Libya’s feral underclass, spurred on by Western arm and primitive ethnocentric agenda eventually got their man. To the glee of every copywriter in the West, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s death was not only sensational in the newsroom but also a testimony to the power of propaganda. When the ‘Arab Spring’ left the Egyptian shore in February and landed in Libya, not even Prophet Isaiah could give a self-fulfilling prophetic certainty that – the scourge of the West – Colonel Gaddafi would be dug out of a manhole and sent to the great beyond by 17-year-old, using a golden gun.
It is wishful thinking to ever believe that we could lay a charge of murder on the juvenile killer of Gaddafi. In fact it was not the baying hounds of Benghazi, Misrati and Sirte that murdered our Bedouin tent dweller. Colonel Gaddafi was killed by the West with our silent consent and collusion.
The life and time of Abu Shafshufa, Gaddafi’s nickname in Arabic, which, in English translation means Old Fuzzhead was a troubled one. He waltzed into the world stage in 1969 after he overthrew King Idris. You could see the joy of a new beginning on that day on the faces of all Libyans. Tripoli was full of rejoicing and excitable crowd as they stamped, urinated and burnt effigies of deposed Idris and the remaining totem of his feudal legacy. As the plaudits of the mob in the 1969 violent intervention gave Colonel Gaddafi the legitimacy he needed, the West would later break out of their hypocritical passivity to be counted as friends of the new messiah of the Libyan nation.
Oily Libya is too beautiful a bride to be left alone without suitable suitors. The once muted encouraging clichés from the sidelines, which is engagingly called soft diplomacy, would later morph into open bilateral friendship.
Our Old Fuzzhead was variously described in glowing terms: visionary, courageous, honourable, incorruptible and benevolent. As long as the oil flowed, none of the Western nation dare called Gaddafi a dictator, monster, evil, murderer and eccentric as I read in the last few months. As the money flowed in, Colonel Gaddafi’s passionate patriotism for Libya flowered. He reconfigured his nation, built the cities, crafted his green book and became an iconic figure in the consciousness of the 70’s Black Power movement.
Trouble started for Gaddafi when arrogance and the delusion of omniscient power turned him into a shambolic figure and a monstrous dynamo for the civilised West. His first misstep outside the bound of international propriety was the positive encouragement he gave to the Irish Republican Arm, (IRA). Then the 1984 killing of WPC Yvonne Fletcher right at the door step of the Libyan embassy in London. The charge sheet against him also included the 1988 bombing of the Pan Am Airline over the mountainous Lockerbie in Scotland. To the irritation of the West, these are Gaddafi’s claim to the original sin.
To every black African, Gaddafi also brought the rod on his own back in his racist maltreatment of blacks in his country. In June 2006 he deported 11,000 Nigerians and blackmailed them all of involvement of robbery, drug fraud and prostitution. DNA evidence also nailed him as one of the financiers of the cowardly Islamic rebels in the North terrorising the Nigerian nation with bombings and mayhem. By 2004, the West got itself into deep moral muddle. It was time to second-guess and rethink their first over-reaction to this rich, tent-dwelling Bedouin. In a rare moment of unrestrained and fuzzy articulation of the ‘Libyan Question’, Prime Minister Tony Blair met Colonel Gaddafi in his tent. Green tea was served in Arabian style. Old Fuzzhead traded his Weapon of Mass Destruction (WMD) for peace and relief from Western pariah. Billions of pounds were paid out as compensation for the Lockerbie tragedy. Here we have to register our infinite revulsion for Western politicians with no moral conscience.
Today, the West that overthrew Gaddafi with unconcealed glad triumphalism will abstain from sending war planes into Syria, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Bahrain. These are countries where far more strangulating repression is taken place. Again, Britain, the leader of the hounds that hounded Gaddafi will not hear the chilling, suffocating cry of millions of Africans who live under cruel tyranny, inhuman repression and every other evil that clamours for change. The death of Gaddafi and the morbid fascination of his half-naked body for the Western audience truly showed that despite all the glittering sophistication of Western power, theirs is truly the heart of darkness.
The charity mogul and promoter of Jesus Wish, Aremu Owolabi in his inimitable fit of rage branded Gaddafi a coward. To Owolabi, a fitting epitaph to a colourful Colonel like Gaddafi was to have emerged from his manhole like a real Rambo and shoot his way to death. For not using even his golden pistol, Gaddafi is today branded a coward like Bin Laden who projected the image of a fearless hard nutter but died without firing a shot at his captors.
On the unholy hill of No 10 Downing Street, David Cameron, the British Prime Minister, basking in the sickening pride of a post-colonial conqueror said that he was pleased with British involvement in the violent regime change in a sovereign nation of Libya. A statement like this from a democrat is more than a grotesque gloating of our New Age political rascals. Now that the war is lost and Libya reversed back to Stone Age, the wisdom of the Iranian outlaw, President Mahmud Ahmadinejad should echo in the thinking of the National Transition Council (NTC) members. He has warned the ‘Magas’ of the NTC not to allow the Western plunderers plunder their oil resources.
The Bible says in Proverbs 24:10-12 that we have to rescue those being led away to death; we have to hold those staggering toward slaughter. Gaddafi in Sirte embodied this precept but the force of our Adamic nature will not allow our obedience to be fulfilled in a pleading Gaddafi who offered to give gold and money in barter for his survival. Will God not repay each person according to what he has done? Were the Libyan mobs right in the murder of an ageing leader who showed true humility at the end?
