"I wanted to start this evening with a Jewish curse that someone told me recently: “May you be involved in a lawsuit in which you know you are right.†[laughter]
No one knows the meaning of this curse any better than Julian Assange and his colleagues at WikiLeaks. Assange has been accused of many, many things. Everything from being anti-Semitic to being a Mossad agent — how you could be the two at the same time I don’t know.
US presidential candidates in the current presidential race in the US have called for his assassination.
The current US vice-president has called him a “high-tech terroristâ€. Can you imagine inserting into that sentence [Guardian editor] Alan Rusbridger is a “high-tech terroristâ€? [New York Times editor] Bill Keller is a “high-tech terroristâ€?
Our own prime minister [Julia Gillard] has accused him of illegal conduct — prematurely, prejudicially and prior to announcing a full-scale criminal investigation, which of course resulted in the outcome that the Australian Federal Police disagreed with her.
US government propaganda, shamefully echoed by our own prime minister, accused WikiLeaks of publishing in breach of US law. But they are wrong.
What Julian does with WikiLeaks is not only right, it is morally right, it is ethically right and, as I’ll explain this evening, it is legally right."
View full transcript at greenleft.org.au/node/50090
