In these parlous times of terrible events, environmental disasters and sobering economic woe, people need some comic relief and who better to provide it than the far right ratbag rabble who periodically surface from the sludge of hate under a variety of names and banners – same usual suspects, different cause each week.
On Monday night 7th September 2015 the ABC’s Four Corners will depart from its weekly deadly serious examination of the darker side of Australia and the world featuring crooks, sociopaths, standover merchants and shonks to examine the darker side of Australia and the world featuring crooks, scam artists, sociopaths, standover merchants and shonks hilarious hate-group underbelly of Straya.
So brew up the lattes, uncork the chardonnays and nuke the popcorn for Wednesday night’s The Weekly with Charlie Pickering tonight’s rib-tickling episode of Four Corners
With seasoned comic performers like #bernardithebigot, the Magic Christians, Mr Potato Head and various boggarts and gremlins slithering in and out , how could it go wrong?
My parents arrived in this country on a boat, and yet I call myself an Australian.
As a disabled woman, I am in a minority group, yet I call myself an Australian.
But according to racist pages promoting a new rally – the ‘Reclaim Australia Rally’ – ‘patriotic Australians’ need to stand together and stop the minorities from changing our country. They’re marching in April to tell the rest of Australia that they don’t want halal certification, burqas and the teaching of Islam in government schools. In short, they don’t want Muslims in our country, and they don’t want our country to change to suit them.
3,306 likes in Perth, and another 500 or so in Bunbury. One in almost every state. It saddens me, because this is the message to anyone who is different – ‘we will not tolerate diversity’.
My parents arrived on the ‘right kind of boat’. They were ten pound Poms, and my father was skilled and the right shade of white. He was Dutch, and his peers were self described ‘wogs’ and ‘dings’ – people from Italy or Greece or Malta, paid to come to this country under the Skilled Migrant program. Nowadays, being of Italian or Greek descent is unremarkable – but all the kids with salami sandwiches, back in the day, were teased relentlessly. I’m a first generation migrant, but nobody ever told me to go away because my very British mother bought Polo mints and held tea parties. No Aboriginal person ever told me that I should leave their country because I was white. Nobody ever told me what I ate or wore or did was wrong, or bad.
We will not tolerate diversity.
‘We don’t want to change the country to accommodate their needs’, they say, and I feel uneasy. Because there is no reason that ‘they’ need halal – but there is also no reason that ‘they’ need steps, no reason they need to adjust their teaching in schools to accommodate differences. There is no reason ‘they’ should make things accessible and available to others, because we are a minority. Yet we disabled people lobby for change – change for a minority group. We will only ever be 20 percent of the population. Why should ‘they’ tolerate us and not them? Why should ‘they’ change? Why should ‘they’ tolerate difference, let alone embrace and welcome it?
‘They’ – the intolerant – are not just the rednecks from down the street. Facebook has a neat way of throwing up an algorithm that allows you to see the comments from your friends first. From the ‘Reclaim Australia – Perth’ page, a comment by one of our former Scout parents, a staunch Christian woman –
‘Putting one or two or fifty in prison doesn’t prevent their being replaced. They have to be removed from the country, every Islamic man, woman and child. As long as one Muslim remains there will be someone with intent on seeking the Islamic state agenda.’
Unfriended.
And these views, from others –
‘Islam is islam, the quran is the quran. No such thing as moderate Muslim.’
‘That is true, and only because the tenets of islam teach them to do these very things! The fact that the majority of muslims choose not to openly engage in jihad against non-believers, simply means they are not good muslims. Those who do engage in jihad are the ones who follow the qur’an and hadiths very closely.’
And I think about my yesterday afternoon, which was spent with my friend and her mother. She always feeds me too much and I regard her as my own mother. We talked about each having six children (she with four girls, me with four boys) and breastfeeding and how wonderfully hot the weather was. I told her that I couldn’t wear a hijab and long sleeves, I would roast, and she unbuttoned her dress to show me the light cotton wear underneath. I would still roast, I told her, and she smiled. Family talk, more offers of baklava, and I went home, and slept, and woke to these posts.
I spent my yesterday morning talking to people, including an Aboriginal artist who chatted easily with me about country, and his mob and mine, and painting styles and cultural traditions in Aboriginal art. I’m as white as the driven snow, but I’m still accepted as Australian by our Aboriginal brothers and sisters, the original owners of this land. We invaded this country, and brought our culture with us – my culture included, there is a fish and chip shop on every corner, teapots in every store. I went to my friend’s house, then home to sleep, and woke to these posts.
I am almost in tears.
They horrify me, those posts, the idea of a rally against difference. This is not the Australia I was born into. This is not the Australia I signed up for. I believe in an Australia where you can embrace diversity and still be a patriot. An Australia where it does not matter what other people wear and what they eat.
A few months ago, there was a campaign to boycott Vegemite on the premise that it has halal certification. I forwarded the comments to Vegemite, including the accusations that they were ‘funding terrorism’. They emailed me back. So the last word on this, for me, goes to Vegemite, who state that they are against racism and bigotry and disrespect. For me, THAT is Australian.
Vegemite’s response re halal certification, 2014:
The AFIC symbol has been present on some of our products, including Vegemite, for some time now and we are proud to make products that can be enjoyed by people of different backgrounds, beliefs and ethnicity. We are also proud of locally manufacturing our products, many of which are exported to markets throughout South East Asia. Our export sales are an essential part of business, and crucial to preserving investment and employment at our manufacturing sites in Australia.
One of the main reasons for the AFIC Halal symbol on our packaging is to assist people of Muslim faith, both here in Australia and across our export markets, to identify our products as including ingredients that meet their consumption requirements. Further, we wish to advise the Vegemite formulation has not altered nor does the product contain any ingredients from animals. Halal certification warrants that, in accordance with Islamic law, the yeast has been processed to ensure the product is alcohol free.
The inclusion of the AFIC Halal symbol is not intended to offend any member of the public of any cultural or religious belief. We do not believe that it promotes one religion over another rather it simply provides people of Muslim faith with information about the food choices they make. Following other consumer inquiries, we have written formally to the AFIC in order to seek clarification on its business activities. In response, the AFIC provided us with verbal and written assurances that it is not engaged in unlawful activities. As such, we have confidence in AFIC as a reputable organisation. We pay a blanket administration fee that covers the certification of a number of our products. This cost is not a tax and is not attributed to a particular product or brand, therefore consumers don’t pay more for a Halal certified product versus a non-certified product.
As a business, we are founded upon values of integrity and respect and take a strong stance against any individual or campaign promoting racism, bigotry and disrespect.
We hope this addresses your questions and any concerns you might have. We produce products that bring joy and pleasure to millions of people across the world every day, and we look forward to continuing this tradition.
A small but noisy group of anti-Muslim campaigners are targeting Aussie businesses in their obsessively stupid warfare against Australian Muslims.
Despite labelling themselves as hateriots “patriots”, their latest strategic move as they rattle and bob across the media landscape is the undermining and trashing of Australian small business – specifically those businesses which want to cater both to Australian customers and to potential markets in our region.
No matter that Australia, without the trading opportunities available in the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific region, will travel on the road to becoming an isolated, dull, backward, intolerant, inward-looking enclave of the suspicious, the xenophobic and the down-right crackbrained.
Much like this run-down white supremacist enclave in South Africa.
To those pig ignorant droogs who shut down a South Australian business because it had halal certified yoghurt selling to Emirates (Airlines)—what stupid, stupid people! If they really think this money goes to terrorists, they should stop buying petrol
– Malcolm Farr Political Editor News.com.au
Now here’s ABC 7:30’s report from November last year.
Transcript LEIGH SALES, PRESENTER: Across Australia, a vicious campaign against halal-certified companies is gaining momentum. A halal product is one that doesn’t contain any traces of pork, blood or alcohol, meaning it’s OK for Muslims to eat. Many products are halal-certified, even Vegemite. But anti-halal activists say they’re fighting back against creeping sharia law, claiming the label is a tax on non-Muslims and the money for certification goes towards terrorism. Here’s Alex Mann.
ALEX MANN, REPORTER: Six months ago, Fleurieu Milk & Yoghurt Company gained halal certification to supply a $50,000 yoghurt contract with Emirates Airlines.
NICK HUTCHINSON, FLEURIEU MILK & YOGHURT COMPANY: It was a requirement of Emirates. We had to pay a $1,000 fee. It opened up a business market to continue to become viable. It was a necessary step.
ALEX MANN: What do you understand halal to mean?
NICK HUTCHINSON: To be honest, up until a couple of weeks ago, my understanding wasn’t great on halal certification. We knew it was a fee we had to pay around $1,000 a year that allowed Muslims to consume our products on Emirates Airlines. Now, since then I’ve done a bit of research and so forth and we now know that halal certification doesn’t need to be – you don’t need halal certification for milk and yoghurt if it doesn’t contain gelatin, which ours doesn’t.
ALEX MANN: Keeping food and drink halal means no pork, blood or alcohol can be allowed anywhere in the production process.
The trouble began last month when Nick Hutchinson received an email asking to confirm whether his company had halal certification. His response was posted and shared across a network of anti-halal Facebook sites, unleashing a barrage of online hate.
FACEBOOK POST (male voiceover): What a crock of s**t. Cease halal certification now. You want halal? Go live in a Muslim country. Simple.
FACEBOOK POST II (male voiceover): It is sharia law that says these rag heads must eat halal food. We don’t have sharia law here, therefore no halal products are required in this country!!!! It’s all a scam to raise funds for terrorism!!!!!
FACEBOOK POST III (female voiceover): Screw halal and all who make it.
ALEX MANN: What exactly were people saying to you?
NICK HUTCHINSON: The money goes towards terrorism, the – it’s impacting on Australia’s well-being, our standard of life is being taken over because you’re paying these fees, allowing people of Islamic heritage to rule us. It come out of nowhere and happened quite quickly, because with one copy and paste onto these sites, you’ve gone from nobody knowing you’re a halal certified to 100,000 people that are extremely against it. And when they work together, they can impact quite heavily on small businesses such as ours.
ALEX MANN: Within two days, Fleurieu Milk & Yoghurt Company decided to ditch its certification, forfeiting its contract with Emirates.
NICK HUTCHINSON: Yeah, it sucks. I hate saying it, but there’s no other way to describe it. We gave in and decided that the negative publicity and the bullying outweighed what we were gaining from the halal certification.
ALEX MANN: The attack against Fleurieu was part of an organised online campaign against companies with halal certification.
KIRALEE SMITH, FOUNDER AND DIRECTOR, HALAL CHOICES: Hi, I’m Kiralee Smith, founder and director of Halal Choices. I love the freedom we have this nation. … Don’t be shouted down. You’re not a racist or a bigot because you have concerns about fundamental Islam or halal certification. Talk, share and discuss this important issue with your family and friends.
ALEX MANN: Across Australia, a loose collection of anti-halal, anti-Islam and nationalistic groups has been targeting halal-certified food companies. The groups identify businesses and direct users to swarm their social media sites.
MIKE HOLT, RESTORE AUSTRALIA: First of all, this is Australia. We are not Islamic. We’ve also been – we’ve had this imposed on us without our permission. Did you ever vote in a referendum to allow halal certification of just about everything in the supermarket? I didn’t. If they don’t change their ways and start acting as patriotic Australians, they deserve what they get. It’s market forces.
ALEX MANN: Mike Holt is an anti-mosque campaigner and a former One Nation candidate. He works with the other boycott groups to target companies like Fleurieu Milk.
MIKE HOLT: We are targeting various groups. We’ve been targeting Byron Bay Cookies. One thing you have to understand is Restore Australia works legally and we do not agree with abuse or threatening people, but we have no control over our supporters. There are people out there who get very, very passionate about this and they have made threats, which is unfortunate, but these companies have brought it on themselves.
ALEX MANN: The biggest anti-halal group, with more than 35,000 followers, is Boycott Halal in Australia. It claims certification costs push up prices and that the money for certification goes towards funding terrorism.
BOYCOTT HALAL IN AUSTRALIA FACEBOOK POST (male voiceover): One halal product = the next bullet that kills or maims. If you buy halal, you are indirectly funding terrorism.
NICK HUTCHINSON: One lady phoned me and asked if I was happy that we contributed towards the 9/11 attacks where she lost a few family members. Outrageous claims, something that – yeah, never expected, but yeah, it’s quite ridiculous.
TRISH DELANEY, BOYCOTT HALAL IN AUSTRALIA: Companies ask for feedback, but it appears they don’t like negative feedback, alright? I mean, I think it’s fair to say that people from all walks of life should be able to ask, “Are you halal certified?” It’s not a hard question.
ALEX MANN: Trish Delaney is one of Boycott Halal in Australia’s resident keyboard warriors. She spends up to four hours a day online co-ordinating the campaign.
TRISH DELANEY: Myself, lots of the 34,000 people have written to the Government and asked the Government to please, do something about this and label it so that people can know that they have a choice. We don’t mind or have anything against people eating halal food. We don’t want to pay for it. We don’t need it and we don’t want to pay for it.
ALEX MANN: So why do you say that we’re paying for it?
TRISH DELANEY: Because of the fees attached to the certification. Some companies say, “No, we absorb the costs,” and we say, “Well you’re not much of a business because businesses don’t absorb costs, they pass it on to consumers.”
ALEX MANN: On the NSW north coast, Byron Bay Cookie Company knows all about anti-halal campaigning. For months the company has suffered under the same sustained abusive campaign that targeted Fleurieu Milk Company.
KEITH BYRNE, BYRON BAY COOKIE COMPANY: When we’ve got the likes of our shop here in Byron Bay and we have a receptionist who has taken some of the phone calls which could – which were quite abusive and also emails that were quite abusive. That’s when we had to say, “Hold on a second, we now need to get some more support on this,” and we did have to actually bring in the police at that stage.
ALEX MANN: In spite of the opposition, he’s decided to keep his certification.
KEITH BYRNE: Cookie Company is exporting to 40 countries worldwide. So, it’s a huge benefit to us and it means that we can not only sustain our existing workforce, but we’ve expanded that over the last years and we’re now one of the biggest employers now in Byron Bay, with 65 people. We decided to keep the certification because if we were to not have that certification, that would mean that we could lose multiple global contracts, which would mean I’d have to downsize my operation here in Byron Bay. That would mean I would lose employees.
ALEX MANN: Nick Hutchinson warns that boycott campaigners are damaging local companies.
NICK HUTCHINSON: If they were to take us down, being a local – all our profits remain in SA. If our businesses disappear, you’re being run by companies in Japan or in Europe and these multinationals and is that better? Is that – our money going back there, is that a better option? Well, I’m sure most people agree it’s not.
The Q Society, responsible for bringing out and hosting international bigots like the floridly excitable Pamela Geller, the pseudonymous self-styled religious expert “Robert Spencer” and the languid Dutch blond Geert Wilders permeates the anti-Muslim movement like a noxious smell.
Wonder if the Qs have secret handshakes, blindfolds and stuff? Or goats? Or funds which they direct to the Three Stooges featured above?
And here they are pretending to be normal. We know better.
It seems like the new sport of choice for the couch potatoes at #TeamStraya is the bullying and intimidation of small Australian businesses who wish to cater for Muslim customers.
After all there aren’t too many suburban trains or trams in the yobbo rural heartland where they can threaten, bully and satisfy their yearnings to parade their hate.
Maybe this will become a new sports rivalry for teams of sweaty bigots like City V Country NRL or some sort of State of Origin. (*apologies to the NRL)
$50 000 for a small business is a serious setback and will probably result in local job losses and a cutback to working hours. It will also impact on local dairy farmers.
But of course the loathsome traitorous rabble will not see this in their senseless idiocy and hate.
Here’s the first one off the bench on the Fleurieu Milk Company Compass Cup community page
Pete manages to have a go at yet another Aussie Company.So we expect he will offer a job to anyone displaced by his bigotry. Not!
And we hope Spring Gully’s lawyers are paying attention.
Here’s some more phobes crawling out of the woodwork
Danny Bell is a proud member of hate group Patriots Defence League – you know the far right extremist group which enjoys threatening and intimidating Muslims?
He is also a member of some Seventh Day Adventist groups. You know, the church that owns the lucrative Aussie Sanitarium food company which caters for the vegetarian dietary requirements of its church members – just like halal and kosher ?
Maybe Danny will want to run a crusade against Weet-Bix.
Never mind,Danny, one of your fellow Muslim haters featured below lives in Newcastle and can march to nearby Cooranbong and stare down the San factory.
Karen wants to let us know that she alone can define what “the Aussie way” is – obviously in her universe it is the one that says it is OK to bully a small business providing jobs and an income to people in economically depressed regional South Australia.
Way to go #TeamStupid!
Yep and General Evi Davis is all locked and loaded up with Wild Turkey ready to take on the evil Muslamic halals. She even belongs to a page that tells us it is against the halal religion.
And if that is not enough, adding to the (vomit) bucket list, spreading his shit on the page is Islamophobe Mike.
It’s well documented that the Bogotariat have little in the way of original thought or imagination, and thus have a tendency to repeat things they have heard other bogots saying. The bogot does this without ever questioning the veracity of what they are spewing forth onto the internet or how nonsensical it sounds to normal people.
We’ve collected some of the most predictable, common, ignorant and moronic comments and topics raised by the average bogot in full rant, and now we want to see just how predictable the Bogotariat is.
And so we present you with:
Bogot Bingo
Instructions:
Download and/or print the bingo card above
Browse the internet as normal
Should you stumble across a fetid, teeming nest of bogots, pull out your bingo card and start checking off any of the words, phrases, grammatical quirks and nutty fantasies that appear in a comment or thread of comments. Please note: The words and phrases don’t have to be verbatim, they just need to be reasonably close in wording and/or sentiment.
If you manage to make a straight line across 5 boxes on your bingo card in any direction, screenshot the comment or thread and send it back to us (via private message to our Facebook page).
We will then sift through the submissions and find the best, worst and funniest Bogot Bingo wins and present them in a blog in a few weeks time. (Rest assured we will keep the identities of all players completely secret.)
On Sunday, October 13, the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre (ASRC) is holding a ‘Run for Refugees’:
On Sunday 13th October 2013 staff, volunteers and supporters of the ASRC will Run 4 Refugees for the fifth year.
This is your opportunity to join our largest fundraiser of the year, set and achieve a personal challenge and have loads of fun in the process. Get your family and friends together to make a difference.
You don’t have to be a seasoned runner or athletic in any way to join. The great thing about the Melbourne Marathon is that there are events for all levels, starting from the 3km walk. You can join as an individual, join a team or create your own team.
By participating you’ll be helping us raise much-needed funds for the ASRC and making a difference in the lives of some of our community’s most vulnerable people.
Run 4 Refugees in the Melbourne Marathon this October, and join us in standing up for asylum seekers.
Members of ASRC and people with refugee backgrounds were referred to as pedophiles and rapists while numerous violence and death threats were made.
Carrie, (From the RSPCA website):
The standard for meat production in Australia is that all animals must be effectively stunned (unconscious) prior to slaughter. The most common form of halal slaughter complies with the Australian standard. The only difference between this halal-slaughter method is that it uses a reversible stunning method, while conventional humane slaughter uses an irreversible stunning method. Halal slaughter overseas may not permit stunning of the animal and this is the key difference between halal slaughter in Australia and halal slaughter in some other countries.
Here’s Glenn Mchale aka Smokem Torana aka Beardy McShitbreath getting ready to be lunch:
Carrie Forrest, quite literally talks shit. Oh the irony.
Carrie is such a giver. She’d really like to give her infected anus disease to Muslims if she could.
Carrie seems oblivious to the fact that her husband/boyfriend/tool-belt spent the weekend offering death threats to Muslims and talking about raping females.
Woolworths is one of many retailers which has a Facebook page where its customers can head over and talk about products with whom we assume are customer service reps . Most conversation there is of an innocuous nature – there isn’t much of great ground-breaking excitement you can say about breakfast cereals and baked beans after all.
Unless you are a dedicated wacko Islamophobe of course. Like the ones we found below.
Former Army sergeant Phillip Needham, now thankfully retired (so no longer a workplace hazard issue for our troops) and having seemingly suffered some cognitive impairment, leads the Charge of the Blight Brigade with a sloppy dollop of misinformation.
Hey Sarge there is no “Muslim Tax” you idiot! Our contact at the ATO is still cleaning the coffee off her keyboard from when we read her your crap.
Along trots Paul Corias who sputters some incoherent babble about 10% of something going to “Jihad”, followed by traditionalist Catholic Paul Bennett.
You know about the likes of Paul Bennett – Vatican II was a socialist plot and all that?
Actually Australian Muslims, like Australian Christians, are morally obliged to give to charitable causes. Causes like these.
Very much the sorts of projects World Vision and other Christian charities support. And non-Muslims are welcome to contribute.
More invented statistics from the mob that never give us any verifiable testable facts.
Here’s Paul C again. More enhanced figures than a 50s Hollywood movie.
He did correct his typo to “religion”. This did not make the comment any less lame and dumb. For Paul’s information, we have a large number of halal accredited Muslim abattoir workers right here. That’s why we should not need to export live sheep and cattle (but that’s another issue)
People standing in checkout queues must just love Paul Corias as he wastes everyone’s time ranting his hate speech.
To paraphrase Woolies’ latest jingle
“Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday…” – “we hate them”…
Glad that Lee Morgan has given up eating. One less bogot = a smarter country.
Meet Col Hinton, food critic, wannabe entertainer and social commentator. Not satisfied with mumbling, moaning and muttering in a huddle with his Facebook mates, Col chests up to the big boys themselves – in this case the KFC Facebook page and its unfortunate unnamed admin.
Col is very angry and like angry bogots everywhere likes to find scapegoats. In Col’s world teachers are not allowed to strike for better pay and conditions (presumably unlike the bogots themselves), and he has a possible solution which he decided to share with the Ten News Facebook page.
We know Col has a balanced diet – his favourite food group features on his Facebook profile pic. In fact it could go a long way to explaining his anger. But Col also likes chicken as long as it is not halal.
We don’t know about banning halal blankets, but Col also likes to hang out with hags wearing dirty bedsheets.
As we will see, Col has diverse xenophobic interests, as shown by his decision to tell Network Ten what they should do about representation of minorities in local productions.
Col’s not shy about posting his pic online so we thought we’d give talent scouts a chance to see whether they wanted to sign him up for their next series of Australia’s Got Bigots.
Oh and if you want to book Col for your next Klan rally teacher’s strike party he’s available. He lives around Coutts Crossing, and presumably plays the banjo as well.
One day Kristy walked into Centrelink at Liverpool, an activity which no doubt occurs regularly with her. Suddenly she saw some musicians.
We know things are tough for Australian musicians since poker machines overran the pubs. But we had no idea they had ten kids – well we know established stars like Barnesy have fair-sized families, but your average Aussie muso is a scrawny male who can barely scratch together enough money to feed himself and afford the petrol to go to gigs let alone have ten kids. And there’s the APRA fees, and paying your roadies and sound engineers…
Joel Rickard apparently wants a voice in “parliment” (sic). So is he proposing a rock concert at the opening of Parliament each year?
Sorry Joel I don’t think SOUTHERN CROSS SOLIDERS PARTY really makes it as a band name.
And then Joel goes off because Vegemite is halal. Guess what Joel, most of what you consume is technically halal. But we have no problems with you and your “soliders” (sic) boycotting food and drink. Best stop breathing too.
Your demise will make more room for better Australians!
Guffaw merchants from the Q Society: Andrew Horwood Debbie Robinson Susan Horwood
you said it... 