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BLOGS: Andrew Bolt rolls out the insanity ...

Things haven't been easy for Andrew Bolt since John Howard left the Lodge. Terrorists haven't cease to exist, but anti-terror raids are no longer occasions for politicians and respectable media to say and write remarks attributing responsibility to entire sections of the Australian community based on their ethnic or ethno-religious heritage.

During his press conference following the recent terror raids in Melbourne, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd refused to even identify a particular ethnic or ethno-religious group. As The Age reported:

He warned against any backlash against any ethnic groups in the wake of the latest arrests.

Mr Rudd said that the terrorist threat came from a small number of individuals "who should in no way be taken as a wider reflection of any group in Australian society".

Instead of demonising minorities and fighting cultural wars, the Rudd government prefers to focus on practical measures such as continued surveillance and increasing security at military installations.

Even The Australian editorialised as follows:

Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Simon Overland acted responsibly yesterday in pointing out that the broader Islamic community should not be seen as terrorists. The majority of Muslims do not support terrorism and have integrated successfully into Australian life where they are valuable members of the community. If anything, such people have an even stronger interest than other Australians in seeing terror stamped out.

With so much sanity now surrounding popular debate about national security, it seems Andrew Bolt may have lost the plot just a tad ...

The alleged terrorists arrested in Melbourne yesterday were all Muslims, from either Somalia or Lebanon. They weren’t Baptists or Greenlanders, Buddhists or Swedes. In fact, if you wanted to confirm a stereotypical profile of a modern terrorist, this pretty much fitted the bill.

So what would be the stereotypical profile of the victims of modern terrorism? Would they be Baptists, Greenlanders, Buddhists or Swedes?

And so, for some reason, Andrew Bolt now founds himself to be in a headspace where to be a terrorist it it's no longer enough for you to be a Muslim. You have to be a Lebanese or a Somali Muslim. I guess that lets Usama bin Ladin off the hook.

Which leads me to ask Andrew Bolt the obvious question ...



Words © 2009 Irfan Yusuf


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BLOG/HATEWATCH: Andrew Bolt allows his imbeciles freedom to spread hate ...

As we've shown on this blog over and over again, Andrew Bolt's idea of sensible discourseincludes even some of the most xenophobic comment. His analysis of events in Xinjiang in Western China attracts the usual array of fruitloops.

The situation in the Xinjiang (or East Turkestan) autonomous region of Western China is extremely complex. There is conflict between Han Chinese and indigenous Turkic Uighurs. Then there are other smaller Turkish tribes (such as Kazakhs) caught in the middle. This conflict crosses ethnic, religious, tribal and class divides, and the complexity of the conflict has not been lost on readers of Andrew Bolt’s blog on the Herald Sun website. Consider these mature and considered reflections:

I was wondering which way you’d jump on this one. Keep in mind that the uighurs probably started the violence - however justified it might be - and they ARE muslim, remember.
Matthew of Canberra (Reply)
Thu 09 Jul 09 (09:45am)

Devlin Carnate replied to Matthew
Thu 09 Jul 09 (05:34pm)
It looks like the ChiComs are battling another form of totalitarianism to come: Jihadism.
Yet another restive Muslim minority with grievances, seizing upon an incident of alleged mistreatment by authorities to stage a riot. Yet hardly no one notices any kind of pattern, or any hint of the Islamic supremacist notion that it is offensive for Muslims to be under the rule of non-Muslims.
So in what sense are the Uighurs the target here? It looks as if they are fairly efficiently targeting the Han Chinese. …

While I normally respect Greg Sheridan’s opinion, I disagree with his analysis on the Uighurs. Greg is not looking at the big picture i.e. everywhere on Earth that Islamic culture meets another culture, there is conflict …

And that’s just this century. Why would Muslims behave any differently in China? … Now they have then gone on a rampage killing dozens of ethnic Chinese. The ethnic Chinese have now responded in kind. I think it is entirely appropriate that the Chinese are cracking down on the Muslims.
I believe what is now happening in China is exactly what will happen in Europe within the next ten years. Muslims will commit atrocities against the indigenous population and eventually the locals will have had enough and retaliate. It will be a low key civil war. Whether it escalates or not will depend on whether the European governments crack down on the Muslims or the locals.
jupes of west coast (Reply)
Thu 09 Jul 09 (07:22pm)

I wonder if News Limited chief John Hartigan had his employee Andrew Bolt in mind when he said recently the blogesphere was saturated with people and opinions ...

... of such limited intellectual value as to be barely discernible from massive ignorance.

UPDATE I: Speaking of Xinjiang, here is an interesting analysis of the use of buzzwords by media outlets, comparing the treatment of Tibetans and Uighurs.

Words © 2009 Irfan Yusuf


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BLOGS: How Bolt and Blair might spin this murdered woman's story ...

Serial tabloid hate-mongers Andrew Bolt and Tim Blair love plucking out stories not widely reported in Australian media about violence against women. Actually, not about violence against women in particular or indeed violence against women in Australia. But rather, about violence against non-white nominally Muslim women, preferably by non-white nominally Muslim men. And not with the intention of showing sympathy toward the women themselves, but rather (especially in Blair's case) to poke fun at a tragic situation.

But one incident of violence against a non-white nominally Muslim woman seems to have passed them by. I wonder why.

IT WAS while Marwa el-Sherbini was in the dock that the accused strode across a Dresden courtroom and plunged a knife into her 18 times. She had been recalling how the man had insulted her for wearing a hijab after she asked him to let her son sit on a swing last year.

Her three-year-old son, Mustafa, was forced to watch as his mother slumped to the courtroom floor.

Why wouldn't Andrew Bolt write about this incident? I mean, there's plenty here for him to write about. You'd think Andrew could at least write ...

This incident shows how European Muslims just aren't integrating and instead are imposing their dress codes on others. The backlash is natural. We could see that here soon also.

Yes, an Egyptian pharmacist living in Germany is stabbed by a white-skinned European man. It somehow doesn't fit Bolt's stereotype. As for Tim Blair, he'd might even argue that the police officer was right.

Even her husband, Elvi Ali Okaz, could do nothing as his pregnant wife was killed by the 28-year-old Russian stock controller who was being sued for insult and abuse. As Mr Okaz ran to save her he, too, was brought down, shot by a police officer who mistook him for the attacker. He is now in intensive care in a Dresden hospital.

Blair would argue that Muslim men are usually the ones bashing up and beheading Muslim women. I can only imagine what commenters on his blog might say.

What does she expect? She's lucky they didn't turn her into compost. That's what I'd do.

Perhaps Blair and his commenters would even sympathise with Alex W's sentiments.

Unemployed Alex W. from Perm in Russia was found guilty last November of insulting and abusing Ms Sherbini, screaming "terrorist" and "Islamist whore" at her, during the Dresden park encounter.

Or maybe Alex W had been spending too much of his time reading News Limited blogs.

UPDATE I: One of Tim Blair's main informants, a certain Sheik Yermami, has this to say about the sorry saga. And it seems Yermami has similar comment moderation methods to Blair, having allowed this chilling remark to remain:

An infidel! July 12, 2009 at 3:56 am
*Where is the outrage? Where are the violent riots, the carbeques, the attacks on Muslims?

It will happen. Like a coiled spring it will unleash at the correct moment. Unlike the hot headed Muslims who carry on for a short while and usually end up killing one another. This will be a massive societal reaction to the murderous monstrocity known as Islam, and will last for a very long time.

I guess it did take their ilk 6 years to murder 6 million Jews. That was a fairly long time.

Words © 2009 Irfan Yusuf


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MEDIA: The Oz finally manages to find an Iraqi to support the Iraq war ...

The op-ed section of The Oz today published a piece by one Omar Fadhil Al-Nidawi, a Baghdad-trained dentist.

And where did The Oz manage to find an Iraqi prepared to write such absurdities? Certainly not in Iraq. Al-Nidawi now lives in the United States. Clearly the war has served his interests quite well.

Others serving his interests well are certain US far-Right loopy groups such as the Foundation for Defence of Democracies, whose website includes among its "favourites" PajamasMedia.

Then there is al-Nidawi's own blog whose links include the Jawa Report, Instapundit, JihadWatch, Little Green Footballs, Michelle Malkin, RightWing News, Tim Blair and a host of other far-Right fruitcakes.

In other words, al-Nidawi's online buddies include the types who would happily support torturing people in Abu Ghraib prison and who are known for their pathological hatred of anything linked to Arabs and/or Islam.

So if you're an Iraqi and you want to get published on the Opinion page of The Oz, you obviously have to follow the party line. Thankfully not all sections of The Oz follow the party line. Because if they did, The Oz wouldn't read more like FoxNews than one of Australia's best newspapers.

Words © 2009 Irfan Yusuf


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BLOG: Daily Telegraph editor's devastating refutation ...

Tim Blair, Opinion Editor of the Daily Telegraph, provided a devastating refutation to the suggestion that his blog allowed racist and xenophobic comments to be moderated and posted onto his blog. He posted this refutation on another far-Right blog. Here is Blair's refutation.

By the way, there's another thing besides manufacturing outrage that gets Irf out of bed in the morning. I've heard it's a Caterpillar 966G Series II loading shovel.

My God, the terrifying logic of that response!

Of course, Blair doesn't need to use this logic at work. No doubt all staff at the Daily Telegraph satisfy his criteria for acceptable physique. Because if they don't, they should keep their distance from him.

The wonderful thing about all this is that questions about the underlying racism and xenophobia Tim allows onto his blog, when made in public, clearly get under his skin. Hence they should be asked again and again and again. And not just to Blair but to all his colleagues. Xenophobia isn't acceptable, even if Blair thinks it is. And the "shut-the-f*ck-up-you-fat-sh*t" response from Blair also becomes a bit tiring after a while.

Words © 2009 Irfan Yusuf


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COMMENT: Truth, lies & the Jerusalem Prize ...

On the May 7 episode of ABC TV's Q&A show, there was an interesting exchange between author Randa Abdel Fattah and columnist Greg Sheridan.

GREG SHERIDAN: I don't believe criticism of Israel is generally labelled as anti-Semitism. I reject absolutely the proposition of the question. However, I do think anti-Semitism has swept back both into the western world and the Arab world. Many scholars have examined anti-Semitism in the Arab world. Notorious tsarist forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which is meant to show Jewish conspiracy to control the world, figures prominently on Egyptian television, in Saudi Arabia and so forth. You Google the Hamas Charter, you'll see that the Jews control the Rotary Clubs and the Lions Clubs in order to enact their vicious conspiracies and so forth. It's perfectly legitimate to criticise Israel, as it is any other nation, when it does something wrong. But the insane, absolutely over the top emotional hostility towards Israel from people who couldn't care less about 300,000 Darfuries, aren't fussed about the status of women in Saudi Arabia, couldn't give a bugger about the 300,000 people in North Korean gulag, but Israel somehow is their enemy - there is something going on there which is psychological and very nasty.

TONY JONES: Randa?

RANDA ABDEL-FATTAH: I totally disagree with that. I know you've said before that being anti-Israel is fundamentally irrational and evidence of psychological and ideological dysfunction...

GREG SHERIDAN: I've never said that. No, I've never said that.

RANDA ABDEL-FATTAH: When you accepted the Jerusalem Prize for being a supporter of Israel...

GREG SHERIDAN: Yeah. Yeah. I never said that Randa. That's just untrue.

RANDA ABDEL-FATTAH: Well, I...

GREG SHERIDAN: That's a lie, Randa. That's a lie.

RANDA ABDEL-FATTAH: I've got it in print. I'll show you after the show.

GREG SHERIDAN: Yeah, well it may be in print, but I never said it, I can tell you that.

Mr Sheridan said that he never said these words. His column on 3 May 2007 must have been a figment of our collective imaginations. Here are some excerpts:

... recently I did get a remarkable piece of mail. It told me that if I would
accept, I would be awarded the Jerusalem Prize.

Sponsored jointly by the Israeli Government and the local Jewish community, it is awarded to people who have supported Israel conspicuously.

Since I believe that Israel is a democracy in good standing I was delighted to accept the award, which has been won by sundry heads of government, foreign ministers, social democrat and conservative European politicians and many others over the years ...

Anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism and anti-Israel sentiment are all different, yet they are all intimately related. They draw from diverse sources, yet they are all, in their virulent forms, fundamentally irrational and evidence of psychological and ideological dysfunction rather than genuine analysis.

And so, as I look outside my window and admire the latest fleet of Qaantas pigs taking off, I cannot help but wonder why Randa could tell such clear and obvious lies on national television.

Words © 2009 Irfan Yusuf


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