Janet gets personal

I’d hate to be working for the ABC. I mean, how embarrassing to be working for someone like Janet Albrechtsen?

Now of course, the above sentence is totally uncalled-for. It is a vicious personal attack and a gross generalisation about the ABC. To suggest that the entire organisation is somehow compromised because of one person sitting on its board of directors is hardly fair.

In short, I am playing the man (or in Janet’s case, the woman), not the issue.

Yet on matters as important as national security, this is exactly what Janet Albrechtsen has done. She has judged virtually the entire legal profession on the basis of her political profiling of a few civil libertarians.

And like her sad attempts at racial profiling, Janet’s political profiling is equally off-the-mark.

Some readers will remember when Janet made the extraordinary claim that Muslim migrant cultures teach teenage boys to gang-rape women with white skin. Apparently, according to Janet, this is some kind of “right of passage”.

It turned out, of course, that Janet was making the whole thing up. She did produce some evidence from European sociologists. It was all about as believable as John Howard arguing Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Or Janet Albrechtsen for that matter.

(Don’t worry. She did.)

Janet’s extire argument may be paraphrased in two simple claims:

1. Lawyers opposing the anti-terror laws are all left-wing lunatics.
2. Muslim terrorists hate us because we are Australian.

Thankfully, Dr Albrechtsen is not working as a policy adviser in the Ministerial Office of the Attorney General. And thankfully, she makes no claims to being an expert on criminal law.

Dr Albrechtsen is a lawyer. Her PhD thesis had something to do with the exceptionally enjoyable topic of ASX Listing Rules. In essence, she is a commercial lawyer and has worked for at least one major commercial law firm.

So how does that qualify her to write on why white women seem to be the only ones getting gang-raped? Or why the war on Iraq can be justified under international law? Or why only left-wing lawyers oppose anti-terror laws?

Who knows? Who cares? The Murdochs clearly don’t. They continue to pay her to write her ideologically charged pieces.

Dr Albrechtsen is the Khalid Yasin of op-ed journalism. She makes all sorts of outlandish claims, playing fast-and-loose with facts. But then, that is what op-ed writers are paid to do. They express an opinion. It may be dumb. It may suck severely. But it’s an opinion.

And in the case of her most recent piece of anti-terror laws, Dr Albrechtsen is wrong.

Both her points are absolutely wrong. Let’s go through them, one-by-one.

In relation to her first claim that only left-leaning lawyers are opposed to the anti-terror laws, I know of at least two non-left (indeed, quite right-wing) lawyers who are opposed to the laws. And who are they?

Myself. And former Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser.

Now as a former member of the NSW-Right of the Liberal Party, I have not exactly been known for my left-wing views. In the past, I have written in support of voluntary student unionism and funding for independent schools. I also am not aware at anytime being a member of any left-wing political organisation (I believe Laurie Ferguson can confirm this). And many local Muslim leaders will tell you that I am not exactly fond of the local Muslim establishment.

As for Malcolm Fraser, the last time I checked he was not on the payroll of any trade union.

Yet both of us find the proposed laws absolutely abhorrent. And we certainly don’t believe that targeting Muslims is in any way helpful to achieving the goals of national security.

But of course, we all know (or at least Janet wants to tell us) that this war against terror is really a war between Islam and Christianity. Why? Because she swallows the words of two terrorists hook line and sinker.

It seems that decent policy arguments are unnecessary for Dr Albrechtsen to support the biggest compromise in civil liberties since Federation. All you need are some nasty quotes from those beady-eyed terrorist types.

And who better to quote from than Imam Samudra and Abu Bakar Bashir. Surely these two persons speak for all 1.2 billion Muslims (or at least for 350,000 Aussie Mossies) more eloquently than anyone.

In Dr Albrechtsen's world, in this holy month of Ramadan, Muslims across the world are renewing their pledge to hate Christians. Indonesian Muslims in particular are declaring their hatred for all things Australian. All those thousands of Indonesian overseas students studying in Aussie campuses are ready and waiting for the order from Bashir.

(Which one? The JI leader? Or the NSW Governor? Who cares. They’re all the bloody same!)

To use her own language, Dr Albrechtsen is influenced too much by “hysterical and absurd mantras". She claims that anti-terror laws are needed so that we can show we are not appeasing terrorists. Yet in reality, Dr Albrechtsen’s prescription is exactly what terrorists want.

Terrorists want Muslim Australians to feel like second class citizens in their own country. Terrorists want Aussie Mossies to be marginalised, for young Aussie Muslims to be profiled and arrested and detained without notice. Dr Albrechtsen wants to implement laws which can only be enforced by profiling Muslims on the basis of their names, their appearance or their declared religion.

Dr Albrechtsen supports these laws precisely because of what they achieve. Her views are in line with those of the terrorists in that she wants Muslims to be marginalised and therefore pushed in the direction of more radical Muslim groups.

© Irfan Yusuf