ANDREW BOLT: RACIST, FASCIST, ISLAMOPHOBE

Andrew Bolt is Australia's most dangerous racist. He is employed by a major Australian regional newspaper and a TV station that broadcasts nationwide in order for him to directly peddle his racist and Islamophobic propaganda. His blog at Rupert Murdoch's Herald-Sun newspaper enjoys the support of a small but dedicated group of like-minded extreme right-wing bigots, rednecks and racists who regularly comment at his blog, and his TV spot is financially supported by various asssorted climate change deniers who have a vested interest in being anti-renewable resources and pro-pollutionist.

Bolt is dangerous because he has a wide audience that his employers see as being gullible to their brand of media propaganda.

This blog aims to expose Bolt for what he really is - a deceitful propagandist intent on dividing Australians by promoting fear and paranoia of multiculturalism. Without the backing of the likes of Murdoch and Gina Rinehart, et al, Bolt is nothing.

Monday, April 21, 2014

ANDREW BOLT AND THE AUSTRALIAN DEFENCE LEAGUE CONNECTION

Last night the 7.30 Report showed a segment exposing the activities of a neo-Nazi anti-Islamic hate group calling itself the Australian Defence League (ADL), an off-shoot of the English Defence League (EDL), an extreme right-wing anti-Islam hate organisation made up mainly of ex-Nazis, skinheads and football hooligans.

Their enemy du jour is Islam. They now deny their Nazi and neo-Nazi roots and the anti-Semitism of their twentieth century background; indeed, many of their members today support the Israeli Zionist cause despite their past hatred of Jews. It’s a classic case of ‘the enemy of your enemy is your friend’. For them, Nazism is old hat. Of course, there are those that will always be Jew-haters but, for today, their hatred is directed at Islam. Today, they’ll keep quiet about their past anti-Semitism; they have a new enemy in their sights.

Many of Bolt’s Bloggies, those that regularly comment on Bolt’s blog supporting his anti-Islam rhetoric and hatreds, have openly supported the ADL in their comments. Some have even inferred that they are members.

Bolt himself is smart enough not to be associated directly with these extremists but certainly he sympathises with their views. And he is more than happy for his Bloggies to peddle support for the ADL at his blog. ADL members, in turn, support Bolt’s views and his blog.


The ADL is a growing hate organisation that Bolt indirectly supports. The Australian Federal Police need to investigate the ADL – which I understand they are – and also need to investigate Bolt’s association with them to assess the extent of his incitement to violence, either directly or indirectly, against the Australian Islamic community.

Wednesday, April 9, 2014

BOLT: PAID LACKEY OF ISRAELI ZIONISM

Andrew Bolt in his column today has admitted having been treated to a trip to Israel bought and paid for by Australia’s Israel lobby.

While many nations offer ex-gratia trips to politicians and journalists in order to promote some political or commercial cause for that nation, when it comes to Israeli lobby groups handing out trips to Israel to right-wing journalists you can bet it isn’t in order to influence that journalist into writing favorable tourist copy for the beaches on the sea-front of Tel Aviv.

Bolt is a classic neoconservative. He presents with all the classic characteristics of a modern neoconservative – and no, contrary to popular opinion, one doesn’t need to be Jewish to be a neoconservative, though, of course, many are.

All neoconservatives are pro-Zionist and anti-Palestinian. Neoconservatives all support the notion of Israelis settling in the West Bank and all privately believe that the territories the Israelis occupied in 1967 after the Six Day War should be annexed and become part of Greater Israel as they did to the Golan Heights. I say ‘privately’ because, at the moment, it is not politically expedient for their objectives to be so forthright. Having said that, there are some more extremist neoconservatives who have no qualms at all about saying what their objectives are but most, rather than push their own agenda, rail instead against the Palestinians particularly those in the West Bank that throw stones and those in the Gaza Strip that fire rockets into Israel in an effort to deter Israelis from shooting unarmed Palestinians near the Gaza border with Israel. Israeli Zionists and their neoconservative allies are simply waiting for an opportunity to find an excuse to once and for all fully invade and occupy these places and to destroy all of their enemies with the eventual aim of annexing all of the Palestinian territories. Any war with Iran will provide the casus belli for the Israelis to invade the occupied territories.

Part of neoconservatism’s pro-Zionist rhetoric is to label all anti-Zionists as being anti-Semites in an effort to demonise them as being Jew-haters. Bolt has frequently accused anti-Zionists as being anti-Semites and Jew-haters. However, for this rhetoric to be effective, Bolt needs to rely on the ignorance of his readers. The fact is; there are many anti-Zionists around the world who are Jewish, indeed, there are many Israelis who are anti-Zionists.


Bolt has been bought lock, stock and barrel by the Israel lobby in Australia.

Tuesday, April 8, 2014

RACISM BY INFERENCE: HOW BOLT’S NOT SO SUBTLE RACIST PROPAGANDA WORKS

At every opportunity Bolt can find he attempts to subtly push his racist agenda at his blog by using topical news items to demonise certain targeted groups. He achieves this by cherry-picking only news items that show non-white non-European Australians to be the perpetrators of mainly violent crimes – especially if those crimes include rape and murder.

Today, Bolt highlights an AAP story published in the Sydney Morning Herald about two sixteen-year-old girls who were sexually assaulted in a Sydney park by three men who the SMH described variously as being of ‘dark complexion, thin build and with black hair’. Bolt then cut and pastes the police media release about the crime which, as well as describing the perpetrators as the SMH did, added that the three men were of ‘Mediterranean/Middle Eastern appearance’.

This was enough for Bolt.

Bolt takes advantage of the story to push his racist agenda in two ways. First, he pans the SMH by asking; why did the SMH, a media outlet that Bolt regards as ‘Left-wing’ and also happens to be one of Murdoch’s rival newspapers, not mention the ethnicity of the perpetrators as the police had done in their media release? And, secondly, by knowing the perpetrators were of Mediterranean/Middle Eastern appearance, he knows that his readers will presume they are probably Arab and, therefore, likely to be Muslims – indeed, everything that Bolt and his bloggies hate. Added to this is the fact that, because the ethnicity of the two girls was not described, it would be presumed that they were white Europeans even though we don’t actually know their ethnicity. Bolt relies on his previous stereotyping stories of non-European men attacking white girls to complete his propaganda picture. He will leave it to his coterie of racist bloggies to complete the demonisation of Bolt’s targeted group.


Mentioning that describing the perpetrators as being of ‘Mediterranean/Middle Eastern appearance’ actually means very little ethnicity-wise since the region covers a hole region of the planet containing people of many ‘ethnicities’ ranging from Africans to Israelis would be about as useful as merely mentioning them as the SMH had.

Tuesday, April 1, 2014

AUSTRALIA'S CHOICE: STOP THE BOATS OR STOP RACISM

Australians are slowly edging toward facing the reality of what the boatpeople saga is really all about.

The catch-cry of the right-wing Australian commentariat and politicians has been ‘Stop the Boats’. They have claimed in their rhetoric that by stopping the boats the drownings will stop.  They have said that, in order to deter others from making the perilous journey across the sea in leaky boats, those that do safely make it to Australia’s shores must be treated harshly by being told they will never be able to settle in Australia and that they’ll be placed in camps in places that are alien and inhospitable to them and where they may face an unknown future which may remain unknown for a very long time. All this, so we are told, is necessary ‘to stop the drownings’.

Accompanying the rhetoric of ‘Stop the Boats’, there has been a relentless tirade of commentary from both commentators and politicians demonising boatpeople by accusing them of being ‘queue jumpers’, ‘economic refugees’, ‘country shoppers’, and even ‘terrorists’. From Australia’s right-wing government the rhetoric has been no less relentless. Policies have been wrapped in nationalistic slogans and titles such as ‘Border Protection’ and ‘Operation Sovereign Borders’ as though Australia was being invaded by some kind of sneaky guerrilla force attempting to stealthily infiltrate Australia rather than desperate people merely seeking asylum.

Along with the ‘Stop the Boats’ and the ‘Stop the Drownings’ rhetoric, a new catch-cry was heard: ‘Stop the People Smugglers’ and ‘Put the People Smugglers out of business’, both slogans clearly designed to shift  attention away from the actual refugees.

Both the Abbott Coalition government and the former Labor government of Rudd and Gillard have fallen over themselves to placate a now negative Australian public opinion about boatpeople.

But all of these slogans and excuses avoid saying what this is really all about.

For some reason, the non right-wing mainstream media to a very large extent have also avoided mentioning it while the right-wing media have gone to great lengths to deny that which the Left in the blogosphere and social media have been saying all along; that Australia’s policies are not about ‘Stopping the Boats’ or ‘Stopping the Drownings’ or ‘Border Protection’ or ‘Stopping the People Smugglers’ or ‘Stopping Queue Jumpers’ or ‘Stopping Economic Refugees’, they’re about stopping non-European, non-white, Muslims from coming to Australia and threatening the very core of what can only be called ‘Australianism’. In other words it’s about racism – pure and simple.

The cheerleaders for this racism – and the main source of the swing in public opinion away from the ‘fair go’ attitude of the post-White Australian era of the 70s and 80s – has been the emergence of extreme right-wing columnists in the mainstream media dominated by the Murdoch-owned newspapers.

Ironically, one of the reasons Australians are now edging toward facing the reality of the boatpeople saga really being about racism is because of the current debate over the change to Australia’s laws about racial discrimination and vilification.

Much of the debate about changes to the racial discrimination and vilification laws has be been brought about by the judgement of a Victorian court against one of the most vocal of the mainstream media’s anti-boatpeople protagonists, Andrew Bolt of the Herald-Sun newspaper. The judgement was not related to boatpeople but to one of Bolt’s other hobby horses, the demonisation of light coloured Indigenous persons who choose to identify as Aboriginal for cultural purposes, though Bolt actually accuses them of choosing to identify as Aboriginal in order to obtain some kind of pecuniary advantage.

Bolt denies being a racist; indeed, he declares that he is anti-racist. He even goes so far as to say that those who say that he is a racist are, in fact, racist themselves because they are preventing Australia becoming a nation where all Australians, regardless of skin colour or ethnicity, should be treated equally as ‘Australians’. He argues that recognising ‘race’ differences – and that includes recognition of different cultures, heritage and religions as well as actual race – is dividing Australians and, therefore, is racist. He calls it the ‘New Racism’, a term purloined from Bolt’s arch-nemesis, the historian Robert Manne. Manne, who first coined the term ‘New Racism’ in an article written in 2002 entitled ‘Beware the New Racism’ in which he argues that racism is no longer restricted to just blood and biology but also to culture and religion. Bolt, who has had a long-standing argument with Manne about the ‘Stolen Generations’, has seen fit to usurp Manne’s tag for use in describing his own version of ‘New Racism’.

What Bolt refuses to accept is that recognising and acknowledging the culture and heritage of people from different ethnicities and racial backgrounds has absolutely nothing to do with being ‘racist’ from his peculiar viewpoint but has everything to do with the sharing of heritage and the tolerance and respect of Australians’ differences regardless of whether it’s blood and biology or culture and religion. It’s not about ‘racism’, it’s about embracing and recognising diversity within a nation’s peoples.

Bolt and his fellow right-wing commentators by virtue of having access to one of Australia’s largest media organisations have over nearly two decades managed to manipulate public opinion to such an extent that Australians have been turned from being a nation keen to give people a ‘fair go’ to being a nation of intolerant bigots. The problem for Australia now is how to turn Australia’s world-wide reputation of being racists and bigots around and that can only be done by recognising that Australia has, indeed, become racist, and that in turn can only be done by education.

The current debate about bigotry in Australia can provide an opportunity to turn things around. Hopefully, that process of education, a process which rebuts the notion of Bolt’s so-called ‘New Racism’ and rejects the creeping new trend of ‘democracy by public opinion’ which gives power to those that have the wherewithal to manipulate public opinion, has now begun.

The debates are not about Left and Right politics; it’s about the morality of right and wrong and the elimination of poll-driven politics.


It’s time for Australia to put this glitch in our reputation as an easy going fair-minded multicultural society behind us and rebuild a more tolerant Australia free of racial bigotry.