size of a car dropped close to the top of his head – killing him and 10 other (presumed to be innocent) people in the vicinity, just for good measure.
And where were the protests at this egregious breach of the right to life and fair trial of Zarqawi and his associates? To the contrary, champagne corks were popping from Washington to Canberra. Racism abounds.
Moreover, war is nothing other than horrible. It is made immeasurably more so by the inevitable levels of collateral damage. The war in Iraq has resulted in more than fifty thousand Iraqi civilians being killed. Each one of these victims is deserving of more sympathy than Hicks.
Another form of collateral damage that often happens in wars is that suspected enemy combatants do more than their fair share of hard time. The concept of victors’ justice is unlikely to be ever conquered. Yet, in the big scheme of things, the harm sustained by Hicks is piffle compared to the thousands of people that have lost their lives in the mess that is Iraq.
But can’t we feel lots sorry for both Hicks and other people experiencing preventable suffering? No. Human compassion is finite. It is important that it is not warped by crusades that narrow our moral thinking and distort our compassion trigger.
High profile social causes are unfortunately rare events. When they do occur it is important that they ethically rooted. This includes a sense of perspective and detachment. This is lost in the case of David Hicks. The disproportionate focus on his plight can only further narrow and corrupt our moral thinking.
If Australians really want to exercise their compassion gland, they should rally hard and long, but they need a worthy cause – try world hunger and gratuitous animal suffering. As for Hicks, too much has already been said.
A version of this was published in MX Newspaper (Melbourne) on 11 December 2006.