…and she’s running for Parliament.

No, it’s not Pauline Hanson, although the media have dubbed her as the “next Pauline Hanson”.

Who? This dopey cow.

Small wonder Kate McCullock has joined the One Nation Party and will be their candidate for the seat of Macarthur in the next Federal Election, according to a press release from the Ku Klux Klan One Nation Party today.

Mad Kate is standing for the seat because:

…she felt strongly about freedom of speech.

“So many people felt so strongly about the issue in Camden but they were too terrified to speak out, and that’s sad,” she said.

She hoped standing as a candidate and “saying the truth and what I think” would give Australians the courage to speak up.

Or allow bigots and racists to spew their bile. Making it acceptable to be racist and ignorant and xenophobic and all that jazz.

Of course, racism and bigotry is never acceptable. Except Kate’s not racist, is she? Oh no. It’s the media’s fault for portraying her like that:

But Mrs McCulloch said she was prepared for an onslaught from the media.

“I have a feeling how the media are going to portray me as xenophobic and racist,” she said.

“They will sensationalise. You have to cop it sweet.

“It doesn’t worry me what they call me. I’ve got six kids. I know I stand for good values.”

That’s right. She’s not xenophobic and racist, she stands for good values (and what the hell does having six kids got anything to do with anything?). But she still thinks

…too much time and money is being spent on helping poorer countries overseas and helping asylum seekers, while Australian citizens such as farmers needed help.

Yeah, real good values, Mad Kate. Farmers need help from time to time but I would hardly put them in the same basket as asylum seekers.

Mad Kate’s good values also means being nice about other cultures:

We don’t want [Muslims] not only here, we don’t want them in Australia. They’re an oppressive society, they’re a dictatorship… The ones that come here oppress our society, they take our welfare and they don’t want to accept our way of life.

Oh, sorry. Hang on, I’m sure I can find something she’s said that demonstrates Mad Kate’s good values…

Go and do something while I search. Go on, then. It will take me a while.

Spend any decent amount of time in a primary school and you will inevitably hear students angrily accuse each other of bullying over the slightest altercation in the classroom or playground. These kids are responding to the very necessary anti-bullying education programs that run in schools, but unfortunately they’re missing the point. Bullying is a sustained campaign of physical or emotional intimidation, whereas an isolated incident of teasing or physical violence, while being equally unacceptable, is not actually bullying.

A parallel could be drawn with wider society, where people in private and public discourse tend to be extremely quick to slap the label “racist” on anyone who says something that is remotely connected to race, in the process watering down the concept of racism until it is almost meaningless.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m sure that by now most of you, if not all, have heard or read about the cartoon that was published in the New York Post earlier this week. That cartoon depicted a chimpanzee being gunned down by New York’s finest, with one of the policemen saying in the bubble: “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.”

I had actually read about it before I saw the cartoon in question. I also read the editor-in-chief of the Post Col Allan’s defence of the cartoon: “The cartoon is a clear parody of a current news event, to wit the shooting of a violent chimpanzee in Connecticut. It broadly mocks Washington’s efforts to revive the economy.”

Try as I could to be open-minded about his clarification on the meaning of the cartoon, I couldn’t. Long has been the history of alluding to or calling Blacks as “monkeys” (or equivalent terms) — with the sole purpose of being intentionally offensive and racist. And Blacks have been told to “go back to your tree in Africa” — or some such. Puerile, hateful and bigoted stuff. Then I saw the cartoon in question. It left no doubt it my mind that the chimp is President Barack Obama. Bullet-ridden. And satire it is not.

Deborah Lipstadt points out on her blog:

Whether the NYPost meant it to be racist or not is almost irrelevant. The fact that Blacks have been regularly stereotyped with images of apes and monkeys is undeniable. It is as fundamental part of that stereotype as large noses and money bags are of the Jewish stereotype.

The fact that it was juxtaposed with a picture of President Obama signing the bill did not help the NYPost’s claims that the monkey did not mean Obama. [There was a pet monkey shot in NY a few days ago but that does not explain away or excuse the racist elements of the cartoon.]

This evening, I opened up the SMH website, and saw the headline, “Post apologises for chimp cartoon”. While I immediately thought the Post were just being prudent and in damage-control considering the world-wide outcry and disbelief, at least there was an apology. However, upon reading the apology, it turned out to be not much of an apology at all:

Wednesday’s Page Six cartoon – caricaturing Monday’s police shooting of a chimpanzee in Connecticut – has created considerable controversy.

It shows two police officers standing over the chimp’s body: “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill,” one officer says.

It was meant to mock an ineptly written federal stimulus bill.

Period.

But it has been taken as something else – as a depiction of President Obama, as a thinly veiled expression of racism.

This most certainly was not its intent; to those who were offended by the image, we apologize.

However, there are some in the media and in public life who have had differences with The Post in the past – and they see the incident as an opportunity for payback.

To them, no apology is due.

Sometimes a cartoon is just a cartoon – even as the opportunists seek to make it something else.

Quite frankly, using this opportunity to have a go at those in the media and in public life who “have had difference with The Post in the past” is nothing short of pathetic. The churlish attack on their detractors (whoever they are; they don’t specify) simply served to render their apology obsolete after all.

When you think of the word “soldier”, what springs to your mind?

Fearless? Brave? Heroic? Fighting for what’s good and true?

When white supremacist group The Southern Cross Soldiers decided to hold a rally on Australia Day, they thought the beach would be their oyster, and the media their bitch. What patriotic, beach loving Aussie could ignore their call for immigrants to fuck off?

Sadly, it was not to be.

You could tell it would be an exercise in idiocy from the moment the first little troopers arrived under The Clocks and began casting anxious eyes over the Australia Day parade rolling down Swanston St.

Chinese marchers with their dragons, Turkish dancers, new arrivals from Africa – the sort of people your typical Southern Cross Soldier wants to send back where they came from.

But outnumbered as they were, there wasn’t a peep out of these heroes, whose ranks swelled gradually to about 30.

Thirty? Sounds like a right proper army to me.

And at Mordialloc’s multicultural melting pot, well you just had to laugh. They congregated for a while at the foot of the pier like virgins at an orgy, glancing anxiously down the beach and at all those non-Anglo faces, who paid them no heed whatsoever.

When a couple of brawny Pacific Islanders ambled past, their silence was deafening.

[...]

When a Herald Sun photographer tried to snap their pictures, that was the moment to demonstrate courage. Fifteen on one, those are the sort of odds cowards like best.

There was a bit of pushing and shoving and lens-blocking, and one big kid struck a boxing pose and offered to punch some heads.

He didn’t and they drifted away on a cloud of obscenity to have another go at remembering the words to Advance Australia Fair.

It’s good to know John Ray has these guys on his side, because when the New Soviets come they will not be spared.

Ten-plus years on, we’re still getting doomsday predictions from our right-wing politicians who still seem to think getting swamped by whoever the latest Scary People are. 

Pauline Hanson in 1996:

“I believe we are in danger of being swamped by Asians. Between 1984 and 1995, 40 per cent of all migrants coming into this country were of Asian origin. They have their own culture and religion, form ghettos and do not assimilate.”

Of course, John Howard never denounced this blatant race-baiting and xenophobia. He just stole Pauline’s policies and made this country an embarrassing one to live in (yeah yeah, the right-wing morons reading this are probably thinking “If you don’t like it, leave!” Get fucked. That’s such a lame-arse response and you know it).

The same old bullshit continues today, courtesy of the doddery dribbling fuckwit Bill Heffernan:

Liberal senator Bill Heffernan later told reporters that Australia was at risk of being swamped by millions of climate-change refugees in the future, declaring it “absolute lunacy” to change the border protection regime.

The sooner Heffernan and his mob piss off, the better.

When Barack Obama correctly referred to John McCain’s “running mate’s” apparent refusal to stop racist taunts at Republican rallies, during the third Presidential debate on Thursday (Australian time), McCain, as is his wont, immediately got huffy and defensive. He said that he was “proud of the people who come to our rallies.”

Is that so, McCain? Then how come the McCain campaign, with three weeks left to go until Election Day, “launched a nationwide talent search to find angry audience members for their increasingly hate-filled rallies”, as admitted by McCain aides?

“People assume that when we hold a rally, angry white people just magically appear, but that’s not the case,” said McCain aide Hardin Carley. “The fact is, a lot of planning goes into this.” In order to stock their rallies with the requisite number of irate white voters, the McCain camp has reached out to Hollywood, retaining the services of casting agent Tracy Klugian, who found the angry crowds for the 2000 film “Gladiator.” “They were really clear about my assignment,” said Mr. Klugian. “They were like, we want the same kind of crowds you had for ‘Gladiator,’ only more bloodthirsty.”

(source)

We all know McCain’s been getting desperate in recent weeks. It’s one reason why his running mate Sarah Palin was “unleashed” and allowed to fire off ugly and highly provocative rants during Republican rallies, such as this gem at a Florida rally on October 6, that Obama “launched his political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist! This is not a man who sees America the way you and I see America.  I’m afraid this is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to work with a former domestic terrorist who had targeted his own country.”

The day before was the risible and now infamous claim that Obama is someone who used to “pal around with terrorists who targeted their own country”. These repugnant statements backfired for McCain and tarnished his reputation as an honourable type of guy.

A poll following these attacks showed that “more voters [saw] Mr. McCain as waging a negative campaign than Mr. Obama. Six in 10 voters surveyed said that Mr. McCain had spent more time attacking Mr. Obama than explaining what he would do as president; by about the same number, voters said Mr. Obama was spending more of his time explaining than attacking.”

Elsewhere, specifically Gainesville, Virginia, state GOP Chairman Jeffrey M. Frederick knows that the McCain bid for the White House is failing miserably. Things are quite desperate, that they’re resorting further still to lies and baseless allegations:

With so much at stake, and time running short, Frederick did not feel he had the luxury of subtlety. He climbed atop a folding chair to give 30 campaign volunteers who were about to go canvassing door to door their talking points — for instance, the connection between Barack Obama and Osama bin Laden: “Both have friends that bombed the Pentagon,” he said. “That is scary.” It is also not exactly true — though that distorted reference to Obama’s controversial association with William Ayers, a former 60s radical, was enough to get the volunteers stoked. “And he won’t salute the flag,” one woman added, repeating another myth about Obama. She was quickly topped by a man who called out, “We don’t even know where Senator Obama was really born.” Actually, we do; it’s Hawaii.

In light of the realisation that attacking Obama is not helping the McCain-Palin ticket at all, the pitbull with lipstick in recent days has softened her tone, saying things like “I don’t question at all Barack Obama’s love for this great country.” What a turnaround!  Desperate, devious, tricky and so utterly insincere. Win at all costs, no matter what.

I hope American voters, especially the undecideds, see just how full of shit the whole McCain campaign has been and make the right decision with their vote.

(Hint: Vote Obama!)

UPDATE:

Turns out that the “report” about the McCain campaign auditioning for “angry crowds” was written by a political satirist and comedian. My apologies for not seeing the fine print in the Huffington Post at the end of the article: “Andy Borowitz is a comedian and writer whose work appears in The New Yorker and The New York Times, and at his award-winning humor site, BorowitzReport.com.”

Having now read some of his archived work after a heads-up in the comments, yes, yes, the penny drops. He’s quite good though. I encourage you to read his stuff, even if the fucker tripped me up! Grrr.

Nevertheless, for McCain to declare he is proud of the people who attend his and Palin’s rallies shows just how silly and desperate the man is. He is not a racist and yet he’s practically endorsing the “people” who have been yelling out bigoted and racist epithets at Republican rallies, such as “Kill him!” (in relation to Obama) and “sit down, boy” at an African American sound man for a network.

Charming.

Remember the Editor asking this last week?

Barack Obama (or someone else) obviously reads Grods.

Back in May of this year, it was decided by Council that there was not to be any Islamic school built in Camden on “planning and development grounds”. Others said this was bullshit: the rejection of the proposal was to appease the racist and xenophobic sentiments that were running high and out of control at the time. Religious intolerance was blatantly feverish. Who can forget the gutless, lowly act of putting the heads of two pigs on stakes on the site of the proposed Islamic school in November last year? Who can forget the pin-up girl of racism and bigotry, Kate McCulloch and her horrid statements such as, “We don’t want [Muslims] not only here, we don’t want them in Australia. They’re an oppressive society, they’re a dictatorship… The ones that come here oppress our society, they take our welfare and they don’t want to accept our way of life.”

Religious intolerance is well and alive… well, unless there are plans for a Catholic school to be built in the same area.

The same dickhead who objected to the Islamic school, the president of the Camden/Macarthur Residents’ Group, Emil Sremchevich, has not seen the Development Application for the Catholic proposal yet. However, he reckons they’ve “ticked all the right boxes” and that “Catholics are part of our community so we should be supporting it on this basis alone. We have to welcome them. To become part of a community, you need to live in the community. You can’t just turn up.”

You can’t just turn up? Then, Mr Sremchevich, go back to wherever you came from! You weren’t invited either. No one ever gets an invite. We all just turn up, one time or another.

The Quranic Society correctly pointed out that Mr Sremchevich’s comments are racist. How did he respond to that? Very, very poorly. Who the fuck made him the president of the Camden/Macarthur Residents’ Group?! The guy is absolutely hopeless!

This is how he responded: “Why is that racist? Why is it discriminatory? It’s very simple: people like some things but don’t like other things. Some of us like blondes, some of us like brunettes. Some of us like Fords, some of us like Holdens. Why is it xenophobic just because I want to make a choice? If I want to like some people and not like other people, that’s the nature of the beast.”

My reaction, upon reading his feeble rationalisaton, was one of utter disbelief. People, it seems, are nothing more important than a mere car model or a hair colour.

And it’s not xenophobia but a choice for this wanker? Wrong. There are no choices in liking some people and not others. Singling out one group of people for condemnation based on religion is xenophobia, not a choice. Xenophobia being the fear of the “alien” or foreigner. Many Catholics in Australia are foreigners, come to think of it.

What a fucking idiot.

The other day, The Editor lamented racism and bigotry implicitly and explicity rearing their ugly heads again after Camden Council voted unanimously to oppose a proposal to build an Islamic school on the outskirts of the town, south-west of Sydney, “on planning grounds alone”.

Local resident and bigot, Kate McCulloch, caught media attention with her garish green and yellow dress and an abominable Akubra adorned with Australian flags, as well as her openly prejudiced remarks, such as:

We don’t want [Muslims] not only here, we don’t want them in Australia. They’re an oppressive society, they’re a dictatorship… The ones that come here oppress our society, they take our welfare and they don’t want to accept our way of life.

Days later, she’s back in the news. The Sydney Morning Herald has interviewed her (why?), and her comments reveal a cretinous dimwit who is now talking about following the footsteps of Pauline Hanson and entering politics. Says she:

“Look, scores of people are coming up to me and saying, ‘Good on you, Kate … you’re saying what we’re too scared to ‘cos of racial vilification laws, but we all think it.’ I would like to keep our place like it is and I guess [joining the] Liberals would be natural,”

She conveniently forgets — or doesn’t know — that Pauline Hanson was kicked out of the Liberal Party for her extremist racist views.

Having said that, however, the Liberal Party is still nevertheless home to many other bigots. The most recent notable being fomer Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews. The Age today writes that a confidential Immigration Department report (obtained under Freedom of Information laws) found that racial harassment of Africans increased following Andrews’ claims in 2007 that they were engaged in crime and failing to integrate.

Desperate political point-scoring at its most detestable. And Kate McCulloch might find a home within the Liberal Party after all.

Anyway, back to Mad Kate. She makes another bizarre comment about the “victory vote” by Camden Council:

She said the victory vote was in keeping with the spirit of Camden’s status as the birthplace of the nation’s wool industry. “The Macarthurs will be proud of us,” she said.

Huh? What’s the wool industry got to do with any of this?

What else did she say?

“I want Muslims in Australia to attend our schools so their children can grow up with our values, and more importantly, so that their mothers can meet Australian mums and see how they don’t have to put up with the sort of treatment they sometimes endure.”

Meanwhile, across all geographic areas of Australia and in all socioeconomic and cultural groups, a conservatively estimated 36% of women experience domestic violence and a conservatively estimated 19% of women experience sexual assault (2005). And they’re just the women who report the assaults, with God knows how many more going unreported.

Oh, but Mad Kate conveniently ignores that. Only Moozlim women are under some kind of terrible “treatment”.

And what does Pauline Hanson think of this new myopic ignoramus upstart?

The Herald called Mrs Hanson about her would-be successor. She hung up without offering a word.

O come, all ye bigots, I shall be your racist mouthpiece.

Note: a bigger article about Mad Kate and the Camden outrage, plus the lead-up to the vote and the involvement of racist groups such as Australia First and the Anglo-Australian National Community Council and their cowardly midnight actions can be found here.

At the risk of stating the obvious, the danger of asking members of the public for their opinion is that they might just give it to you. This was illustrated perfectly in a recent edition of the Shepparton News, a regional Victorian tabloid.

A reporter and photographer ventured out into Greater Shepparton asking the following question for the newspaper’s “On The Street” section:

If you could learn another language, what would it be and why?

From the responses published, one can only assume (in order of likelihood) that:

1. The opinions editor has a wicked sense of humour
2. Of all the responses received, only six were (barely) fit to publish
3. There were only six respondents, and space and deadline constraints meant all of their answers had to be given a run.

A few stood out. The first was that of 38-year-old Stanhope resident Denise Bowyer who, despite possibly having told a porky-pie about her age, offered the following:

Japenese (sic) so I can understand most of them.

Either Stanhope has an enormous Japanese community whose Engrish is barely intelligible, or Denise believes all Asian-looking people (you know, the ones with the funny eyes) are Nips. I’ll let you decide which is more likely to be the case.

Clint Morris, a 14-year-old Mooroopna resident, puts an even finer point on Denise’s sentiment with his response:

Asian, because there are so many of them here.

Clint’s done away with the folly of trying to pin down these shifty immigrants to individual nationalities — and why not? Since they all look the same, it makes perfect sense that they’d all speak the same imaginary language.

Bill Huylands, 67, of Moama provided what, on the face of it, seems a reasonable enough response:

Spanish, because you can use it anywhere.

Except in Stanhope, of course, where the throngs of incorrigible little foreigners refuse to understand a word of anything but Japenese (sic). And would probably karate-chop you for your insolence anyway, amigo.

The most thoughtful response came from 12-year-old Steven Sutton of Invergordon:

Auslan, so I can understand deaf people.

A terrific answer. Which goes to show that youth need not be a barrier to commonsense and open-mindedness.

Tonight, I’ve been catching up with my reading at the online American magazine, Slate. I was particularly captivated by their slideshow on the anti-busing rallies in Boston in 1976 (long after the Civil Rights Movement began). It was an ugly episode, it goes without saying. The nightmarish photo below earned the photographer, Stanley J. Forman, the 1977 Pulitzer Prize. As you look at it, you can see why the photo, called The Soiling of Old Glory, won the prize – it captured a white youth transforming the American flag into a weapon directed at a black lawyer.

You would think that, in this day and age, the issue of segregration and desegregation was no longer an issue. Wrong. As the slideshow points out:

In 2006, when Deval Patrick became the first black governor of Massachusetts, the Boston Globe expressed hope that his inauguration would “finally wash away the shameful stain of that day in 1976.” Last June, however, a Supreme Court ruling forbade school districts from assigning students based on their race, and Patrick’s administration has been forced to find ways to avoid dismantling desegregation programs throughout Massachusetts. The issue, and the photograph, continue to haunt Boston, and the nation.

Here’s hoping that if Barack Obama wins not only the Presidential nomination but the Presidency itself, America might finally realise that being dark-skinned is not an abomination or evil or whatever silly story it is that white supremacists and other racist ratbags peddle.

As for the other photos in the slideshow, the one that made me look at it for ages was the picture of the woman and child freefalling out a window when their apartment block caught fire. There is a cruel beauty in that particular photo, and I wonder what you think.

I’m reading a pretty good account of Bob Hawke’s prime ministership at the moment — The Hawke Years: The story from the inside (1993) by former Hawke speechwriter Stephen Mills — and thought I’d share a couple of interesting passages with you, seeing as I found the book at a garage sale and it’s well and truly out of print.

In the first passage, Mills is attempting to explain why Hawke — whose diplomatic skills were regarded highly among world leaders at the time — was never quite successful at “breaking through the starch and reserve of the Japanese”. It made me laugh out loud on the train:

Perhaps his style and abrasive vernacular puzzled them. On one occasion he told Japanese businessmen they would be ‘out of their cotton-picking minds’ if they didn’t support him in the pilots’ dispute; another time he assured the Japanese that Australia wouldn’t play ‘funny buggers’ on protectionism. He was told later that the phrase had been translated for the audience as ‘humorous homosexuals’.

The second passage describes a moment on Brisbane talk-back radio where Hawke “veered back to indiscipline” during the otherwise meticulously managed 1990 election campaign. Indiscipline aside, Hawke’s rebuke serves as a stark reminder of just how far John Howard’s latent racism and cynical opportunism later degraded the moral authority of the prime ministerial office:

On this occasion, when a caller offensively urged Hawke to hold a referendum on Asian immigration, he embarked on a passionate assault on racism. ‘I happen to believe profoundly in the concept that I learned from my father, and that is if you believe in some concept of a God, then if there’s a fatherhood of God then we are all brothers and sisters in this world. So I reject you profoundly in terms of fundamental patriotism for the future of this country, and I reject you with total contempt on moral grounds.’

Sadly, I’m pretty sure we’ll never again hear a prime minister publicly reject a bigoted citizen with “total contempt”. But with any luck we’ve also seen the last prime minister who will treat so many citizens with contempt, while enjoying the shameful cheerleading and apologetics of a most viciously partisan commentariat.

Australians are not at all racist.

Step 1: Listen to this podcast (if you can — it’s pretty turgid stuff and is quite hard work) by Prodos on the topic of racism and racialism.

Step 2: Read this post by Prodos on the inferior “stone age” indigenous people of Australia.

Step 3: Listen to Prodos’ anti-Islam tune Under Sharia Law, or if you value your eardrums read the lyrics.

Step 4: Decide whether Prodos is a racist, a racialist, or neither. Give us your conclusions in comments.

Yes, readers, you read that headline correctly. And here’s why:

HAVE we gone mad? A few drunk Sudanese louts bash a policeman yesterday and we carry on as if we’ve never seen such savagery on our streets.

Never, bellow the talkback callers to an eager ear, until we let in these uncivilised Africans.

With all due respect, Mr Talkback Caller, you are an idiot. We’ve got thugs of all colours—white in particular—now punching police and anyone else they find, and the Sudanese aren’t the worst of them.

While you were on the phone panicking about a few Africans, 50 extra police were this very week deployed into the city to deal with the grim fact that scores more people are getting bashed in the heart of our state’s capital, and not by Africans. Panic about that, sir.

And panic, too, about two other scary things we haven’t been short of lately: drunks and underparented children. Both of which, I suspect, have contributed to an alarming rise in violence—and a crime rate in Victoria that’s worse these past few years than anything seen since 1934.

Take the half a dozen white beer-brains at a Mornington Peninsula caravan park, who an hour after the Sudanese scuffle were pushing around police sent to shush them, and had to be sobered up with pepper spray and a trip for three to the cells.

Never accuse GrodsCorp of being incapable of giving credit where credit’s due.