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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."

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