Australian Politics
Tuesday, March 12, 2024
Anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian feminism
A strange combination, considering the subordiate position of women in Muslim society. How is cutting the clitoris out of your daughters feminist? It's a widespread and respected practice in Islam. Islam is a religion of h*te and it appears that, for many, feminism is too. Only h*te explains the marriage between the two. It goes against all that feminism claims to be against
An anti-Israel academic who says “Zionists have no right to cultural safety” and disseminated a leak of private details of hundreds of Jewish artists will be one of the stars of a Sydney Opera House event on Sunday, sparking outrage from Jewish groups.
The venue is now facing calls to reconsider hosting Macquarie University academic Randa Abdel-Fattah, who is to give a talk as part of a festival co-curated by anti-Israel social media influencer Clementine Ford.
Ms Ford and Dr Abdel-Fattah were among the figures who sent to their social media followers a link to leaked personal details of Jewish creatives from a WhatsApp group.
The talk is advertised as a “timely discussion about the need for white feminists to decentre themselves to embrace supporting roles rather than equating empowerment with the ability always to lead”.
Dr Abdel-Fattah has come under fire for a comment she made on her Instagram account on Thursday afternoon that “if you are a Zionist you have no claim or right to cultural safety”.
“And it is my duty as somebody who fights all forms of oppression and violence to deny you a safe space to espouse your Zionist racist ideology,” she continued.
“It is the duty of those who oppose racism, misogyny, homophobia and all forms of oppressive harm to ensure that every space Zionists enter is culturally unsafe for them.
“And institutions and festivals that continue to defer to the fragile feelings and tears of Zionists are as abhorrent as those who would defer to the feelings of misogynists, white supremacists, neo-Nazis.
“You want to cancel pro-Palestinian voices and Palestinians because of cultural safety?? Whose cultural safety are you privileging?”
Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-CEO Alex Ryvchin labelled Dr Abdel-Fattah an “odious extremist” and called on the Sydney Opera House to decide “whether our most iconic venue is the people’s house or a platform for those who denigrate and vilify others”.
“She has likened the Jewish national liberation movement that restored the Jews to Israel after the land had been colonised by others for 2000 years to Nazism and white supremacism,” he said.
“This is an extraordinary piece of deceit that places a target on the back of virtually every Jew. She will deny she hates Jewish people, she will tell us about all the Jewish people she’s friends with but anyone with any awareness of what anti-Semitism is and how it works knows what this person is.”
NSW Jewish Board of Deputies president David Ossip also condemned Dr Abdel-Fattah’s comments.
“Randa Abdel-Fattah, who has infamously refused to condemn Hamas or accept that it is a terrorist organisation, is now seeking to deny safety to Jews here in Australia,” he said.
A Sydney Opera House spokesman said: “The All About Women festival supports freedom of expression, thought, discussion and debate.
“We recognise this is a challenging time of conflict and division about which artists, audiences and the community feel very strongly, and that not all views presented will be shared.”
Dr Abdel-Fattah was contacted for comment.
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Court Finds Emergency Doctor Guilty of Misconduct for Questioning COVID Vaccine
Must not mention clinical experience?
A junior emergency room doctor in Western Australia has been found guilty of professional misconduct after giving a series of speeches and interviews critical of the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and questioning the safety of the Pfizer vaccine.
Dr. Mitch Sambell, who has not practiced medicine since April 2023, has had his registration suspended for three months, and will be subject to a 12-month mentorship by another doctor.
Further, he has been ordered to pay a contribution of $2,500 toward the costs of the Medical Board of Australia, which sought review by the State Administrative Tribunal.
In a schedule of agreed facts, Dr. Sambell admitted to telling an interviewer that administering the vaccine to the wider populations was “at best manslaughter, and at worst, like, outright murder.”
He also described the director-general of the World Health Organisation as a “communist.” That interview was published on a video platform, Rumble, titled “Medical Cover-Up in Australia—Albany Doctor Speaks Out.”
ED was ‘Flooded’
When asked by the interviewer, “Could you confidently say that people died in Australia from the vax jab?'’
Dr Samball responded, “Oh, a 100 percent. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it in ED. I saw so many people die in the hospital, so many people. I’ve got people who are 40 that have heart failure after taking this vaccine ...”
“When it started getting rolled out I started seeing ED just got flooded; our hospital was at 117 percent pretty much all the time. And people say, ‘Oh it’s just a lack of staff, it’s flu season,’ but it wasn’t. We rolled out an experimental therapy to supposedly 95 percent of the population, and then our healthcare system couldn’t cope.”
He noted that the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency has threatened disciplinary action against medical professionals who spoke out against the vaccine and said: “The truth always come out. And you can hide, and you can use your money, and you can manipulate things, but when people find out, you’re in big trouble.”
Dr. Samball repeated similar views at a public meeting in the Shire of Denmark in Western Australia in March 2022, saying, “If you are injected you can still acquire and spread the disease, so why are we allowing this issue to tear apart families, destroy businesses, and ultimately remove people’s ability to choose a medical intervention without coercion, and therefore consent? ... I’m disgusted that the career I love has been used to destroy people’s lives, and honestly I’m ashamed to be called a doctor.”
The State Administrative Tribunal found these remarks “legitimised anti-vaccination sentiments and/or were contrary to accepted medical practice and/or were untrue or misleading,” they were also “designed to, or had the potential to, undermine public trust in the medical profession” and were inconsistent with the Code of Practice with which doctors are expected to abide.
In setting the penalty, the Tribunal noted that Dr. Samball had no previous disciplinary history, has made no public comment on the issue since 2022, and had “shown insight and remorse.”
The ruling has been criticised by newly appointed One Nation member and former Liberal Party MP, Craig Kelly, who said on social media it was “Medical Fascism in Action” and that “Australia is officially a medical fascist state.”
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Christian schools under fire from official body
Tax deductibility for Greenie bodies is OK but not for Christian ones.
The insidious influence of Catholic schools was a matter of no small concern to the colonial establishment in the late 19th century, not least because of their devilish power to corrupt the youth.
“Large numbers of children are perverted to Popery before their parents are aware of the true character of the teaching,” The Protestant Weekly reported in 1886, arguing that Catholic schools should be barred from government funding. Romanist education was “a false mean deceit” propagating “a religion degrading to the intellect and the heart as its design was simply to extract money”.
Such narrow sectarian prejudice would be deemed inappropriate in the 21st century by the guardians of diversity and inclusion, whose job is to make everybody feel comfortable.
Today, their intolerance extends to all forms of Christian education and, indeed, to any private school that undermines the monopoly of the state system. The Productivity Commission fired a particularly nasty salvo against religious schools, out of character for an organisation that once anchored its findings in data rather than the fashionable preconceptions of the intelligentsia.
In November, the Commission published a draft report recommending that donations to Christian school building funds should no longer be tax-deductible. The draft argued that the Deductible Gift Recipient status granted by the Australian Taxation Office to a wide range of registered charities was inappropriate since religious education had limited claim to a broader public purpose.
The PC argues that DGR donations require co-investment from taxpayers since a $100 donation from someone in the top income bracket saved them $35 in tax. This, the PC argues, is unfair since the priorities for public investment in schools should be decided by the government, not God-bothering tax dodgers.
They were not the exact words the PC used, but how else should we read a passage like this? “The Commission does not see a case for additional government support for the practice of religion through the DGR system.”
Or this? “Providing indirect government support through school building funds means government funding is not prioritised according to a systemic assessment of the infrastructure needs of different schools.”
The naive proposition that the government knows better where to spend public money than the public themselves sits awkwardly with the lessons from the Rudd government’s Building the Education Revolution program, a $16.2bn splurge on school infrastructure projects to stave off the recession that never was. The official report into the implementation of the BER by Brad Orgill found public schools in Queensland, NSW and Victoria paid 25 per cent more than Catholic schools and 55 per cent more than independent schools for near identical projects.
Yet the Commission doggedly insists that tax deductibility for donations to school building projects is unfair. It bolsters its argument with a peculiarly perverse interpretation of what constitutes private benefit. Potential donors are most likely to be people directly involved with the school, it claims, and are likely to reap the fruits of their donations as the parents of students or as alumni.
The Commission does not oppose tax-deductible donations per se. Indeed, it argues that they should be extended to a broader range of charities. Nor is it opposed to charities that want to build things, just those who like to build buildings that could be used for religious purposes.
It declares the building of social capital to be a worthy charitable ambition. Ditto is the building of bonds between individuals and communities, however loose that goal might be defined. Capacity-building activities for organisations and individuals get a tick, particularly the building of empowerment and self-determination by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander organisations. Indeed, the Commission recommends the establishment of an independent philanthropic foundation controlled by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people for that very purpose.
It is religion to which the Commission seems to object. Not all of the 5000 school building funds that are currently endorsed are religious. Some three-quarters are for charities, and a quarter for government entities, such as public schools.
Yet the Commission wears its prejudices on its sleeve by mounting arguments exclusively against Christian schools rather than private schools. The concerns about tax-deductible proselytising do not extend to the 148 environmental charities with tax-deductible status.
The Commission does not question the broader public purpose of Boundless Earth Limited, which attracted $30.6m in revenue in its most recent annual report lodged with the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission.
Boundless Earth gained its tax-deductible concession in 2021, stating its purpose is ”to accelerate climate solutions at the scale and speed required for Australia to do its fair share to avert the climate crisis”. Boundless Earth’s registered address is 13 Trelawney Street, Woollahra, the site of the former German consulate now owned by Mike Cannon-Brookes.
The Commission makes no recommendation that the projects and organisations Boundless Earth funds should be put on the public record, or suggest that Boundless should be declared an associated entity by the Australian Electoral Commission under the disclosure rules for political donations. And this would not be an unreasonable recommendation since Cannon-Brookes has made no secret of his financial support for the teal campaign at the last federal election.
The granting of DGR status to Boundless, Greenpeace, Lock The Gate, the Australian Solar Energy Society (which operates as the Smart Energy Council) the Climate Council, Farmers for Climate Action, Veterinarians for Climate Action and other members of the renewable energy cheer squad reinforces the growing concern that privileges of charitable status should be reviewed.
The Albanese government has prudently distanced itself from the Commission’s recommendations. “It’s not something we’re considering,” Assistant Education Minister Anthony Chisholm told a Senate committee last month.
The Commission is right to complain that the DGR system is poorly designed. It is piecemeal, overly complex and lacks a coherent policy rationale. It is responsible for inefficient, inconsistent and unfair outcomes for charities, donors and the community. It is badly in need of review.
Yet the draft report of the philanthropy inquiry is a small-minded, mean-spirited document unworthy of an organisation with a reputation for forensic and impartial examination of public policy. For the sake of their own reputation, the commissioners should find the courage to send the report back to its authors and ask them to start again.
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Embracing ‘feelings’ is no solution to scourge of youth crime
It is beyond incredible that in this technology age, where billions have been devoted to research into the causes and cures of crime, governments remain functionally clueless on how to efficiently deal with the scourge of increasing youth crime.
The most recent data from the ABS shows that in the previous year police charged nearly 50,000 offenders aged 10-17, a 6 per cent increase from the previous year. And we are not taking about petty transgressions. The most common offence among juvenile offenders (25 per cent) is assault intending to cause injury.
The youth crime rate will only drop once the legal system makes young people accountable for their actions and the system reverses the trend of encouraging young people to embrace their feelings. Instead of surrendering to their feelings, they need to be taught impulse control and that the welfare of others is no less important than their own.
The importance of stopping crime cannot be overstated. The empirical data shows crime, especially violent and sexual offences, can ruin people’s lives. Research demonstrates the most effective way to reduce crime is to increase the chances people will be caught. This is known as the theory of absolute general deterrence. It works – all of the time. That’s why speed cameras have had such a dramatic effect on reducing speeding and people don’t commit crime outside police stations.
If governments want to reduce crime, there is a sure fix. Put more uniform police on the streets. In crime hotspots, this should be supplement with AI-enhanced CCTV which automatically notifies police when suspicious activity is detected.
This will only be effective if criminals face unwanted consequences. The primary aim of the criminal justice system is community protection. The main consideration in setting penalty severity is the principle of proportionality; the view that the harm caused by the crime should match the harshness of the penalty.
Both of these considerations mean all serious sexual and violent offenders should be subjected to harsh sanctions. The human body does not distinguish between the level of suffering caused by being stabbed by a 50-year-old or 15-year-old. The community needs to be protected as much from teenagers as adult criminals.
The goal of rehabilitation is alluring but it’s failing – youth reoffending rates are higher now than five years ago. Clearly the offenders are receiving the wrong advice and treatment. The criminal justice system needs to stop the nonsense of encouraging youth to connect with their inner selves. It needs to teach them objective truths in the form of the importance of hard work, grit and being good at not getting what they want – even if it triggers their feelings.
At present, the evidence shows the only forms of rehabilitation that work are age and education. People age out of crime. The prefrontal cortex of people does not mature until age 25. All young offenders are salvageable and can become contributing members of the community. This can be accelerated through better education. Nearly 80 per cent of young adult prisoners have not completed high school – an approximately four times higher non-completion rate than other young adults.
This gets us to the complex tension between the desire to rehabilitate young offenders and the need to protect the community from serious acts of violence.
Primacy must be accorded to incapacitating offenders from inflicting serious harm on more victims. Yet prisons are not the solution for young people: they diminish educational progress and governments have no idea how to run youth detention centres in a non-profligate way.
The excessive spending on youth justice provides an easy alternative to youth detention. Each serious juvenile offender should be chaperoned by a police officer 24/7 as they go about their daily activities.
Police chaperoning sounds excessive and simplistic, and there are many theoretical reasons not to pursue this approach, but all of them are evaporated by the thudding economic reality that the cost of a 24/7 police chaperone for each young offender would be approximately $400,000 annually (ie, five full-time police salaries – factoring in holidays and other leave – working on this one task). Incredibly, this is more than a $600,000 annual saving for each offender (the saving is $1.5m in Victoria).
The job of police would be made easier if the offenders were required to wear GPS tracking bracelets and compelled to stay within set geographical confines, which were sufficiently expansive to include important facilities, such as school and sports activities. Thus when offenders were inside their home or school, the police would not need to have visual contact with the offenders.
Constant police monitoring of young offenders would obviously have downsides. Some offenders would find it embarrassing and humiliating. Others would regard it as a serious invasion of their privacy. But these disadvantages are minor when compared with the harshness of the alternative: being removed from their family, school and friends and placed in detention.
The money saved through appointing a police chaperone to each serious juvenile offender should be spent on putting more police and AI-enhanced CCTV cameras on the street, which would reduce the crime problem at the outset.
Alternatively, governments can keep employing even more misguided youth counsellors and hiding the cost of their incompetence in remote government reports and hope they can continue to avoid accountability for their breathtaking missteps.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Evelyn Rae, a conservative Australian political commentator
Margo Robbie -- a beautiful australian
My son Joe at ANU
One of the happiest pictures ever -- Cleo Smith, aged 4
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