THE AUSTRALIAN BOATPEOPLE CRISIS: THE UNSPOKEN REASONS FOR IT

This piece in The Drum the other day demonstrates clearly how democracy has been eroded and usurped by a media dedicated to manipulating public opinion with spin, half truths and outright lies.

It seems that most people who answered the question referred to in the article about whether or not they believed 'most of the refugees were genuine’ said they were not, whereas the reality is that the vast majority of them in fact actually are genuine refugees.

One needs to ask then; where are those people getting their information from that led them to making a factually incorrect decision? Clearly, these opinions are not informed and yet there is a tendency for politicians to formulate policy based on this uninformed opinion.

Furthermore, as the example shows, not only are their responses ill-informed, but they are based on their political allegiance.

Real democracy based on a properly enlightened people armed with facts has become obsolete. ‘Democracy’ today seems to revolve around those that have the means to successfully manipulate public opinion – and are able to do so with total disregard to the facts and, increasingly, with total disregard to any sense of morality or even reference to or respect for international law.

We have become a poll-driven ‘democracy’ that is dominated by the political commentariat in the employ of influential right-wing media barons for the benefit of their friends and associates in business and politics which, by its nature, is also predominately right-wing.

In the build up to the present refugee crisis, right-wing commentators have succeeded in developing an anxiety among the community based on xenophobic and Islamophobic fears bordering on paranoia. In the run-up to the last election this led to both sides of politics scrambling to pander to those fears in order to secure the votes of an electorate that had become misinformed about the realities of the boatpeople situation.

Australia’s responsibilities to asylum seeking refugees was overlooked in this scramble by both sides of politics to placate an electorate that had been whipped into a frenzy by the rightwing who had discovered that the ‘preventing deaths from drowning’ meme was a suitable vehicle to drive the anti-boatpeople propaganda.

Today, Jonathan Green in another article at The Drum takes a look at what the alternatives are to what is increasingly being seen as an entirely inappropriate system of dealing with boatpeople. He writes:

The compassion now shown to the miserable victims of circumstance and people smugglers is of course opportunistic and politically inspired. It is as genuine as the tears that flowed when Liberal members howled down the Malaysian people swap promoted by the Gillard government, only to sit back, smug and happily certain when more recent policy left people beaten to death, bloodied or shot while within the not-so-protective custody of a detention camp administered in our name. Camps, it should be said, established specifically to promote hopelessness, psychological trauma, degeneration and despair; the sum of these parts being deterrence.

Green sees the problem but, sadly, is unable to provide an adequate answer to it. Instead, he handballs the problem to Labor though he acknowledges that Labor’s initial answer to the problem of boatpeople was more or less the same as the Coalition’s. Green says that it is Labor that must rethink the problem and provide alternatives.

The main reason that both Green and the Labor opposition are unable to provide an alternative to deal with the problem is because of the way both define what the problem is. For them the problem is how to deter refugee boatpeople from attempting to sail to Australia to seek asylum yet, at the same time, deal with those that do turn up on our shores with compassion and with respect to their human rights.

Ignored is the real problem that has yet to be addressed and that is: why do we need to deter asylum seeking refugees from coming to Australia? For those on both sides of mainstream politics the answer has been to ‘stop the drownings’. For many this has become the whole reason for the entire off-shore processing exercise, but what if there had never been any drownings? What excuse then would there have been to lock people up in places they didn’t want to be for indefinite periods of time in the most appalling conditions? If there had been no drownings, would there then be no need to deter asylum seekers from coming to Australia by boat?

‘Stopping the drownings’ is just an excuse to cover the real reasons for deterring boatpeople from coming to Australia.

The unspoken bottom line lies in Australia’s innate fear and loathing of non-European foreigners coming to Australia. It is this that lies at the heart of the boatpeople problem. Everyone knows it but everyone denies it. Australians have put forward every excuse under the sun as to why boatpeople shouldn’t be allowed to come to Australia. They range from faux compassion over the drownings, to them not being real refugees, to them being queue jumpers or just rich country shoppers. It is with a certain irony that the only people being honest about their reasons for not wanting them in Australia are those monoculturalists on the extreme right who quite gleefully exclaim that they don’t want non-European non-white foreigners in Australia to dilute or change our existing culture – in other words, straight out racists the likes of which one will find commenting at blogs everywhere especially those run by Murdoch journalists like Tim Blair, Andrew Bolt, Piers Akerman, et al.

The answer to the drowning problem is simple: provide seaworthy boats – something the navy is now actually doing – but instead of sending them back to Indonesia, allow them to come to Australia. Alternatively, fly them in. Once they are here they can be quickly processed and dealt with accordingly. Those that are genuine are then released into the community and allowed to work, and those that don’t meet the requirements are then detained in humane conditions until alternative arrangements are made for them.

But before any of this or any other alternative answers to the problem can be considered, the Australian people need to either own up to being racists or do the right thing and meet the obligations we signed up for with regard to refugees because this ‘tough to be kind’ nonsense simply isn’t fooling anyone.

Australia must declare itself: we are either a nation of out and out racists or we are a compassionate fair-go nation willing to give anyone a chance.

We cannot be one while pretending to be the other. Australians need to face its racist demons and drive them out.

There needs to be honesty in the media and the propagandists need to be exposed and shut down. There needs to be penalties for lying in the media. The Australian Press Council needs its powers strengthened to ensure the media tells us the truth. And, finally, we need to look to the long term future of a compassionate Australia – and that starts with education.

AUSTRALIA: THE NEW RIGHT AND THE END OF TRANSPARENT GOVERNMENT

For all the foibles and weaknesses of the previous Labor government, what with its leadership issues and struggles to govern with the help of the Greens and independents, at least the Australian people knew what was going on as the two sides of the media, Murdoch’s right-wing hard copy and online news resources on one side, and the centrist and left-of-centre Fairfax hard copy and online news resources and ABC media on the other side, gave a running commentary which the Labor government under both recent leaders were always willing to respond to.

But it was the overwhelming ability of the right-wing Murdoch media with its ultra right-wing commentators who were able to appeal to the business-suited right on one side of the right-wing court, while Murdoch’s bloggers like Andrew Bolt, Tim Blair, Piers Akerman, et al, on the other side of the right-wing court, appealed to the red-necked hard right working classes that managed to swing the nation against Labor and its disrupting factional influences. In the end, both sides of the Australia mainstream political fence were trying to appeal to the same tiny set of swing voters who would, in the end, determine who the new government would be.

In order to try and win over the red-necked working class voter, Labor succumbed to the demands of the racist right, so vocal through Murdoch’s media, to end the flow of asylum-seeking refugees arriving to Australia by boat by offering almost identical anti-boatpeople policies as the Liberal coalition. It ended up being a battle as to who could offer the toughest deterrence with the result that all that both sides were going to offer any boatperson attempting to come to Australia was a life of potentially perpetual misery in oppressive conditions in places they never wanted to be. It seemed that every time one side came up with what they thought was a solution; the other side would come up with something even tougher on boatpeople. All empathy went out the window in the race to be the meanest and toughest against boatpeople.

In the end, it became obvious what was going on; most of Labor hated what they said they were going to do to boatpeople and it was clear the tough rhetoric and all the talks with the various off-shore governments involved was just pandering to the racist voter. On Election Day the racist voter didn’t trust Labor to keep boatpeople out and instead voted for Abbott’s ‘Stop the boats’ and ‘Tow them back’ solutions. Messrs Bolt, Blair, Akerman, et al, were more that willing to help Abbott out with their fearmongering blogs by blustering about boatpeople on a daily basis and pointing the finger of ‘border security failure’ directly at Labor and their Left wing supporters. They did this by both playing on the fears of the racist monoculturalist right who reject anything that may upset the racial status quo of Australia and, at the same time, tempering the guilt of such outright racism by claiming that stopping the boats will end deaths at sea – as though any of them actually cared.

Now we have a government that is beginning to show its true colours. They’ve found a simple solution of making a problem disappear – pretend it’s not there by saying no more about it. And, of course, the right-wing commentariat are more than happy to oblige. Ever since the election, they have not said a word about boatpeople arrivals despite the fact that, as of this writing, some seven boat loads of asylum seeking refugees are known to have arrived. In ignoring their arrival, the right-wing commentariat expose themselves as hypocrites. Their concerns for boatpeople safety have vanished and, in all likelihood, if boatpeople did vanish at sea, we would not be hearing about it from this government.

Abbot has said that he will leave it to Australia’s military to decide what the Australian people may or may not know about asylum seeking refugees attempting to arrive by boat. And Abbott has also said that he will only be making statements to the Australian people when he deems it necessary – not just about boatpeople, but about anything.

In short, the new Australian government is no longer going to be transparent. It will tell us only what it thinks we need to hear.

One wonders to what extent the government will go in order to maintain its ability to keep the people of Australia un-informed. Will there be censorship in the media? Certainly the right-wing Murdoch dominated media are likely to be compliant but in this day and age of digital communication and social media, it will be hard to keep everyone in the dark. Will the government simply ignore those the attempt to inform or will they clamp down on them for ‘security’ purposes?

News that affects Australians and what is done in Australia’s name, including the future of asylum seeking boat arrivals, must never be allowed to become silenced. The new opposition must sort itself out quickly and challenge – no matter how futile such challenges may seem – everything the government does that hides from Australians the truth of how we are being governed.

All Australians must insist on transparent government.

The alternatives are unimaginable.

HAS THE WEST’S WAR AGAINST ISLAM RADICALISED WESTERN MUSLIMS?

The so-called ‘war on terror’ is now seen for what it really is; a euphemism for a war against Islam. It began as a war fuelled by Western greed and power as European colonialists divided and conquered Islamic lands in order to plunder their riches. The war about religion and beliefs had long run its earlier course during the Crusades. By the nineteenth and twentieth century it was no longer about religion; it was about oil. Today it has come full circle; it’s still about oil, as well as regional control and hegemony, but for those that resent the West’s intrusion into their lands and the plundering of their wealth, religion has become the means rather than the reason for their determination to fight back.

As Europeans and Americans colonised and controlled Islamic lands through war and influence so Islamic peoples, many of them fleeing the war poverty colonialists had brought to them, searched for a better life in the West. But, wherever they went to settle in Western lands, racism was all that greeted them. Even those that had converted to Christianity were not immune from attack. Colour alone was enough to cause abuse. Anti-discrimination laws needed to be enacted in a bid to stop racism but it was never enough. The abuse continued and in the sixties many African-Americans and those of West Indian and African descent in Europe began to turn to Islam as they rejected Western abuse.

Then 9/11 happened. The West’s ‘war on terror’ was soon seen as a war against Islam. Islam in Europe and the US at first rejected the violence the West accused the Muslim extremists of committing but then those Muslims in the West became victimised themselves by the communities they lived in. While wars raged in the Middle East and Central Asia, hatreds fuelled by resentments have now boiled over into the streets of Europe and America. And fuelling the resentments is a mainstream media full of racists dedicated to stirring up hatreds by relentlessly demeaning and marginalising Muslims that live in the West.

Wanton acts of extreme violence by those that profess to be Muslims are held up as being typical of all Muslims. Their violence is used to promote more hatred and so the cycle of violence and hatreds are perpetuated.

The recent violence in the West by radicalised Muslims – the Boston bombings; the riots in Sweden; the horrific hacking to death of a soldier on London’s streets – are all as a result of the West’s media promoting Western exceptionalism and demonising Islam.

Rupert Murdoch’s various mainstream media outlets have all played a major role in the promotion of these hatreds. In the US commentators at Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal have contributed to the hatred; in the UK Murdoch’s Sun and The Times newspaper have made their contribution to inspire hatred. In Australia racists like Tim Blair (read the comments that accompany this lunatics propaganda) and Piers Akerman at Murdoch’s Daily Telegraph in Sydney (who even tried to blame the Victorian bushfires of 2009 on Islamists), and Andrew Bolt at Murdoch’s Herald-Sun in Melbourne have all sought to promote hatred of Islam throughout the West. Their hatreds inspire revenge. These hate merchants at Murdoch’s online papers open their columns to comments from people who are attracted to this kind of Islamophobic racism. For the most part dissenting comments are not tolerated.

As a result, the worldwide anti-Islam movement is growing. The extreme right-wing racist neo-Nazi English Defence League has already organised anti-Islam demonstrations as a reaction to the slaying of a British soldier in London yesterday.

As the hatreds of each side feed off each other, so the violence associated with those hatreds grow. Provocations by the right-wing arm of the mainstream media, mostly belonging to Murdoch, do nothing to relieve the problem; they only fuel the hatreds that radicalise people from both sides.  

AUSTRALIAN RACISTS FALL OVER THEMSELVES TO AVOID BEING LABELLED ’RACISTS’

There was an interesting article in Australia’s ABC online Drumbeat column yesterday about the visit to Australia of the Islamophobic Dutch hatemonger Geert Wilders scheduled to tour Australia selling his message of hate. Both the article and the myriad of comments that followed the article are well worth a read as the comments demonstrate how fear and hatred in Australia is born out of ignorance. The comments also show how many racists attempt to avoid the ‘racist’ label by denying that Islamophobia is being racist ‘because Islam is a religion and not a race’. This stemmed from my original comment which went thus:

The main problem with allowing Wilders to come to this country to spew his hate speech is that some people actually believe what he says. He actively incites hatred. It is the only reason why he has been brought to Australia.

One has only to look at who in Australia supports his tour here; Andrew Bolt, Tim Blair, Fred Nile, et al, indeed all the right-wing Australian Islamophobes that support Wilders brand of hate-speech.

There's a difference between free speech and hate speech - and Wilders, together with his Australian cohorts, is that difference.

‘Tory Boy’, among others, wrote in response to my post:

I also suspect you make the common mistake of linking Islamophobia to racism when Islam has nothing at all to do with race.

In response to Tory Boy’s comment I wrote:

Racism isn't just about blood, biology or skin colour; it's also about religion and culture.

There was an avalanche of responses to my comment as the racists rushed to dispute me in order to avoid being labelled ‘racist’.

‘Reaver’ wrote:

You don't get to change the definition of a word simply because the accepted definition does not suit your purposes, Damian. Racism is about race and only about race. An irrational fear or hatred of someone due to their religion or culture is xenophobic, but it is not racist.

And ‘Mike’ wrote:

Then you yourself are a racist Damian by your own definition, given that you oppose all sort of ideologies yourself. Seriously, you cannot simply redefine a loaded word such as "racism" just to suit your ideological agenda.

And ‘Jarrod’ wrote:

No it is not. Racism is about discriminating against people based on minor genetic differences in different subpopulations of humans. Racism is largely treated as abhorrent in developed countries (in a lot of developing countries it is actively encouraged for political reasons) because there is no way that people can change there race and more importantly because there is no scientific evidence that differences in race affect the quality of a person Religion and culture are often bundled in to the definition of racism because people want to give these attributes the same protection from criticism. This is unfortunate as religion and culture can be changed and when there is evidence showing that they unfairly impinge on the rights of others they should be changed.

All of these remarks are typical of racists who attempt to avoid being labelled ‘racist’. Yet these people are likely to be the first – and quite rightly – to accuse me or anyone else of being a racist if I said something that was offensive or insulting about, say, Ethiopian people who practice Judaism or the many Europeans who have converted, or are descended from converts to Judaism, all of who are Jewish by religion only.

If to discriminate against people who practice the religion of Judaism is racist, then those who discriminate against people who practice the religion of Islam are also racist. It’s as simple as that.

Intolerance of Islam or any other religion is racism no matter how one looks at it.

ANDREW BOLT’S AUDIENCE HAS DROPPED TO RECORD LOWS

There was a time when every rednecked Islamophobic racist in Australia would get on to Bolt’s blog for a read or to drop a comment in support of his xenophobic nonsense. However, since his managers have banned him from moderating comments at his own blog, his audience, according to my spy at the Herald-Sun, has plummeted and are likely to fall much further as more and more readers find it impossible to get a word in edgeways and simply lose interest and either not bother attempting to make comments or migrate to Bolt’s competition at Tim Blair’s Blog for Morons. The bottom line is; Bolt’s influence is on the wane and, hopefully, this will reflect in the long term on public opinion and possibly even on the numbers watching his Bolt Report show on Ten.

This can only be good news for real Australia.

Bolt has been his own worst enemy. He’s moaned and carried on about freedom of speech yet the reason for his managers banning him from moderating his own blog is because he has hypocritically been deleting or not allowing to be published comments that dissent from his own view. Some people – myself included – have stood up to his abuse of his blog in this manner and have complained to the Australian Press Council. This has been the result.

The downside, of course, is that the likes of Tim Blair and Piers Akerman are likely to get an increase in readership as the Bolt’s Bloggies attempt to find another vent for their racist and Islamophobic garbage.

AUSTRALIAN RACIST TIM BLAIR AND THE ‘WE CARE ABOUT THE DEAD BOATPEOPLE’ CON

Racists, Islamophobes, xenophobes and rednecks just hate being called racists, Islamophobes, xenophobes and rednecks, so when a boatpeople tragedy happens they see it as an opportunity to kill two birds with one piece of propaganda and immediately jump on the caring conservative bandwagon in an effort to convince people that they truly care about the welfare and safety of asylum seeking refugees coming to Australia by boat. This is exactly what Murdoch minion and racist warmonger Tim Blair has done.

Blair tries to make the case that racists, Islamophobes, xenophobes and rednecks are really ‘caring conservatives’ and, because they’re so caring, they want to make life really tough for boatpeople – for their own good mind you – by banging them up in detention indefinitely in places they don’t want to be in order to deter people trying to seek asylum in Australia by boat.

Let’s get one thing straight here; the likes of Tim Blair, Andrew Bolt, et al, have absolutely no interest in the wellbeing or safety of boatpeople, They are racists that do not want non-white people in Australia – especially if they are Muslims.

The ‘we care about the dead boatpeople’ nonsense is just a con that attempts to cover their real motives of keeping boatpeople out of Australia.

CONVICTED AUSTRALIAN RACIST ANDREW BOLT WANTS TO STOP BLACK AFRICAN IMMIGRATION TO AUSTRALIA

In his online blog today at Murdoch’s Herald-Sun newspaper, Andrew Bolt, a well known convicted Australian racist, has suggested that Australia stop allowing black African migrants into Australia.

The article is probably the most blatant piece of racism yet from Bolt who usually attempts to avoid being so obvious about his racism.

Bolt uses an article in the Age newspaper as an opportunity to peddle his hatred. The article tells of a group of Australian students who happen to be black who are complaining of police harassment when they visit the inner city in Melbourne. They have said that many of them are getting fed up with this harassment and, if it continues, there could possibly be a backlash such as there was last August in the UK when Londoners rioted over the death of a black Londoner who was shot to death by the police.

Racism, sponsored deliberately by the likes of Andrew Bolt and his fellow Murdoch so-called ‘journalists’ like the Islamophobic Tim Blair, Piers Akerman et al, is marginalising black youth in Melbourne who, in turn, look to each other for socialising and studying whilst readying themselves for work – if they can get it.

It’s time to end racism in Australia. Bolt’s blatant racism should never be allowed to take hold in Australia.

ANDREW BOLT: GUILTY OF RACISM!

In a landmark victory for multiculturalism in Australia, a Melbourne court today found Murdoch propagandist Andrew Bolt guilty of breaching the racial discrimination act.

While many, including those who detest Bolt’s ideology and writings, have stated that the decision is a blow against freedom of speech, the reality is that it’s actually more of a blow to those that abuse the freedom of speech in order to peddle their scaremongering extreme right-wing ideology of hate and racism.

People like Bolt and his other racist cohorts at the various Murdoch publications including Tim Blair, Piers Akerman, et al, are going to have to think twice before hitting the keyboards to spout their hatreds.

MURDOCH’S AUSTRALIAN HATE MERCHANTS

Whereas in Britain Murdoch’s journalists revel in tabloid sensationalism utilising various nefarious methods of gaining material for their non-stories, Murdoch’s Australian journalists tend more to specialise in ultra right-wing racism. This includes cultural and religious racism directed mainly toward Islam, as well as blood and colour racism which is directed particularly toward Australia’s own Aboriginal people and also toward black Africans that have sought refuge in Australia.

At Melbourne’s Herald-Sun newspaper, Andrew Bolt, the ultra right-wing blogger-columnist, almost daily lays bare his racist credentials for all his followers to see. Today, for example, he tells us that the ‘underclass are stirring’. For Bolt the underclass are the whites of Australia who are lashing out against African migrants. In a futile effort to distance himself from the activities and violence of the underclass that he has stirred up by writing articles designed specifically to influence such perpetrators of violence and hatred, Bolt calls his post about the stirred underclass; ‘White trash’.

Meanwhile, at Murdoch’s Sydney newspaper, The Telegraph, another ultra right-wing blogger-columnist, Tim Blair, showed his Islamophobic colours when he made the same knee-jerk call as Bolt when the Norwegian atrocity story broke; he blamed Muslims.

The other blogger-columnist at The Telegraph is the all round racist Piers Akerman. Writing, thankfully, only intermittently these days, Akerman’s latest offering, ‘What a pack of Burqas’, was apparently written in France where he has been touring. The article covers the whole gamut of Akerman’s lunatic rantings (he once actually attempted to blame Muslims for causing the 2009 Black Sunday fires in Victoria) ranging from protecting what’s left of Murdoch’s credibility in the UK to Muslim immigration in Europe and back again.

The propaganda at Murdoch’s – and Australia’s – only national newspaper, The Australian, is only marginally more sophisticated than his regional tabloids. Greg Sheridan, Dennis Shanahan and Janet Albrechtsen, the Ann Coulter of the Australian loony right, are among the most prominent racist ultra right-wingers that Murdoch employs. Naturally, they all also happen to be climate change denialists and supporters of pollutionists. Currently, most of them are busy trying to isolate Murdoch’s Australian propaganda machine from the fallout from the misdeeds of his UK propaganda machine.

The aims of the two arms of his propaganda empire, the UK and Australia, are the same; its just that the UK arm tends more toward using underhand means of pushing their message while the Australian arm uses blatant fear-mongering racism and lies about climate change to get to its objectives of ‘regime change’ in Australia.

Murdoch’s merchants of hate in Australia have played down the events that occurred in Norway two days ago. Few have condemned the atrocity and have only reported the facts. Nor have Murdoch’s propagandists properly condemned the reactionary violence against African immigrants by racist white youths who clearly have been influenced by the likes of Murdoch’s Australian propagandists.

MURDOCH JOURNO ANDREW BOLT FAILS TO CONDEMN FAR-RIGHT KILLINGS AND BOMBING IN NORWAY

Murdoch journalist and extreme right-wing Australian racist, Andrew Bolt, is always quick to condemn Islamic terrorism wherever it may occur. Of course, all terrorism needs to be condemned but for Bolt, such condemnation is also seen as an opportunity to push his hate spiel against Islam for his racist followers to feed on.

Yesterday, as news came in that bombing and shooting atrocities had occurred in Norway, Bolt was quick off the mark to blame Islamist extremists saying “Once the identity of the attackers becomes known, the consequences for Norway’s immigration policies could be profound”.

Well, the identity of the attackers did become known and it seems at least one of them, who has been arrested, is actually just like Bolt and his crew of haters – an Islamophobic far-right racist.

Once Bolt realised that the attack had not been perpetrated by Islamic terrorists, he began to report only the bare facts in a series of updates to his original post. All of the updates were noticeably devoid of any condemnation. To date there have been no further posts on the attacks at Bolt’s blog.

This is part of the Murdoch style of journalism in Australia. Whether or not there is phone hacking going on in Australia is as yet unknown, but certainly there is a distinct pattern of anti-Islamic and anti non-white racism running through most of Murdoch’s publications in Australia particularly in Sydney where another Murdoch racist, Tim Blair, operates, and in Melbourne which is Bolt’s hate base.

MURDOCH JOURNALIST, GREG SHERIDAN, DISPLAYS HIS RACIST CREDENTIALS.

In a lengthy article last Saturday in The Australian titled ‘How I lost faith in multiculturalism’, Greg Sheridan finally showed himself to be the racist that we always knew he was. Of course, having ranted against Islam in the past, usually when discussing the war against terrorism, we already knew that he was a racist. But in those circumstances he usually denied being racist by saying that his rants were directed against extremist Muslim, not moderate Islam. But now he has finally come out against Islam generally thus displaying his true racist credentials. At one point in his article Sheridan relates how he witnessed a white Australian women being verbally abused and then spat on. He explains that the men who abused this woman were of ‘Middle Eastern appearance’ inferring that because they were Middle Eastern they must have been Muslims and so, therefore, were behaving offensively because they were Muslims. As historian Robert Manne pointed out in response to Sheridan’s hate piece, if Sheridan had replaced the words ‘…of Middle Eastern appearance’ with ‘…of Jewish appearance’ then one would have a quote worthy of something that may have been found in Julius Streicher’s Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer. With this disclosure of his racist attributes, Sheridan now joins the ranks of those other leading Murdoch racists; Andrew Bolt of the Herald Sun in Melbourne, and Tim Blair and Piers Akerman of the Daily Telegraph in Sydney. Andrew Bolt, Australia’s premier racist, couldn’t help himself but pass comment over Sheridan’s racist rant and Manne’s response. Bolt called on Manne, who also happens to be Jewish and who is also Bolt’s arch nemesis, to apologise to Sheridan saying Manne ‘demeans’ both Sheridan and the Holocaust. As it happens, while Sheridan deserves to be ‘demeaned’ on the basis of his declaration of being a racist, Manne actually didn’t mention the Holocaust. In the course of his racist rant, Sheridan mentioned that many of the Right wing parties in Europe that were now anti-Islam had in the past been anti-Semitic but have now changed their stance. He says, for example, the French National Front party had “recently ditched the anti-Semitism and now stands primarily against Muslim immigration and Islamic influence”. The reality is that many of those white European Australians that are now opposed to Islam were once also anti-Semitic themselves like their peers in England. One wonders if the likes of Murdoch’s journos in Australia weren’t once amongst them. Like in Orwell’s 1984, for the likes of Bolt, Sheridan, Blair, Akerman, et al, they occasionally need to change their enemy but they always must have an enemy. The right-wing in the post war years still hated Jews even in Australia but, like leopards, they can never change their spots but the can attempt to hide them. Once a racist, always a racist.

AUSTRALIA’S RACISTS ARE TO BLAME FOR THE CHRISTMAS ISLAND BOATPEOPLE TRAGEDY.

The noisy racists of Australia and their cheerleaders in the Australian right-wing Murdoch press need to take the blame for the tragedies that have left hundreds dead in the seas around Australia. The policies they have demanded from successive governments culminated in yesterday’s tragedy that saw some thirty people, including women and children, drowned as they tried to reach Christmas Island, an Australian territory in the Indian Ocean.

These racist cheer leaders are Tim Blair and Piers Akerman of Sydney’s Daily Telegraph newspaper, and Andrew Bolt of Melbourne’s Sun-Herald newspaper. Bolt is still awaiting trial facing charges of racial vilification of Aboriginal people while Akerman famously accused Muslims of starting the February 2009 bushfires in Victoria. Both newspapers are owned by Rupert Murdoch.

Asylum seeking refugees are desperate to come to Australia and Australia’s racists are just as desperate to keep them out by trying to create an impression that public opinion actually supports their demands that boatpeople do not come to Australia. As a result, successive Australian governments, most of which are to some extent or another racist themselves and who have partially conceded to the racists demands in exchange for votes, have created conditions where asylum seeking refugees need to take extreme risks in order to try and touch Australian soil.

Ex-prime minister John Howard, a well known racist from way back, even went to the trouble of excising some of Australia’s island territories in order to deprive asylum seekers of any ability to claim having arrived in Australia. Refugees that reached these islands were transferred to off-shore facilities where they were kept in long drawn-out limbo whilst their claims were processed; a process that often took years for some refugees.

Following the recent tragedy off Christmas Island, Andrew Bolt, Australia’s most notorious racist and Islamophobe, was the first and quickest to jump on the politicisation wagon even before the tragedy had even finished unfolding by declaring in his online hate column that Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard and her Labor government had ‘blood on their hands’ for not being tough on asylum seekers claiming that by not being tough they are being ‘lured to their deaths’. Bolt later went on to accuse Australian Greens leader, Bob Brown, also of having ‘blood on his hands’.

Senator Brown had written an open letter saying, quite rightly, that it was Bolt that had blood on his hands for having supported the wars that created the refugee crisis in the first place.

The bottom line is this: Bolt and his comrades Tim Blair and Piers Akerman, together with their flock of supporters at their respective blogs, are racists that do not want non-European people, particularly Muslim people, in Australia. Bolt’s politicisation of this tragedy in order to advance his racist aims and his appalling and transparent facade of pretending to actually care about what happened to these people should disgust fair-minded Australians.

JOE STACK'S DEATH

One wonders how long it will be before Joe Stack's suicidal action of flying his aircraft into a government building will be labelled 'a terrorist attack'.


UPDATE 1

Well, that didn't take long!!


Here to see what Tim Blair refuses to publish?
Take a look here!

GEORGE MONBIOT LAUNCHES WEBSITE TO ARREST TONY BLAIR FOR CRIMES AGAINST PEACE.

Last Monday, George Monbiot, writer and commentator with the UKs Guardian newspaper, launched a website called http://www.arrestblair.org/ which intends to raise money for a bounty to be paid to any one who attempts a citizen’s arrest of former UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair.

So far, the appeal has raised some £8,830.00 in just a few days with Monbiot himself kicking it off with a donation of £100. Any one attempting a bona fide citizen’s arrest, successful or otherwise, will be entitled to one quarter of the kitty as it stood at the time of the arrest and providing the arrest is reported in a bona fide news reporting service and also providing no one is hurt in the process of the arrest – including Blair. All the details are available at Monbiot’s http://www.arrestblair.org/ site.

Already the right-wing media blogs, especially the Murdoch press, are inadvertently promoting Monbiot’s venture. With a certain degree of irony, one of Murdoch’s most outrageous propagandists, Tim Blair of Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, has already written a column in his extreme right-wing opinion blog which provides a link directly to Monbiot’s site together with commentary of what it’s all about. Of course, while Tim Blair is attempting to ridicule rather than promote Monbiot’s endeavours in the delusional belief that all of those that visit Tim Blair’s blog are actually supporters of his right-wing garbage, he has actually done Monbiot a great favour since the vast majority of visitors to Tim Blair’s site go there merely to be entertained by his coterie of bloggies with their disgraceful racial slurs and blatant over the top extreme right-wing nonsense.

Monbiot has put his money where his mouth is and deserves all the support he can get. While Monbiot has no illusions about how successful any arrest is likely to be, he at least is bringing to the attention of the world the crimes that Tony Blair has committed and ensuring that Tony Blair will not be able to rest easily ever again until he has answered for his crimes.
Well done George Monbiot and all those that support him – including those like the ridiculous Tim Blair in Australia who, while he doesn’t realise it, is also doing his bit to ensure Monbiot’s cause is heard about!


UPDATE

In an interesting but probably predictable development, PayPal, the world-wide money shifting facilitator company founded by neoconservative Peter Thiel, has decided to withdraw its services to George Monbiot’s www.arrestblair.org site. Fortunately, Monbiot has set up alternative facilities for people to donate through.

MURDOCH’S AUSTRALIAN RACIST BLOGGERS GO QUIET ON INDIAN KILLING AND ATTACKS.

Normally, Murdoch’s racists on his newspapers in Sydney and Melbourne, Tim Blair and Piers Akerman at Sydney’s Daily Telegraph and Andrew Bolt at Melbourne’s Herald Sun, wouldn’t be able to resist making some comment about the recent spate of attacks on Indian in Melbourne. But, while it is true that Bolt is on leave, both Blair and Akerman are very active with their blogs in Sydney yet both have been strangely silent on the issue.

Last Saturday four unidentified men set fire to 29-year-old Jaspreet Singh in Melbourne while a little over a week ago 21-year-old Nitin Garg, a student also in Melbourne, was stabbed to death by an unknown assailant or assailants.

Police were very quick to insist that the attacks were not racially motivated despite the fact that none of the culprits have yet been caught. Police offered no evidence to support their assertion. The Victorian government, anxious to keep relations sweet with the Indian government in order to protect a very lucrative education industry offered to overseas students, likewise have insisted that the attacks were not racially motivated. Julia Gillard, Australia’s deputy prime minister, has also denied any racial motivation for the attacks.

Clearly, the attacks have created a massive diplomatic problem which, just as clearly, the Australian government wants to maintain control of. While here in Australia we like to think we have a ‘free’ press, there are times when it is in the government’s interest to ask the media to limit discussion of sensitive issues like this to simply the facts without proffering too much opinion and certainly not to aggravate the problem by allowing it to be discussed on the mainstream newspaper’s blogs – particularly the right-wing racist ones run by Blair, Akerman and Bolt, et al.

These people have done enough damage to Australia with their racist outbursts over the years. Perhaps it’s time they should be silenced for good. The world would be a far better place without these people shoving the hate on the rest of us.


This article is also posted at Murdoch’s Propagandists.

THE ISLAMOPHOBIC RACIST RIGHT OF AUSTRALIA SHOW THEIR TRUE COLOURS.

Australian Liberal MP Kevin Andrews, an ex-immigration minister in John Howard’s government famed for his role in the notorious Dr. Haneef Affair in which Andrews insisted that Haneef, an Asian Muslim, be kicked out of Australia despite being found to have played no part whatsoever in any ‘terrorist plot’ that a relative was involved in, is now, again, demonising by inference Muslims that are in this country. Andrews is now calling for a debate on what he calls ‘Muslim enclaves’ in Australia.

Andrews call for the debate comes at a time when the debate about immigration and boatpeople is raging over the plight of a boatload of Sri Lankan refugees, all Tamil, who were recently rescued by an Australian ship when their own vessel was in imminent danger of sinking while on their way to seek asylum in Australia.

Andrews was speaking with Alan Jones, the ultra right-wing Sydney radio broadcaster and well known fellow Australian Islamophobe and racist agitator. Andrews told Jones that to “have a concentration of one ethnic or one particular group that remains in an enclave for a long period of time is not good”.

Andrews views are, of course, supported by other ‘journalists’ and ‘commentators’ in Murdoch’s Australian media stable. Greg Sheridan, Foreign Editor for ‘The Australian’ newspaper, unashamedly demonises the current crop of asylum seekers as being ‘illegal immigrants’ ignoring altogether the fact that are not immigrants since they are not actually in Australia yet, and that there is absolutely nothing illegal about seeking asylum in Australia.

Naturally, Murdoch’s other propagandists working at some of Murdoch’s metro newspapers are also mounting a determined attack against these asylum seekers and Muslim immigration generally. Three of Murdoch’s most outrageous racist bloggers, Piers Akerman, Tim Blair and Andrew Bolt, have for days since the so-called ‘crisis’ began, all used their newspaper’s online hate sites to foment anti-Islam and anti-Asian racism.

Akerman in Sydney uses the propaganda of fear in his rhetoric endorsing the notion “that possible terrorists could slip into the nation among the asylum seekers the RAN is busily ferrying to our shores”. Akerman then leaves it the usual mob of bloggie followers that comment at all three blogs.

Tim Blair, also in Sydney, who’s not over-keen on actually writing too much himself preferring instead to cut and paste suitably cherry-picked quotes from other peoples work to make his point (that way, if it proves to be wrong, he can always blame someone else) works in a similar way to Akerman letting his coterie of predictable bloggies actually say what he might otherwise be sued for saying.

Andrew Bolt, Murdoch’s Melbourne propagandist, follows the predetermined demonising game plan but attacking Rudd from a slightly different angle saying: “Kevin Rudd’s dilemma is this: he must order the Sri Lankans to be forcibly evicted off the ship and into Indonesian jails, thereby looking the utter bastard and hypocrite. Or he must relent and bring the asylum seekers to Christmas Island, signally to people smugglers everywhere that all they need do now to get here is to do as these boat people did - send out a distress signal when near some Australian ship, after first disabling their own boat.” Bolt’s bloggies respond predictably.

For the sake of the those asylum seekers now in distress as a result of being used as the racists political football, and for the sake of others that wish to seek asylum in Australia, I hope that Rudd does the right thing for our fellow humans and gives them the refuge they seek here in Australia without any further delay and that we as Australians put an end once and for all this nonsense of abusing people who are different from us.

ZIONIST CHUTZPAH NO. 5

Just a quick one today.

Both the ‘Jerusalem Post’ and ‘Ha’aretz’ have published video of some Lebanese folk loading a truck. The reports state that they are Hezbollah loading a truck with weapons but, of course, there is no actual evidence that they are either Hezbollah or that they are loading weapon; we’re just told to believe.

Whether it’s Hezbollah loading weapons or not is neither here nor there; it could just as well be ordinary folk loading a truck with carpets or gas cylinders or whatever. The hypocrisy is this: Israel claims that Hezbollah are in violation of resolution 1701 if – and we only have their word for it – it is, indeed, Hezbollah loading the truck with weapons. The problem, however, is that the only way Israel could have got video of Hezbollah violating 1701 is if they violate 1701 themselves by flying Israeli aircraft (manned or unmanned) without permission into Lebanese airspace.

Considering Israel has unsuccessfully invaded and occupied Lebanon several times over the years in order to get at the waters of the Litani River, and, in the process, have killed thousands of Lebanese and Palestinian people, Hezbollah would be silly not to arm themselves to the teeth to defend against Israeli aggression.

Ordinary Israeli people and Jews throughout the Diaspora must reject Zionism before it destroys both the Israeli and Arab peoples.


Visit Murdoch’s Propagandists for the latest piece of deceit from Sydney’s leading liar and deceiver, Tim Blair.

SO WHAT’S BEHIND THE DECISION TO GIVE OBAMA THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR PEACE?

It’s fairly clear that the announcement that President Obama is to be the recipient of this year’s Nobel Prize for Peace has come as a surprise to everyone – including Obama. Questions regarding whether he deserves it or not will be discussed throughout both the blogosphere and the mainstream media for sometime, but what in my view is far more interesting is; what was the committee thinking when formulating their decision. Why did they choose Obama? Was there some noble ulterior motive behind the decision whereby, in awarding it to him, they imagined that a war against Iran, a war that could lead to a global catastrophe, be thwarted?

Did they think that, if he was awarded the prize, it would be difficult – if not impossible – for him to launch a pre-emptive attack against Iran? Did they think that it would be difficult – if not impossible – for Obama to send more troops to Afghanistan to ‘surge’ the war there and extend it even further into Pakistan?

Will this act of giving him the Nobel Prize for Peace give something for the world to stop and think about? Is not the world now thinking not just about ‘peace’ but ‘Peace’ and the man who has the power to wage war but is now obliged to bring ‘Peace’? Before the announcement, it would have been easy for Obama to have launched a pre-emptive attack against Iran. The world would not have liked it, but would have accepted it, once it had happened, as fait accompli. But now…

I wonder if this is not a very clever move by the committee that makes decisions about who gets the Nobel Prize for Peace.

Whether he deserves it or not remains debatable; but there is no denying the fact that the most powerful man on the planet with the power of life or death over millions at his fingertips has been given the most prestigious peace award on the planet to ensure that war can be averted and millions of lives saved.

Once again, the ball is in Netanyahu’s court.


Visit Murdoch’s Propagandists for the latest piece of deceit from Sydney’s leading liar and deceiver, Tim Blair.

THE U.S. SUFFERS AN INTELLIGENCE BLOW AND LOSES CREDIBILITY.

The claim by the US that its intelligence services have known of Iran’s plans to construct an underground enrichment plant at Qom for some three years is really stretching the bounds of credibility and, when examined in the light of the intense rhetoric about Iran’s so-called ‘nuclear weapons program’ that has emanated from both the US, Israel and the rest of their Western allies during that period, it simply does not relate to the corresponding historical chronology.

If, as the US claims, their intelligence services have known about it for some three years, then why was it not included in the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) released in October 2007, just two years ago?

Furthermore, the rhetoric about Iran’s so-called ‘nuclear weapons program’ coming out of Israel has been even more relentless than that coming from the US but we are expected to believe that some three years ago Israel too also knew of Iran’s plans to construct an underground enrichment plant yet did not mentioned it at all to anyone despite the fact that its discovery and exposure then could have bolstered their ‘argument’ that Iran’s nuclear plants should be immediately destroyed just as they are screaming for just that right now. Why leave it until now as against mentioning it when Bush was still President who would have been far more likely to support a strike against Iran then than Obama is now?

The reality is; Israel, the US and their allies actually knew nothing of the Iranian enrichment plant until the Iranians declared it, quite properly and within the bounds of their legal obligations, to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Clearly the declaration caught the Israelis, the US and their allies on the hop but decided to try and turn it to their advantage by saying they knew about it all along and that it goes to show just how crafty the Iranians are. However, the only people who have been shown up to be crafty are not the Iranians, but the Israelis, the US and West.

The ploy is utterly transparent and the peoples of the West should begin to demand that there will be no more wars for Israel. Iraq and Afghanistan should be a reminder to us all that we have been fooled before; let’s not be fooled again with this warmongering nonsense.


UPDATE

Winning the Nobel Prize for peace, of course, is likely to make it extremely difficult for President Obama to drop any of his new fifteen ton Grand Slam bombs on Iran.

The ball is now back in Israel's court.


Visit Murdoch’s Propagandists for the latest piece of deceit from Sydney’s leading liar and deceiver, Tim Blair.

MURDOCH'S RACIST OBSESSIVES.

Both Tim Blair at Sydney’s ‘Daily Telegraph’, and Andrew Bolt at Melbourne’s ‘Herald Sun’, both Murdoch newspapers, seem to think that the things that define race, particularly Aboriginal race, begins and ends with skin colour, eye colour and facial features.

For Blair and Bolt ancestry has nothing to do with race if you are an Aborigine that doesn’t look Aboriginal. At that point you are a white person and therefore not entitled to any of the benefits that one may be entitled to if one were Aboriginal. Bolt and Blair believe that Aboriginality is only bona fide when measured against the sensory function of sight. In other words, you are only Aboriginal if you meet the perceptions of what they consider an Aboriginal person should look like.

One wonders if there were special entitlements to other races because of their race if the same kind of criteria applied. For example, if there were, say, scholarships being awarded to Jewish students by a Jewish endowment foundation, would the students only be eligible for those scholarships if they looked Jewish? What if they looked like white Europeans as, indeed, many Jews do and the only way of telling if they were Jewish or not is to simply ask them to provide evidence of their Jewish heritage?

If these Aboriginal people that do not look Aboriginal are able to provide evidence of their Aboriginal heritage then who could deny them of their entitlements any more than a Jewish person could be denied of their entitlement just because they didn’t look Jewish?

For Blair and Bolt racism is in the eye of the beholder - both literally and metaphorically.