ANDREW BOLT: THE ‘JULIUS STREICHER’ OF THE AUSTRALIAN EXTREME RIGHT

Andrew Bolt, Australia’s most notorious racist and Islamophobe, like the Nazi Jew-baiter Julius Streicher before him, continues to relentlessly pursue his program of hate against Islamic and non-European immigrants to Australia.

His almost daily attacks (here’s today’s) against Islam at his on-line column at Rupert Murdoch’s Herald-Sun newspaper are designed to demonise the entire Islamic community. Bolt does this by cherry-picking the misdeeds of a very few and inferring that whatever offence has been committed by an Islamic person was done because they are Muslims and that they are representative of what the whole Islamic community are like. In other words, Bolt misrepresents the values of the Islamic community claiming that Western values are different and, therefore, are better than those of Muslims. It is exactly the same propaganda technique that Julius Streicher used in his Der Stürmer newspaper in Germany during the Nazi era to demonise the Jews of Germany and later throughout Europe.

Like Streicher, Bolt hopes that his relentless propaganda demonising Muslims and Islam will influence public opinion to the extent that the Australian people will eventually hate Islam and Muslims as much as he does and that the government will then deport those that are here or, at least, not allow any further Muslim immigration to Australia.

The problem is; it never just ends there. Streicher started his hate campaign against Jews in much the same way. At first he demanded that Jews should be expelled from Germany. Over time, as the Nazis and other extreme right-wing groups coalesced and became increasingly more influential politically, so the persecution against Jews went beyond mere words. Eventually, as the Nazis moved into power, so the persecution of Jews increased. They were shunned by their fellow Germans and then excluded from certain professions. As Hitler’s expansionist dreams became reality so the persecution of Jews was taken a step further and they were put in camps and then later deported, mostly to Poland. As Hitler marched further east into Russia so the final plans that became the ‘final solution to the Jewish problem’ were put into effect. The rest of the story is all too well known.

Yet there are some among us that never learn and others that seem to have forgotten about the horrors of the last century. In more recent history, as we have seen in Bosnia-Herzegovina where over 7000 Muslims were murdered simply because they were Muslims, history does repeat.

The Jews of Germany and Europe, whilst aware of the anti-Semitism that was pervasive, not just in Germany, but throughout Europe and the US during that period, never in their worst nightmares as the war approached imagined that Germany would actually attempt the wholesale slaughter of every one of Europe’s Jews. But in just a very short time it went from abusive harassment in Streicher’s Der Stürmer newspaper to what ended up being the deaths of millions. And one of the reasons so many did die was because they simply did not believe that such hatreds could lead to slaughter on such a massive scale.

We should not allow the abusive harassment against Muslims that we see in Bolt’s column of hate to continue. While Bolt continues to claim his rights to ‘freedom of speech’, his abuse of those rights to harass and demonise Muslims should be stopped in its tracks. His column of hate should be shut down. This meme about ‘freedom of speech being a cornerstone of democracy’ is simply being used by people like Bolt as an excuse to pedal their hatreds.

Freedom of speech is one thing; the abuse of it in order to pedal hatred is something else.

ANDREW BOLT AND THE NAÏVETÉ OF THE ‘FREEDOM OF SPEECH’ DEBATE

There are some on the Left that seem to be extremely naïve when it comes to considering certain aspects of free speech. Paul Howes, the national secretary of the Australian Workers’ Union, seems to be a prime example of this type of naïveté. In an article in today’s The Australian newspaper, Howes defends Australia’s most obnoxious racist, Andrew Bolt, on the grounds that freedom of speech is essential for a robust ‘democracy’. Howes reckons:

Andrew grabs an idea and often follows his logic to wherever it may lead him; God help those who stand in his way!
Now while I really can't accept some of this stuff I will - unsurprisingly - defend to the death his right to run a hot-headed, half-cocked argument where he says he is now putting into his crosshairs all sorts of political, academic and media grandees. It is the Voltaire in me that says I don't like what you're saying - or about to say - but sure as hell I reckon you have the right, in our democracy, to run that argument.

Why would anyone want to die defending Bolt’s right to foment hatred in the world? Because that is exactly what Bolt is doing. For centuries there have been propagandists like Bolt that seem to see it as their life’s work to insult, demean, belittle and ostracise those who are different from them solely because they are different.

Just as Julius Streicher, the Nazi propagandist proprietor of the anti-Semite newspaper Der Stürmer, fomented hatred of Jews throughout Germany and Europe which ultimately led to the attempted extermination of European Jewry that resulted in the deaths of millions, so Andrew Bolt is subtly doing exactly the same as Streicher did by fomenting hatred of all things that are not a part of a Europeanised Judeo-Christian Australian society.

I wonder, though, if Paul Howes would defend Julius Streicher ‘to the death’.

Bolt’s disgusting views about Aborigines and the plight of indigenous peoples which he carefully cloaks in patronising rhetoric are well known. They are views that have now seen him before the courts as he attempts to defend himself against charges of defaming people who identify as Aboriginal by accusing them of defrauding the Australian people on account of them not being black enough for Bolt’s liking. But Bolt's racism doesn't stop at Aborigines. It goes beyond skin colour and physical differences; it also extends into other peoples cultures and religions.

Bolts paranoid detestation of Islam is well known and in many ways even more fanatical than his very public written and verbal assaults on Aboriginality. The reason for Bolt’s appearance in the courts is just the tip of the iceberg as far as the legal aspects of Bolt’s racism are concerned; it doesn’t even begin to address the real potential consequences of his racism.

Hatred of Islam, Islamophobia, is sweeping the Western world thanks to the likes of Andrew Bolt and his so-called rights to ‘freedom of speech’. We should all bear in mind the consequences of such hatreds as we approach the anniversary of the July 1995 massacres of Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina who were murdered by Serbians who had been taught to hate by people just like Andrew Bolt; murdered for no other reason than they were Muslims.

Defend the right to free speech that helps progress society by all means, but the likes of Julius Streicher and Andrew Bolt don’t use that right for progress; they abuse it to foment hatred and disharmony that ultimately lead to terror and death in once civilised societies.

That’s indefensible.

ANDREW BOLT: THE DECEITFUL RACIST

In his column today, Andrew Bolt, Australia’s most outrageous racist, attempts to deceive his detractors by pretending he actually cares for the plight of those boatpeople in Australia who may be sent to Malaysia where refugees are kept in appalling conditions. The government’s proposed five-for-one deal with Malaysia whereby 800 asylum seeking boatpeople in Australia will be sent to Malaysia in exchange for 4000 refugees currently being held there is at the core of Bolt’s deceit. The problem for Bolt isn’t really the well being of the 800 that may be sent into horrendous conditions but, rather, the 4000 non-European refugees that could arrive in Australia for settlement.

In the event that Gillard is forced to abandon the plan because of the appalling conditions in Malaysia, it will be a win-win for racists like Bolt because they will have stopped an extra 3200 non-European refugees from having the opportunity of coming to Australia as well as having scored a propaganda victory against their political enemy.

The ideal situation now is for Australia to take 3200 refugees from Malaysia and keep the 800 that were to be sent there. That way 800 will not be sent to suffer and 3200 will be relieved of their suffering. All should then be released into the community.

It’s a win-win for refugees and lose-lose for racists!

MURDOCH JOURNALIST, GREG SHERIDAN, DISPLAYS HIS RACIST CREDENTIALS.

In a lengthy article last Saturday in The Australian titled ‘How I lost faith in multiculturalism’, Greg Sheridan finally showed himself to be the racist that we always knew he was. Of course, having ranted against Islam in the past, usually when discussing the war against terrorism, we already knew that he was a racist. But in those circumstances he usually denied being racist by saying that his rants were directed against extremist Muslim, not moderate Islam. But now he has finally come out against Islam generally thus displaying his true racist credentials. At one point in his article Sheridan relates how he witnessed a white Australian women being verbally abused and then spat on. He explains that the men who abused this woman were of ‘Middle Eastern appearance’ inferring that because they were Middle Eastern they must have been Muslims and so, therefore, were behaving offensively because they were Muslims. As historian Robert Manne pointed out in response to Sheridan’s hate piece, if Sheridan had replaced the words ‘…of Middle Eastern appearance’ with ‘…of Jewish appearance’ then one would have a quote worthy of something that may have been found in Julius Streicher’s Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer. With this disclosure of his racist attributes, Sheridan now joins the ranks of those other leading Murdoch racists; Andrew Bolt of the Herald Sun in Melbourne, and Tim Blair and Piers Akerman of the Daily Telegraph in Sydney. Andrew Bolt, Australia’s premier racist, couldn’t help himself but pass comment over Sheridan’s racist rant and Manne’s response. Bolt called on Manne, who also happens to be Jewish and who is also Bolt’s arch nemesis, to apologise to Sheridan saying Manne ‘demeans’ both Sheridan and the Holocaust. As it happens, while Sheridan deserves to be ‘demeaned’ on the basis of his declaration of being a racist, Manne actually didn’t mention the Holocaust. In the course of his racist rant, Sheridan mentioned that many of the Right wing parties in Europe that were now anti-Islam had in the past been anti-Semitic but have now changed their stance. He says, for example, the French National Front party had “recently ditched the anti-Semitism and now stands primarily against Muslim immigration and Islamic influence”. The reality is that many of those white European Australians that are now opposed to Islam were once also anti-Semitic themselves like their peers in England. One wonders if the likes of Murdoch’s journos in Australia weren’t once amongst them. Like in Orwell’s 1984, for the likes of Bolt, Sheridan, Blair, Akerman, et al, they occasionally need to change their enemy but they always must have an enemy. The right-wing in the post war years still hated Jews even in Australia but, like leopards, they can never change their spots but the can attempt to hide them. Once a racist, always a racist.

AUSTRALIA’S RACISTS ARE TO BLAME FOR THE CHRISTMAS ISLAND BOATPEOPLE TRAGEDY.

The noisy racists of Australia and their cheerleaders in the Australian right-wing Murdoch press need to take the blame for the tragedies that have left hundreds dead in the seas around Australia. The policies they have demanded from successive governments culminated in yesterday’s tragedy that saw some thirty people, including women and children, drowned as they tried to reach Christmas Island, an Australian territory in the Indian Ocean.

These racist cheer leaders are Tim Blair and Piers Akerman of Sydney’s Daily Telegraph newspaper, and Andrew Bolt of Melbourne’s Sun-Herald newspaper. Bolt is still awaiting trial facing charges of racial vilification of Aboriginal people while Akerman famously accused Muslims of starting the February 2009 bushfires in Victoria. Both newspapers are owned by Rupert Murdoch.

Asylum seeking refugees are desperate to come to Australia and Australia’s racists are just as desperate to keep them out by trying to create an impression that public opinion actually supports their demands that boatpeople do not come to Australia. As a result, successive Australian governments, most of which are to some extent or another racist themselves and who have partially conceded to the racists demands in exchange for votes, have created conditions where asylum seeking refugees need to take extreme risks in order to try and touch Australian soil.

Ex-prime minister John Howard, a well known racist from way back, even went to the trouble of excising some of Australia’s island territories in order to deprive asylum seekers of any ability to claim having arrived in Australia. Refugees that reached these islands were transferred to off-shore facilities where they were kept in long drawn-out limbo whilst their claims were processed; a process that often took years for some refugees.

Following the recent tragedy off Christmas Island, Andrew Bolt, Australia’s most notorious racist and Islamophobe, was the first and quickest to jump on the politicisation wagon even before the tragedy had even finished unfolding by declaring in his online hate column that Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard and her Labor government had ‘blood on their hands’ for not being tough on asylum seekers claiming that by not being tough they are being ‘lured to their deaths’. Bolt later went on to accuse Australian Greens leader, Bob Brown, also of having ‘blood on his hands’.

Senator Brown had written an open letter saying, quite rightly, that it was Bolt that had blood on his hands for having supported the wars that created the refugee crisis in the first place.

The bottom line is this: Bolt and his comrades Tim Blair and Piers Akerman, together with their flock of supporters at their respective blogs, are racists that do not want non-European people, particularly Muslim people, in Australia. Bolt’s politicisation of this tragedy in order to advance his racist aims and his appalling and transparent facade of pretending to actually care about what happened to these people should disgust fair-minded Australians.

AUSTRALIA’S TOP RACISTS RUSH TO ULTRA-RACIST ANDREW BOLT’S AID PRIOR TO HIS TRIAL FOR RACIAL VILIFICATION.

Two of Australia's foremost pseudo-intellectual racists and right-wing extremists, John Izzard, a frequent writer for the right-wing magazine Quadrant and Quadrant Online, and Keith Windschuttle, the well-known ‘Stolen Generations’ denialist and perverter of Aboriginal history, have both written articles defending Andrew Bolt as he is about to face Federal Court to answer charges of racial vilification.

The charges against Bolt have been made by a group of Aboriginal activists who are suing Bolt over two articles that he wrote for the Herald Sun newspaper that employs him. In the first article written in April 2009 and titled ‘White is the new black’, Bolt accuses Aboriginal people whose appearance happen to be white but who still prefer to identify themselves as indigenous, of being ‘political Aborigines’ and accuses them of identifying as Aboriginals for nefarious purposes.

In the second article titled ‘White fellas in the black’, written in August 2009, Bolt similarly accuses Aboriginal people of identifying themselves as Aboriginal in order to gain pecuniary advantages by way of grants and awards.

The question about who is black and who is white – or who is Aboriginal and who is not – is the centrepiece of the pending legal debate and both Izzard and Windschuttle discuss the background to this argument while carefully avoiding any direct discussion as to how this relates to Bolt’s case through fear of contemptuously pre-empting the courts decision.

There is also a secondary implication related to this case. Bolt argues that any decision restraining him from publicly speaking or writing about how he feels about this subject – or, indeed, any subject – violates his rights to freedom of speech and this aspect of the case is also touched on, albeit lightly, again presumably not to pre-empt any decision by the court, in the Izzard and Windschuttle articles.

If this were an isolated incident of a group of people who simply took umbrage to what someone else had said about them in the course of, say, incidental discussion then the matter would be easily resolved one way or the other by a court or even settled prior to going to court. But, in this case, it is not that simple.

While the question of ethnicity is at the centre of the debate from the legal point of view, and the question of freedom of speech will give cause for further debate depending on the judgement that will eventually be handed down, there are other, in many ways, even more important issues at stake here particularly when they relate to Andrew Bolt and his kind.

Bolt is a high profile journalist and blogger employed by a Rupert Murdoch-owned mainstream newspaper. He is well known for his racism particularly in relation to Aboriginal peoples. He is also a well known Islamophobe and xenophobe, climate change denier and pro-pollutionist.

Apart from the legal specifics relating to the case, there is also the moral question of why Bolt continually sees it necessary to vilify Aborigines and non-European foreigners at every opportunity at his blog. He does this mostly by innuendo, inference and the occasional classic double entendre whereby he writes on a subject seemingly totally unrelated to his usual run-of-the-mill xenophobic or racist rants but which is clearly meant to convey an opinion that is so offensive he could not possibly write it directly without facing further charges of vilification and discrimination. An example of this can be found here.

Bolt usually takes care not to cross the line himself. He does this by cutting and pasting sometimes quite long extracts of other peoples work obtained from all over the blogosphere and, if it’s really offensive, he ensures that the authors are out of legal reach. He then relies on his small but vocal coterie of regular commenters at his blog to endorse and amplify his intended opinion with many of the comments sometimes interpreting that opinion in a manner so crude and offensive that even Bolt or his moderators need occasionally to censor or ’snip’ it.

Bolt’s blog is not just an obscure column tucked away in some online digital recess but, rather, it is an upfront showcase of right-wing bigotry and outright racism. It’s not just Bolt the racist. The racism comes as a complete packing which is his blog; it’s ‘Bolt’s Racist Blog’, almost an entity in itself, which shamefully is paid for and published by Rupert Murdoch, and its influence, unfortunately, is potentially powerful.

It is unfortunate that Bolt’s racist views about Aboriginal people and boatpeople have now fraudulently influenced public opinion to the extent that politicians are now formulating policies relating to these peoples based on the ill-informed views of only a small but vocal rednecked and racist minority group of Australians.

One hopes that the complaints against Bolt are upheld and, while it is unlikely to see an end to the likes of Bolt’s racism, at least it would have demonstrated that Bolt’s racism is not acceptable in a multicultural society such as Australia’s.


This article can also be found at the Telling the History of the Twenty-First Century as it Really Is blog.

ANDREW BOLT, AUSTRALIAN ULTRA-RACIST MURDOCH JOURNALIST, GETS TAKEN TO COURT ACCUSED OF RACIAL VILIFICATION.

At long last, a group of Aboriginal people are to take Australian journalist Andrew Bolt of Rupert Murdoch’s ‘Herald Sun’ newspaper based in Melbourne, Australia, to the Federal Court accusing him of racial vilification. The documents were lodged with the court on 7 September 2010, and the case is due to be heard this coming Wednesday, 29 September 2010.

For years Bolt has been vilifying people who identify themselves as being Aboriginal accusing them of abusing their racial identity in order to receive benefits and awards that are exclusively for Aboriginal people. Bolt seems to think that some people who identify themselves as Aboriginal are ‘too white’ to be Aboriginal. For Bolt, it would seem that the only test of Aboriginality is the colour of ones skin.

The group that are prosecting the matter are basing their claim about Bolt’s vilification on two articles Bolt had written and that were published in the ‘Herald Sun’ newspaper. The first appeared in Bolt’s Column and blog on 15 April 2009 and was titled ‘White is the New Black’, and the second appeared as an opinion piece on 21 August 2009 titled ‘White fellas in the black’. In both articles Bolt attempts to vilify people with pale skin and who identify as Aboriginal by implying that they are frauds. Bolt uses his own brand of genetic rhetoric of eye, hair, and skin colour to support his claims.

There’s a certain kind of inverse irony with Bolt’s racial views. Readers may remember the 1978 made-for-television film, ‘Holocaust’, about the attempted genocide of European Jewry by the Nazis during World War 2. In it there was a scene which depicted Himmler, the head of the SS, witnessing the execution of captured Jews by shooting. As the naked prisoners were being lined up prior to being shot, Himmler noticed a young man who to Himmler didn’t appear to be Jewish. Himmler called him over to ask him if he was Jewish. The young man readily identified himself as Jewish to which Himmler then responded: “Then I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do for you”. The youth then returned silently to his place at the execution pit where he and the others lined up with him were then shot. For the Jewish youth who was murdered, his Jewish identity was so important to him that he was prepared to lose his life for it despite the opportunity of possibly saving himself from dying that particular day.

For Aboriginal people, racial identification is also important. It may not be about life or death today, but it may well be about the survival or demise of Aboriginal heritage in the future if the likes of racists like Andrew Bolt are successful in denying those that identify as Aboriginal of their heritage.

One can only hope that this prosecution will be successful.