What do you think of this?

[catsidhe]

At the urging of people whose opinions I trust, I have written an almost publishable version of this rant. It follows below. If I get more positive feedback than negative, then it will be sent in to the editors at The Age, the Herald-Sun, the Australian and AB himself. Criticism will be listened to, and may be included. No feedback at all will be taken as 'don't do it.'

EDIT: It's sent, as of about 2:30pm Sat 12 Nov. The following text was sent to
bolta@heraldsun.com.au
hseditor@heraldsun.com.au
hsletters@heraldsun.com.au
newsdesk@theage.com.au
letters@theage.com.au
feedback@theaustralian.com.au

Now we see what happens.

Here goes:
I normally try to ignore Andrew Bolt.

Sometimes, though, his shrill hysteria becomes too much for me to stand,
especially knowing that some confuse his flying spittle for rational
argument. His diatribe, 'The threat is real', in the Herald-Sun
(9 Nov 2005) is so replete with innuendo, misrepresentations and
outright falsehoods, that I had to speak out.

Andrew starts with a whopper: "So it wasn't a political stunt."

Andrew seems to dislike the term 'non sequitur', as his letter in The
Age (11 Nov 2005) indicates, so it seems a good term to use. That there
were potential terrorists arrested does not mean that it was not, at the
same time, used as a political stunt. Certainly there are several
features of the raids which arouse deep suspicion. Foremost among these
is the question, what were all those camera crews doing there at 2:30 in
the morning?

Do the police usually give similar advance warning of such potentially
dangerous and delicate operations?

Secondly, the timing seems to have been too good to be true. 'Ah,' you
say, 'but the PM can't directly influence a police operation!' And you
would be wrong. Because he and the Attourney General did precisely that
with their breathless warnings of dire consequences if Parliament did
not, as soon as physically possible, change the word 'the' to the word
'a' in one Act. By doing this, John Howard and Phillip Ruddock
pre-empted the police, warned the suspects, and probably rushed the
timing of the raids. It has been reported that the suspects knew that
the warning was about them, and at least one -- Benbrika -- said to a
journalist ('Family man counts costs of his views', The Age, 10 Nov
2005) that he knew full well that he was being followed, and expected to
be arrested soon.

The obvious question then, it would seem, is why was John Howard so keen
to assist accused terrorists by explicitely informing them of police
attention? Were anyone else to do it, they would be accused of being
sympathisers and traitors.

This was just the first sentence. Andrew continues by railing at The
Age and unnamed others for raising just these points. He attacks David
Neal's piece in The Age ('Proof new law not needed', 10 Nov 2005) for
calling him on the non-sequitur of that one-word change being
somehow responsible for the raids, even though Andrew himself conflates
the two in his opinion piece by jamming them together in the same
"aren't those stupid lefties stupid" context, cheek-by-jowl.

As Andrew himself points out, "These arrests follow an investigation
that's lasted 18 months, and were conducted by three police forces."

Several points need to be made here. First, note the phrase 'police
forces'. Not ASIO. They were investigating suspected activities which
are already illegal. And they were investigating specific crimes.
'Conspiracy' is where two or more people gather to plan a crime. The
plan itself is illegal, no [other] crime needs to be committed. Changing 'the'
to 'a' was, in this context, nothing but a stunt, and the concomitant
sound and fury did nothing but endanger the operation.

Second, '18 months'. Eighteen months means that the operation started in
May last year. How important could that one word have been, if it could
have stalled the whole thing? And if they had realised how important it
was, then why wait until less than a week before showtime to fix the
problem? Moreover, it has been reported, as I said, that the fireworks
Howard and Ruddock set off did nothing but alert the suspects to their
peril. It might have even caused the failure of the operation. How
*furious* must the police have been that Howard 'helped' them in this
way?

Andrew then takes a cheap shot at people who are worried about the new
Sedition Laws. "And how silly were these sedition laws in his new
anti-terrorism Bill that ban the preaching of violent change?"

Well, as they would also, strictly read, ban the *discussion* of violent
change, and severely curtail the preaching of peaceful change, I and
many others still say that they are pretty damn silly.

Actually, strike that. I think that they're obscene and frightening.

It is good that Andrew accepts that the final guilt or innocence of the
17 men arrested is for determination by a court, even while he espouses
uncritical support for legislation which would largely abnegate the
possibility of this happening in future.

Oh, and "We do know, however, enough to be sure this was not cooked up
by Adolf Howard just the other day when his polls slid south," is
hilarious. Especially the subtle way it implicitely merges all dissent
and criticism of Howard in with people who shout 'Nazi' at the slightest
provocation.

Actually, that says a lot about Andrew. 'Some of my enemies are foolish,
therefore all of my enemies are foolish' is a syllogism which he uses
with only slight modification for the main argument of the piece. This
is 'some Muslims are dangerous terrorists, therefore all Muslims might
be dangerous terrorists'. And for Andrew to claim that he doesn't say
that is disingenuous. He denies that he says it, he even says the
opposite, but it lies behind every argument he makes.

For example, he conflates the recent australian arrests with the Paris
riots, with the murder of Theo van Gogh, with Spanish ploice shooting
asylum seekers, with Iran's threats against Israel, with...

The most visible common factor is that they are all Muslims. If I were
in a playful mood, I would point out that the common factor of the
Oklahoma bombing, the call for the firebombing of abortion clinics, the
continual influx of Mexicans into the USA and the Paris riots of the
1960s was that they were all Christians. Far be it for me to be so
frivolous, though. Under Andrew's logic, however, it follows that
Christianity is a dangerous religion which must be contained and
modified for the good of society, otherwise *any* Christian might blow
up an abortion clinic.

His examples are fundamentally flawed. He tries to raise the spectre
that the Lebanese community in Australia might break out in Parisian
style riots at any moment, ignoring one fairly basic fact: *Australia is
not France*. There are a number of reasons why this just isn't going to
happen, not least *because* of multiculturalism, or its lack. Australian
Muslims have a sense of belonging to Australian society -- there are
places they can go where they are comfortable, there are people who will
talk to them. This is not true of France, where the refuse of Empire has
been flooding in, and the only response has been to build ghettos and
ignore them. There is no multiculturalism in France, combined with a
high immigration rate, and they are discovering what that equation leads
to.

"Oh," you interject, "but he is claiming that the Islamic Threat is not
the result of the invasion of Iraq." That is a point easily lost in the
tirade of Islam's evils, however, and completely misses the point. That
the Iraq invasion was Justified and Right is just one of the barrows
Andrew pushes, but not the heaviest one. His bugbear is multiculturalism
and Islam, that simple. He says so, in his conclusion.

"At home, multiculturalism must go, and true integration promoted.
Radical preachers must be kept out, or held to account. We must let in
only Muslims with the skills and desire to adapt and thrive. We can
afford no French-style ghettos here, including ghettos of the mind," he
says. Well, I've already explained why the comparison with France is
bogus.

And as for his call for assimilation, he should remember that
assimilation at gunpoint doesn't work. It never has. It has been tried
before, and if it looks like it has, it is because the 'assimilated'
group has actually been annihilated. The Normans tried to assimilate the
English, and for three hundred years it looked like it worked. And yet
Andrew fulminates in English, not French. The Timorese have not
magically become Indonesians, just because they were told to. Nor have
the Acehnese, or the Papuans. Similarly for the Caucasus and Russia. Or
Ireland and England.

And his final point is simply scary: "A BROAD, [sic] the solutions seem
clear, too, but hard. The countries breeding Islamist hatred -- and
breeding the immigrants who overwhelm Europe -- must be hurried into
freedom. As Iraq is already beginning to show, a free country does not
turn its citizens into refugees. It gives them a future back home. A
reason not to hate."

So Andrew now calls for the wholesale invasion of countries whose
governments he doesn't like. Which is to say: Islamic countries.
Lebanon? Qatar? Egypt? Look out, Andrew Bolt wants you to have decent,
*Christian* governments. No mention that the "thieving despots" might be
the ones most responsible for the miserable conditions, not Islam.
Heaven forfend that he might mention that many of these thieving despots
were installed by Western powers in the first place, and many others
were supported -- not least Saddam Hussein.

Andrew rants about the evil Jack Roche. Would it be tasteless to point out
that it was Jack Roche himself who repeatedly -- and futilely -- tried
to contact ASIO and the AFP with warnings?

Andrew froths at the monstrous Benbrika, and yet the interview and
article I cited earlier from The Age would indicate that he has been
misrepresented. Or does Andrew mean that it should be illegal to ever
mention that Osama bin Ladin was known as a philanthropist before he was
known as a monster?

Is it sedition to say that a Bad Man has done Good Things?

Andrew works himself into a lather demanding that Muslim groups and
individual Muslims all denounce terror. News flash, Andrew, they are.
They do. They have been. You just haven't been listening. Andrew would
likely say that if they have, then it wasn't loud enough. What *would*
he like, every Muslim in the country to personally line up and
apologise to him?


I sometimes don't know why I pay any attention to the frothing lunacy of
Andrew Bolt. But then I hear his misleading, arrogant fulminations
coming from the mouths of people who think of him as a fount of wisdom,
and then I remember. Andrew Bolt actively poisons the minds of those who
believe him. I could not look myself in the mirror if I did not at least
attempt to resist his malign influence.



David Cameron Staples,
(address)
(phone)

Comments

[baralier.livejournal.com]

I don't know that the Ferrel-Hun would print it - too many big words that their readers may mistake for Intellectual Wankery. concomitant, syllogism and fulminate might be ones to choose a replacement for.

But the tone of the piece certainly comes across as a very rational look at the idocies of Bolt.

[usuakari.livejournal.com]

There's a couple of typos and spelling mistakes that need to be tidied up, but other than that I like it. I agree with Baralier that it's too long and probably too complex for the Herald-Scum to print as anything other than an opinion piece, but that doesn't mean it's not worth trying.

You could also throw in references to everyone from the Conquistadors to 1950s and 60s missionaries to Aboriginal tribes if you wanted to, when mentioning the downside of Christianity and its effects upon the world.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

It won't be printed, but it will be read.

You'll have another note in the "dangerous people" file.

[drjon.livejournal.com]

Oh dear. Very seditious article, there...

(well done)