U.N. CREATIVE LITERATURE COUNCIL

Why Gordon Weiss has gone all the way down under to throw a tantrum about Sri Lanka is a question that has an answer that would make all of us wiser to the workings of professional international saboteurs/hit-men.

Weiss went down under because the Australians, bless them, are through policy and not so much by rhetoric, threatening to finish off his day job as a mercenary deployed to destroy the reputations of countries in progress such as Sri Lanka. The Australian Labour coalition was the first pragmatic force among the elite club of English speaking nations to reject the NGO backed human rights and governance narrative on this country.

This would have sent a chill down Weiss’s spine. In short, he is in a desperate attempt to save his day job by trying to teach his grandmas in the Australian ruling coalition Julia Gillard, and Julie Bishop, to suck eggs. (No offence meant to these two wonderful ladies, but these people are mature and astute statesmen, compared to the Booker-prize seeking fiction writer Weiss.)

The man has written an op-ed piece in The Australian which we reproduce here, only because it gives the context to the salty rejoinder written by Bandula Jayasekera, our Consul General in Sydney, who has succinctly but with devastating effect, taken Weiss’s homily aimed at the Australian Labour administration apart. (Please see opposite page.)

Gordon Weiss purports to quote the UN refugee agency stating that refugees from Sri Lanka, among others such as journalists and activists, could also be ‘gays, women and children.’(!)

Gordon Weiss should seek asylum here in Colombo, and the government shall gladly grant him that -- in Mulleriyawa. There is plenty of space there for the delusional, hysterical and the certifiably loony.

If there is persecution of gays in Sri Lanka, the United Kingdom must be gay hell. In Weiss’s country it has taken a great effort for Cabinet ministers to come out as gay, whereas in Sri Lanka, we’ve had persons of that sexual orientation in the Cabinet openly proclaiming themselves to be gay for as long as we can remember. If the police records are perused there is probably not a single gay hate crime on record in this country, though Britain newspapers frequently report cases of men in London for instance, being bashed up simply because they looked gay.

The point here is that if we are asked to believe the available ‘literature’ on a country as opposed to the real situation on the ground, we would have to believe that that Sri Lanka and India were civilized by Westerners!

It’s time to remember what Mahathma Gandhi said after an audience with King George V when a British journalist asked him what he thought about Western civilization. “I think it would be a good idea,” he deadpanned.

What makes Gordon Weiss contradict something that is the considered opinion of an Australian parliamentary delegation? Is he suggesting that these people were bribed, or that they were dunces, or that they are blind?

These are highly responsible persons, not comparable to moonlighting short story writers, sundry novelists and snake oil salesmen. Julie Bishop is Australia’s foreign policy spokesman, and is there any likelihood that she cannot be trusted to make a proper assessment of a situation in a country she has visited?

Weiss and McRae – these are two peas in a pod. Weiss and Frances Harrison, who we heard dreams only of a white-flag Christmas, are two more peas in a pod. All these people are buffeting the ill-wind blown Sri Lanka’s way all the way from Geneva, because they want to piggy-back on the only real occasion, despite all the hyperbole, that Sri Lanka is in some way the focus of some attention in an international forum.

These people are basically fiction writers making use of a literary festival, the UN Human Rights Council sessions, which relies mainly on documentation – (unauthenticated literature i.e.: fiction), and not on any organic connectivity with the people they speak about on the conference floor. Ask any author – literary festival time is the best to try and sell works of fiction that doesn’t seem to have market traction.

Weiss for instance, could have been nominated for fiction writer of the year, but unfortunately the man is unable to write prose that is any good either, but that’s strictly by the way …