Australia – Can racism be funny ?

hedgehog.

Racism was certainly a subject I had planned to write about in this blog. The recent events around racial comments aimed at Adam Goodes have caused A LOT of debate in Australia, some arguments are very heartfelt and true, some of it.. are rather stupid and unproductive.
I won’t even go into the comments itself, they have been discussed in depth on tv, in newspapers, online, certainly also in homes of many people in Australia.

Both comments were racist without doubt; both comments, I believe, were impulse-driven and thoughtless. No intend to actually harm? Probably. It certainly could be (and was) discussed if  “it wasn’t meant racist” or “I meant the opposite” are a acceptable excuses from a 13yo and from a public personality like Eddie McGuire. 

But what is more saddening is that these comments and the aftermath were triggers to a debate that showed a very UGLY face…

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Conflating the Issue – Muslims Behaving Badly

WHERE do I start? Perhaps with the viral image that will come to define this episode: a child who’d be three or four hoisting a sign triumphantly above his head blaring ”Behead all those who insult the Prophet” while a woman, presumably his mother, thinks this is cute enough to capture on her smartphone. Alternatively, I could begin with the observation that the trailer for the anti-Islamic film that ostensibly started this all, Innocence of Muslims, is now a blockbuster, with YouTube hits in the millions thanks largely to the protesters around the world who think nobody should see it.

No. Let’s start with the fact that so few of the protesters who descended on Sydney’s CBD this weekend seem actually to have seen the film that so gravely offends them. When asked by journalists, they bluntly admit this, one even adding that she refuses to watch something so offensive. It’s almost impressive how cyclical this stupidity is. But it’s also instructive. In fact, this is the key to making sense of something so gobsmackingly senseless. The protesters – at least the ones quoted in news reports – know nothing except how offended they are.

That, you see, is all that matters. This isn’t about a film. It’s about an excuse. We know because we’ve seen it all before, like when Pakistani protesters vandalised American fast food outlets and burnt effigies of President George W. Bush in response to the Danish cartoons.

We know because so much of the weekend’s ranting was nakedly gratuitous: ”Our dead are in paradise, your dead are in hell”. Pardon? Which dead? Weren’t we talking about a movie?
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This is the behaviour of a drunkenly humiliated people: swinging wildly with the hope of landing a blow, any blow, somewhere, anywhere. There’s nothing strategic or calculated about this. It doesn’t matter that they are the film’s most effective publicists. It doesn’t matter that they protest using offensive slogans and signs, while protesting against people’s right to offend. It doesn’t matter that they object to insulting people on the basis of their religion, while declaring that Christians have no morals. This is baffling only until you realise these protesters are not truly protesting to make a point. The protest is the point.

It feels good. It feels powerful. This is why people yell pointlessly or punch walls when frustrated. It’s not instrumental. It doesn’t achieve anything directly. But it is catharsis. Outrage and aggression is an intoxicating prospect for the powerless.

Accordingly, it is not an option to leave an insult unanswered because that is a sign of weakness, rather than transcendence.

The irony is that it grants an extraordinary level of power to those doing the offending. It puts them constantly at the centre of your world. That’s why, when Gallup polled 35 Muslim majority countries, it found that of all the gripes the Muslim world has against the West, among the most pervasive is the West’s ”disrespect for Islam”.

And it is this disrespect that is the overarching grievance that subsumes others. Everything, global and local, can be thrown into this vortex: Swiss minaret bans, French niqab bans, military invasions, drone strikes, racist stereotyping, anti-immigrant politics, and yes, even films so ridiculously bad that, left to their own devices, they would simply lampoon themselves.

This is what gives Innocence of Muslims meaning: not its content, but its context. It’s a symbol of contempt, which is why protests against it so quickly turn into an orgy of anti-Americanism. So, ”Obama, Obama, we love Osama” they scream, mainly because it’s the most offensive rhyme they can muster. Osama, too, is a symbol; the most repugnant one in their arsenal. How better to prove you exist than to say something outrageous?

That the Obama administration immediately condemned the film in the strongest terms doesn’t register. Nor that the White House took the extraordinary (and ultimately unsuccessful) step of asking Google to pull the video. This is invisible to an audience of humiliated souls waiting desperately to be offended and conflate every grievance. Indeed, they need the offence. It gives them the chance to assert themselves so they can feel whole, righteous even. It’s a shortcut to self-worth.

The trouble is that in our digital world, there is always something to oblige. Anyone can Google their prejudices, and there is always enraging news to share with others. Entire online communities gather around the sharing of offensive material and subsequent communal venting. Soon you have a subculture: a sub-community whose very cohesion is based almost exclusively on shared grievance. Then you have an identity that has nothing to say about itself; an identity that holds an entirely impoverished position: that to be defiantly angry is to be.

Frankly, Muslims should find that prospect nothing short of catastrophic. It renders Islamic identity entirely hollow. All pride, all opposition, no substance. ”Like the Incredible Hulk,” observes Abdal Hakim Murad, a prominent British Islamic scholar, ”ineffectual until provoked.”

Sometimes you need a scandal to demonstrate an underlying disease. And that’s the good news here. The vast bulk of Saturday’s protesters were peaceful, and Muslim community organisations are lining up to condemn the outbreak of violence. But now a more serious conversation is necessary. One that’s not about how we should be speaking out to defend our prophet and ourselves. One that’s more about whether we can speak about anything else.

Waleed Aly hosts the Drive program on ABC Radio National and is a lecturer in politics at Monash University.

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Refugee Week: The Highs and the Lowly Lows

Refugees

Tens of thousands of Aussies marched through major cities around the country yesterday (23/6/12) in support of ending mandatory detention and welcoming those who’ve sought refuge in Australia.

From ‘Welcome To Australia‘s website:

At 1pm on June 23, the Saturday of Refugee Week, we’re inviting everyone who is a part of the Australian community to ‘Walk Together’ in recognition that although we’ve all arrived here via different pathways we share a common Australian journey. 

We’re Aboriginal Australians, we’re refugees, we’re skilled migrants, we’re long-term Australians, we’re international students, we’re asylum seekers… we’re people. It’s time to Walk Together into a future where diversity is celebrated, fear is replaced with welcome and where everyone belongs.

Workplaces, schools, community groups and even pockets of politicians held services, events and parties in recognition of World Refugee Week. Here are some of the photos:

But it wasn’t a week completely full of positives, no. The ‘party’ of perpetual political pants-downs, ‘The Australian Protectionist Party‘ had organised a counter-rally that would somehow negate the positive actions of the tens of thousands of Australians who believed in treating asylum seekers and refugees like real people. They called it the ‘Torpedo the Boats Rally‘.

You will note that this event was shaping up to be the most successful Australian Protectionist Party in the history of the ‘organisation’. To date, the hicks have only ever been able to conjure up around 8-10 supporters at each racist eyesore rally. They once got around 20 people, but that was because they called on the Southern Cross Soldiers and the Australian Defence League (two other similarly dysfunctional and unpopular groups of intellectually mild boys in men’s bodies) to boost their numbers. But perhaps Hodges always knew that the event would eventually turn out poorly, given the group’s history of failing miserably at attracting any form of support from any given demographic, and he put his hand up to declare that it would be his final ‘rally’.

Hodges actually showed a glimpse of intelligence as he declared “…defined madness as repeating the same actions and expecting a different result…”. However, he then went ahead and practically removed himself entirely from the APP and left Brievik appreciator and child-murder supporter Matt ‘Mutation’ in charge, much to Matt’s confusion.

The Facebook event page for the torpedo-solution inbreds was red-hot with fake profiles from both sides of the debate, many deciding that the best course of action in dealing with Australia’s migration issues would be to post private details about each other and call people pedophiles and rapists etc. But while the social networking site was getting a server-crashing workout, the rally itself was failing to gain any kind of foothold, as the APP failed time and time again to secure a protest permit from NSW police.

Hodges and Folkes were talking up the idea that the only reason police were refusing to let them publicly humiliate themselves was because ‘leftists’ were always violent at these kind of gatherings. Meanwhile, at the Facebook event page, there were calm rational comments being made from APP supporters.

And while Hodges was keen to paint his opposition as the kind who refused to answer questions and silence debate, he teamed up with bum-chum Nicholas Folkes and consistently went on a comment-deleting rampage, proving that the best way to win an argument was to make it appear as though the opposition didn’t want to talk.

Without wanting to speak for the APP, I can’t imagine they could feel any kind of pride for the kind of lowlife bottom-feeders they were attracting to their page. Sharlene Ashton even turned up to threaten people (including pregnant mothers) with lighting their houses on fire and setting her ‘roids-raged husband onto them.

The debate was reaching an intellectual low-point wherever you looked – Rosina Mason-Parker was unfortunately one of the more intelligent APP supporters commenting.

Mid-way through the lead-up to the APP’s rally, another asylum seeker boat crashed, killing many people including women and children. Did you expect compassion from the scum? I certainly hope not. Here’s stand-up comedian and pants-wetter Trilby Steinberger‘s take on it:

Bigotry and hatred coupled with inappropriate apostrophes. It set off celebratory parties within the Protectionist Party’s corner however.

Even Folkesy weighed into the conversation, intimating that God had stepped in to kill the asylum seekers, and suggesting that in the future he would also sort out the ‘Marxist scum’.

Of course, the Bible-basher couldn’t avoid pushing his thoughts on slavery.

Anyways, I bet you’re itching to actually find out how the APP rally went. I hear you say, “I’m finally interested. This well respected, well received political party is now attracting numbers of over 130 at their planned rallies.” Well here are a few pics for you. Sorry to say, Nicholas Folkes and Darrin Hodges only managed to attract FOUR supporters and the pathetic non-event racist Italian Sergio Redegalli (the guy who dresses up and hides in women’s bathrooms).

Here’s Sergio with a nearly-dead, lonely fogey APP supporter filming the five other lousy APP dead-shits standing alone in a park next to Central Station in Sydney, waving an Australian flag and holding up signs saying ‘Join the Aussie Resistance’.

And here are Folkes and Hodges, flanked by random nobody and Old Guy. They took great delight in telling their opposition (Wallabies jumper and blue cap) that they were feral, unwashed S-bend scum, yet both Folkes and Hodges had turned up to their fap-rally after bathing in each others’ sweat, regrettably failing to shave their filthy unkempt attempts at facial hair and wearing the unwashed shirts they wear to all of their fail-events.

Here’s a photo of all six proud Australians who support the torpedoing of boats lined with women and children. You will note the blimpy woman on the right wearing a scarf and sunglasses – we have photos of her at previous events, including ‘ban-the-burqa’ rallies outside Redegalli’s house in Newtown. The irony hurts.

With another failed event chalked up; a miserable sayonara for fomer sex-shop assistant Hodges, they parted ways and headed for the pub. We look forward to the write-up on their website, describing the hundreds of attendees. It’s important to find humour in all situations.

And finally, a quick wrap from one of our other administrators:

“Went to the Welcome to Australia rally yesterday. It was really positive. They had performances and speakers.  I’d say 99.9% of attendees had absolutely no idea the APP were down the other end of the park… you could barely see them, and couldn’t read their signs or anything, plus they were standing between/behind some big trees.  There were about 3 police standing behind the pro-refugee group, mostly just chatting and one helped a little girl put some rubbish in the bin because she was too small.

At the other end of the park was the APP group.  There were 6 or 7 of them standing as part of their ‘rally’, and Sergio Redegalli was away from them with a video camera on a tripod.  They were faced (a distance away, probably set by police) by about a dozen Antifa who held banners saying ‘Torpedo the First Fleet’ and ‘No Borders’, in response to the APP calling their rally ‘Torpedo the Boats’.  The Antifa chanted to the APP that they were racist scum, to stop deportation, and that Australia was and is Aboriginal land.

Nicky Folkes responded by calling out to say they were “S-bend socialists”, “feral stench”, “bog stench”, etc. He ranted about them supporting murder and being racist. The force is obviously not strong with this one. Darrin Hodges mostly stood beside him, sniggering and looking adoringly at him.  Occasionally he repeated something Nicky had said, or chanted something himself, quietly at first while looking at Nicky for approval and then got louder if Nicky laughed, or stopped awkwardly if Nicky didn’t respond.

At one point, Nick called out “How are you going to torpedo the First Fleet? Are you going to go back in time?” and Darrin looked like he was so in love he was almost salivating. Darrin did some Beavis and Butthead style guffaws. Nicky spent a lot of time waving a big Australian flag around, not seeming to quite understand that it didn’t make a statement to anyone, because aside from the odd tourist or international student passing, everyone in that park was pretty much Australian.

There was one woman with them who had a beanie, scarf, sunglasses, long sleeved jumper and long skirt. Any time her scarf started to slip down from covering her face, she pulled it back up.  She tried to turn away from photos a lot. I guess she didn’t realise that the people she was standing with opposed burqas in public. I was scared that she may have been hiding a bomb. That’s what people who cover themselves are doing it for, right?

There was another guy in a cap and glasses who got really worked up if anyone went over to question him or talk to him.  He yelled at one girl and she walked away, I’m not sure what about though.

They attracted a few jeers from random people passing through the park.  There were about 10-15 police babysitting them.

Sergio was filming the Antifa for the most part, although if he was recording with sound, a lot of the video would have included him chatting shite to people.  Old Guy was at the rally and he went over to talk to Sergio for a while, and then there was a group chatting to him and one young woman was talking to him for a while.  I wasn’t close enough to hear but the few times I walked close enough behind him I heard him giving the spiel about how someone he knew was attacked by a Muslim or something, in his normal “I’m an intellectual and I don’t hate Muslims except when I do” type fashion. He ended up being interrupted by Nicky calling out to him to say to come over and take a group shot of their rally before they left to go and get a beer.  Sergio went over and introduced the girl to the fuckwits and then the 5 of them in t-shirts posed for the photo… the guy in the cap and glasses didn’t get in the pic, and neither did the woman with the full face covering, who stood beside Sergio, despite him being against that sort of thing.

They then toddled off towards Surry Hills.”

Six Bogans Wear Burqas to, um… Prove A Point

Some pockets of bogot lowlife trash are celebrating tonight after firmly believing that their burqa stunt in Sydney has proved a point – that people just don’t know who is under a burqa.

Well no shit.

We’ve been through this burqa conversation a million times, but here goes again – this time we’ll keep it brief:

* If balaclavas have been banned in banks, how come bank robbers still choose to wear them while robbing banks?

* If burqas can hide bombs, how come there have been no burqa related suicide bomb attempts or successes in Australia, ever?

* If cargo pants can hide deadly weapons, how come these aren’t banned?

* If burqas oppress women, how does limiting their freedom to dress liberate them?

* If a woman is forced to wear a burqa by her oppressive husband, how is it liberating for them to ban burqas in public? Wouldn’t that then confine those women to stay inside their homes?

* If the statistical majority of sexual assaults are committed by those known to the victim, what’s the point of wearing a burqa to sexually assault someone?

* If the main factor in physical abuse and domestic violence is alcohol, how come we are blaming Muslims who don’t drink alcohol, and women who wear burqas, who generally don’t go into pubs or liquor stores?

* If wearing the burqa supposedly hides one away from society, how come they stand out in a crowd? Surely if a person wanted to blend into a crowd or secretly hide their identity they’d wear some dark glasses, a hat, and maybe some form of cosmetic hindrance.

* If terrorism is such a massive threat in our country that we need to be scared about women wearing burqas, how come we aren’t scared of dying of heart failure, drink driving, road accidents, lung cancer or any of the other major killers?

* If terrorism performed by women wearing burqas is such a threat, how come I have more chance of being killed by being struck by lightning (odds: 40,000 : 1)?

* If we are concerned about women wearing burqas hiding out in female changerooms, how come we never see them in female changerooms? Surely we’d notice them sitting there, doing nothing.

* If we are so concerned about women wearing burqas and watching women at the beach, how come we haven’t paid homage to the trillions of gigabytes worth of porn freely accessible on the Internet?

Anyways, back to the dropkicks that took the day off ‘work’ to wear burqas around the city of Sydney. Let’s see what else they proved today!

1. When walking through the city wearing clothes meant to conceal – partying and forming a conga line won’t convince many people to accept your claims that you could be hiding a nuclear weapon.

2. When you’re allowed to buy a drink at the pub, it’s not your attire that’s being judged, but your behaviour. By proving that service will still continue in a true blue Aussie pub, these burqa clad clowns proved that most Australians don’t really care about the burqa issue. What we didn’t see here was how pub staff would have reacted if the burqa wearers were intoxicated. They probably would have reacted in the same way as if any other member of the general public was intoxicated, and asked them to leave.

3. When six idiots ponce into a public bar wearing burqas asking for alcohol, it is proven that the person behind the bar safely assumes that it’s merely a dress-up piss-take camera-stunt, as devout Muslims don’t generally drink alcohol.

4. When you try to suppress a freedom in order to promote freedom, you prove yourself to be as impotent as the man who started a war against an ideology (War on Terror?). By wearing a mask while following regular laws, you’ve proven that your identity doesn’t matter until such time as you disobey the law.

5. When six dopes wander the streets in dress up with a cameraman right next to them the whole time, it is now proven that anyone who witnesses this spectacle will assume that it’s merely an offensive joke.

Enter burqa fuck-up no.1, Nicholas Folkes + offended Arabic men:

Nicholas Hunter Folkes is the son of a Russian refugee, and the brother of fellow minion Vera Kolesnikoff, and he is a racist. He represents a ‘political party’ that over 98% of Australians either haven’t heard of, or don’t like. He’s a racist, but he thinks his actions and words are an integral part of what will get this country out of ‘trouble’.

(Folkes discussing his love for the White Australia policy.)

(Folkes choking on his own shit.)

(Folkes being smirked and stared at by an audience of people with IQs higher than his miserable 20.)

Here’s Folkes at one of his previous miserable fail-rallies:

And here are some of the things he’s publicly said over the past few years:

Enter burqa-bozo no.2, Sergio Redegalli.

This is Sergio’s second appearance in the burqa. His first appearance was when he donned the burqa to enter a ladies toilet, once again trying to ‘prove a point’. Was he noticed? Probably. Did he get a look at women urinating? As much as he desperately wanted to, it’s pretty clear that unless he managed to burqa-stealth his way into an actual cubicle, all he saw were closed doors and ‘engaged’ signs.

Enter niqab-nobody no.3, ‘Betty’ – Diane Leigh Renard.

Just like her Facebook profiles, Betty chooses anonymity for this 7 News interview. Oh well, she’ll be dead soon anyway – she looks like she’s about 90. Here’s some of Betty’s wonderful design work:

And here’s her hideous face: (Note the wart next to the left eye)… One has to wonder – does she have a poison apple in her basket?

The other three failed to get any airtime, so have remained as completely irrelevant as they were when they first headed out the door this morning.

So there you have it. Three over-the-hill nobodies, completely phobic about the less than 0.2% of our population that actually cover their faces. Not one of them will come to our blog, so here are the questions none of them can answer, one last time:

* If balaclavas have been banned in banks, how come bank robbers still choose to wear them while robbing banks?

* If burqas can hide bombs, how come there have been no burqa related suicide bomb attempts or successes in Australia, ever?

* If cargo pants can hide deadly weapons, how come these aren’t banned?

* If burqas oppress women, how does limiting their freedom to dress liberate them?

* If a woman is forced to wear a burqa by her oppressive husband, how is it liberating for them to ban burqas in public? Wouldn’t that then confine those women to stay inside their homes?

* If the statistical majority of sexual assaults are committed by those known to the victim, what’s the point of wearing a burqa to sexually assault someone?

* If the main factor in physical abuse and domestic violence is alcohol, how come we are blaming Muslims who don’t drink alcohol, and women who wear burqas, who generally don’t go into pubs or liquor stores?

* If wearing the burqa supposedly hides one away from society, how come they stand out in a crowd? Surely if a person wanted to blend into a crowd or secretly hide their identity they’d wear some dark glasses, a hat, and maybe some form of cosmetic hindrance.

* If terrorism is such a massive threat in our country that we need to be scared about women wearing burqas, how come we aren’t scared of dying of heart failure, drink driving, road accidents, lung cancer or any of the other major killers?

* If terrorism performed by women wearing burqas is such a threat, how come I have more chance of being killed by being struck by lightning (odds: 40,000 : 1)?

* If we are concerned about women wearing burqas hiding out in female changerooms, how come we never see them in female changerooms? Surely we’d notice them sitting there, doing nothing.

* If we are so concerned about women wearing burqas and watching women at the beach, how come we haven’t paid homage to the trillions of gigabytes worth of porn freely accessible on the Internet?

Gay Marriage Rally in Sydney Attracts Over 10,000

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“you (sic) know you are a true Aussie when you cant (sic) stand stinking Asian wankers.”

‘Lovin’ it’.

Racists Can’t Spell

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Oh dear Chelsea, we’d actually noticed the complete opposite. Usually people who publicly post their vile diatribes that insult entire communities of people are noticeably unintelligent, uneducated and consequently terrible at English.

The irony in your comments is not lost on us. Please allow us to show you why:

“I just gotta (got to)… put this out there while…” (confusing coordinating conjunctions with subordinating conjunctions):

Conjunctions have two basic functions or “jobs”:

• Coordinating conjunctions are used to join two parts of a sentence that are grammatically equal. The two parts may be single words or clauses, for example:
  – Jack and Jill went up the hill.
  – The water was warm, but I didn’t go swimming.
• Subordinating conjunctions are used to join a subordinate dependent clause to a main clause, for example:
  – I went swimming although it was cold.

“…this is totally irrelevant, but has anyone else noticed (that) every facebook…” (capital letter needed for a proper noun: Facebook) “…user who is of Islamic faith type ALL IN CAPS or with a large number of grammatical errors? I’m yet to come across one to prove me wrong.”

“Or do alot…” (‘a lot’ – two words) “…of these(;)…” (inappropriate use of semicolon) “”…………..”.” (Yes, they’re called speech marks.

“Come to bankstown, sydney…” (Bankstown and Sydney are both proper nouns and need capital letters, Chelsea) “…Michelle. Worst place in australi,…” (proper noun – Australi(a)…) “… you will see why.”

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Yes boys and girls, Chelsea is a hypocrite. There’s no denying it. But she wanted to be proved wrong. So here’s some more evidence of racists who can’t spell and don’t know shit about grammar:

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