Julian Assange's interview of Hezbollah's Hassan Nasrallah

I've seen a lot of interviews, and a lot of interviewers.  Julian Assange's interview of Hezbollah's Hassan Nasrallah does NOT measure up.  Just to be honest,  I am not a fan of Assange's politics, and am personally quite critical of the man. I actually watched his program to find out just who was brave enough to advertise with him...no one, it seems - and I'm not surprised.  Advertisers generally aren't dumb.

Quite independent of my dislike of Assange's politics, I found that the man is a miserable journalist and interviewer as well.  Below are a few of the problems I found with his interview.

1 - The questions are obviously canned.  Assange is checking his printout of questions each time before he asks anything, and there are NO followup or clarification questions after the answers are given in spite of the fact that Nasrallah frequently didn't answer the question as asked.  It is possible that a condition of the interview was that the questions be pre-vetted, but that makes this a PR program, not an interview.  No journalist looking for the truth would accept such conditions.

2 - The claim by Nasrallah that the reports about things he had said which Assange had found in STOLEN DIPLOMATIC CABLES were just western propoganda to attack Hezbollah is ridiculous on the face of it.  If it were propaganda it would have been in the press without Wikileaks having to steal it.  Assange should have at least questioned that claim further...as in, "If this was a propaganda attack on Hezbollah, why did I find it suppressed and hidden in a diplomatic cable?"

3 - Hassan Nasrallah is quite obviously in favor of Assad of Syria doing whatever it takes to deal with his people, however many he kills.  The Arab Spring movement in Syria is not politically different from the ones in Libya or Egypt that Hezbollah supported, so that they verbally defend and support Assad in this case has to be politically motivated by some relationship with Assad.  Why didn't Assange ask more about this?!

4 - Assange is sitting there listening to the answers he is getting, and NODDING HIS HEAD THE ENTIRE TIME!!  I always thought *I* was pretty gullible about expecting people to tell the truth, but you've got to be kidding me!  The video shows him to be just sucking up and believing every word Nasrallah says, like a well-behaved child in a classroom.  The last time I saw that level of gullibility was on a late night infomercial!

5 - Assange is obviously an atheist, and at the 24:15 minute point in this interview he attempts a "very provocative" non-political question (which to Assange means "religious"), and showed himself to be naive beyond belief.  At 24:52 you can see Nasrallah working very hard not to laugh out loud at just how ridiculous the question was, but he composed himself and found a way to say something he knew would have Assange nodding his head again.  Assange apparently has some sort of naive belief that there is an inherent conflict between being a 'freedom fighter" and believing in a mono-theistic God.  That's just dumb.

There are other reasons this program was weak, but these should suffice for now.   Given the amount of time he's been in the news, I expected Assange to be a lot smarter than this, but after watching it I'm a lot less worried about his anarchistic politics affecting the world.  He isn't smart enough for that to happen.