Skip to main content

PM Rudd's Kristallnacht

Crikey makes more than some valid points about the new PM and his "response" to a proposal to build an Islamic school in Campbelltown - and the opposition it has engendered, mostly bigoted and racist.

"Two NSW MPS joined hundreds of angry residents at protests against the construction of a Jewish school in Camden in Sydney’s southwest. “The Jews have already taken over Sydney,” one protester explained. “We don’t want them coming here and doing the same thing.”

Had the paragraph above appeared in our daily papers, do you suppose Kevin Rudd would have added his voice to those denouncing the school?

Ah, but when it’s an Islamic institution, all bets are off.

Last month, Rudd visited Campbelltown and declared he opposed the application for the Camden Islamic school on "planning grounds".

"We are concerned about the adequacy of local infrastructure to support such a large school," he explained.

More recently, Liberal MP Charlie Lynn explained his opposition to the school as purely and simply motivated by environmental and planning concerns.

Of course, Lynn delivered his remarks before a crowd containing representatives of the Australia First Party, the Australian Protectionist Party and the Anglo-Australian National Community Council, noted environmentalists all. And many demonstrators showed their concern about traffic, infrastructure and heritage values by dressing in what police euphemistically described as "Australia gear" – just as earlier a concerned town planner had daubed the site with pigs’ heads adorned with a flag.

One protester explained the issue to the ABC as follows: “Like, ay, if we go down to Lakemba, Bankstown and shit like that, you walk through there, mate, they despise ya, they don't want to talk to ya. Half of us would get f***en knifed or robbed. I guarantee ya, mate. If they want to come down here and try take over, the same thing is going to happen in f***en them, mate.”

Yep, it's all about infrastructure.

Fred Nile spoke at the rally beside Lynn, quoting a passage from the Koran to show that Muslims and their schools threatened Carols by Candlelight celebrations. “I believe the Bible's the word of God but Muslims have greater belief in the Koran than Christians have in the Bible," he said, thus neatly explaining away the bloodthirsty bits in his own holy texts (“Spare them not,” says the Good Lord in I Samuel 15:2-3, “but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass”).

Nile might be unhinged but at least he’s honest. He knows a pogrom when he sees one – and he’s with the pogromists.

But what about Rudd? Before incarnating as PM07, Kevin Rudd liked to quote Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the anti-Nazi theologian. Here’s the thing about Bonhoeffer – when it came to Kristallnacht, he didn’t mutter about Jewish shops breaching planning regulations."

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Robert Fisk's predictions for the Middle East in 2013

There is no gain-saying that Robert Fisk, fiercely independent and feisty to boot, is the veteran journalist and author covering the Middle East. Who doesn't he know or hasn't he met over the years in reporting from Beirut - where he lives?  In his latest op-ed piece for The Independent he lays out his predictions for the Middle East for 2013. Read the piece in full, here - well worthwhile - but an extract... "Never make predictions in the Middle East. My crystal ball broke long ago. But predicting the region has an honourable pedigree. “An Arab movement, newly-risen, is looming in the distance,” a French traveller to the Gulf and Baghdad wrote in 1883, “and a race hitherto downtrodden will presently claim its due place in the destinies of Islam.” A year earlier, a British diplomat in Jeddah confided that “it is within my knowledge... that the idea of freedom does at present agitate some minds even in Mecca...” So let’s say this for 2013: the “Arab Awakening” (the t

The NPT (Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) goes on hold.....because of one non-Treaty member (Israel)

Isn't there something radically wrong here?    Israel, a non-signatory to the NPT has, evidently, been the cause for those countries that are Treaty members, notably Canada, the US and the UK, after 4 weeks of negotiation, effectively blocking off any meaningful progress in ensuring the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons.    IPS reports ..... "After nearly four weeks of negotiations, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference ended in a predictable outcome: a text overwhelmingly reflecting the views and interests of the nuclear-armed states and some of their nuclear-dependent allies. “The process to develop the draft Review Conference outcome document was anti-democratic and nontransparent,” Ray Acheson, director, Reaching Critical Will, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), told IPS. “This Review Conference has demonstrated beyond any doubt that continuing to rely on the nuclear-armed states or their nuclear-dependent allies for l

#1 Prize for a bizarre story.....and lying!

No comment called for in this piece from CommonDreams: Another young black man: The strange sad case of 21-year-old Chavis Carter. Police in Jonesboro, Arkansas  stopped  him and two friends, found some marijuana, searched put Carter, then put him handcuffed  behind his back  into their patrol car, where they say he  shot himself  in the head with a gun they failed to find. The FBI is investigating. Police Chief Michael Yates, who stands behind his officers' story,  says in an interview  that the death is "definitely bizarre and defies logic at first glance." You think?