Australian Politics
One University leader stands tall against anti-Semitism
Western Sydney University chancellor Jennifer Westacott has broken with fellow chancellors and explicitly condemned anti-Semitism during Gaza protests on Australian campuses.
Ms Westacott, a former Business Council of Australia chief executive, writes in The Weekend Australian that it is time for “collective leadership” to call out “growing division and anti-Semitism”.
Her plea comes after weeks of pro-Palestinian campus protests during which students have chanted “intifada” and “From the river to the sea” anti-Israel slogans, accusations have been made that radical and anti-Semitic outsiders have infiltrated campuses, an anti-Israel terrorist-linked group’s flag has been flown, and Nazi-style gestures have been made at student meetings.
Going further than any university leader has since the anti-Israel campus protests began, Ms Westacott said universities were champions of free speech and places of intellectual challenge “but they must never be places of fear”. “The hate speech and anti-Semitism occurring on our campuses is a direct assault on Australia’s multiculturalism and its principles,” she said.
Ms Westacott said she was speaking both as Western Sydney University chancellor – a role that makes her head of its governing body, similar to a company board chair – and in her personal capacity.
The university administrator and business leader says her own experiences suffering discrimination, and the way war and genocide have affected members of her family, fuelled her opposition to the anti-Semitism crisis in higher education.
“I’m doing so as part of a family that includes two people, a mother and her son, who are from an Islamic background, who are stateless because they faced genocide in Afghanistan, who were forced to flee, and now live as asylum-seekers,” she writes.
“They are our family, and my partner, Tess, and I love them. And I am doing so as someone who has endured sexism and homophobia. I do not believe we can pick and choose our moral positions.”
Ms Westacott’s condemnation of anti-Semitism comes after the University Chancellors Council decided at its plenary meeting last Thursday week not to explicitly call out anti-Semitic elements among campus protests, a resolution that went against the wishes of some chancellors. After the May 2, meeting the council issued a statement that condemned hate speech but stepped around the issue of anti-Semitism.
“Hate speech or conduct directed at any person or group of persons because of their nationality, religion or identity is completely unacceptable,” it said.
Another university chancellor told The Weekend Australian the council statement should have been stronger and explicitly condemned anti-Semitism, but this view was not accepted at the meeting.
In her article, Ms Westacott said the Australian values of tolerance, respect and fairness “made us the most successful multicultural country in the world”.
“I believe we cannot be silent when members of the Jewish community are targeted for the actions of a government more than 14,000 kilometres away,” she writes, saying Jews in Australia cannot be considered responsible for the Israeli government’s invasion of Gaza following the deadly Hamas attack on Israel on October 7 last year.
“It would be like persecuting the Russian diaspora for the actions of Vladimir Putin,” Ms Westacott writes.
“Nor can we allow any form of discrimination or intimidation against Palestinians because of the actions of Hamas.”
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Leftists want to force their faith on Christians
A religious civil war is raging but only one side understands that it is a battle over theology.
At stake is whether the ascendant state morality will drive deeper into the ancient institutions of faith and force believers to submit to its temporal commandments.
Nationally, the Australian Law Reform Commission’s final report on religious exemptions from anti-discrimination law is just another sortie in a long campaign over what the state will allow you to believe and how far it is prepared to go to force apostates to heel.
Queensland’s proposed anti-discrimination bill also seeks to narrow the rights of the faithful. Alex Deagon, from Queensland University of Technology, argues it will “significantly undermine the ability of religious organisations to employ persons in accordance with their faith”.
The ALRC admits one of its recommendations may limit “the freedom to manifest religion or belief in community with others, and the associated parental liberty to ensure the religious and moral education of one’s children in conformity with one’s own convictions”. This, it says, is balanced by the overall effect, which “would be to maximise the realisation of human rights”.
The ALRC wants section 38 of the Sex Discrimination Act, which allows religious schools to hire those whose lives and ideas accord “with the doctrines, tenets, beliefs or teachings of a particular religion or creed”, to be abolished.
When you lose the freedom to manifest your faith, abide by your beliefs and the liberty to ensure your children are educated in your creed, what is left? The commission is erasing the right of a religious school to organise around its own ethos.
This is an extreme form of laicism, driven by a fierce “progressive” crusade against Christianity. In a multifaith society that means all believers are on this battlefield, as the institutions of government are mobilised against them. Like many things dubbed progressive, it is the latest incarnation of the despotic tendencies of the Bureautoracy (n): the ubiquitous, unelected technocratic blob bent on imposing its notion of utopia on the mob. Its relentlessly mutating dogma has spread like Paterson’s curse through all the institutions.
In a profound irony we are witnessing the final metamorphosis of Christianity as zealots torch the last idol: belief in a power that transcends the state.
The child has turned on a parent it does not recognise because the source code of this secular faith is the notion of universal human rights. That idea was born with the belief that each individual is valued by God, an avowedly Christian concept and part of a set of revolutionary beliefs that the early faithful simply called “The Way”.
Warnings religion’s role in Australia is ‘under attack’
Universal equality is captured in Paul’s letter to the Galatians: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
Another epoch-changing idea rings from the first sentences of John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the word (logos). And the word was with God. And the word was God.”
The New Testament was written in Greek and logos means both word and reason. So, in the Christian tradition, God is reason itself. Christianity is the singular encounter between Greek philosophy and Jewish mysticism, the marriage of reason and faith. The theology that evolved was a thoroughly different way of thinking. Let’s call it wisdom.
This wisdom elevated the poor, the meek, the righteous, the merciful and peacemakers. Faith in God demands you “treat others as you would like them to treat you”, and not to act with reason is contrary to the nature of God.
Christianity is born in the East, informed by the West and takes on its historically decisive character in Europe. Europe is defined by its faith and its faith is defined by reason. Faith and reason set Europe on the road to liberal democracy.
Through all its failures, and its many crimes, reason pushes the West forward and demands that it learn and evolve. And the excesses of both church and state always had to contend with its Christian conscience.
The savage colonisation of the Americas was fiercely denounced by Dominican friar Bartolome de Las Casas, the evil of slavery collapsed when it confronted the faith of William Wilberforce. Despite often spectacularly failing to abide by its ideals, Christianity demanded the West slowly bend towards realising the radical demand of the central tenet of its faith. The new commandment to “love one another” excludes no one.
As historian Tom Holland demonstrates in his epic work Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind, “To live in a Western country is to live in a society that is utterly saturated by Christian concepts and assumptions.”
It is, of course, a heritage that the zealots of the New Way deny. To them their belief system is self-evident because it just is. It is neutral. It is agnostic. That is a delusion. The New Way exhibits some of the best and all the worst features of a proselytising religion. It looks to uplift, to guide, to build a better, more just world. It is also deeply intolerant of dissent and has established the institutions of inquisition to police heresy, in state and federal human rights commissions.
It’s hard to criticise anti-discrimination laws but the growth of objective penalties for subjective crimes should trouble those who care about liberal democracy. Such penalties are how American journalist Robert Wargas defines totalitarianism.
What standards will be applied? The notion of transgender identity, for example, is a rapidly moving target. Even the Australian Human Rights Commission’s website admits the “terminology is strongly contested”.
So, this latest assault by the state on the faithful is a battle of competing theologies, as the disciples of Caesar seek to mount his image in every temple. And the insurgents know nothing of faith because, as anyone who has any dealings with religious schools knows, most have no desire to discriminate and are far more tolerant of difference than “progressives”.
What religious institutions don’t want is to be forced to submit to state diktats that deliberately undermine the ethos of their institution. Here let’s recall that the Labor Party pledge demands its members not be a part of any other organisation that is inimical to its ideals. Why shouldn’t religious schools enjoy the same right?
The arc of history has bent out of shape. Those who claim the heritage of reason have discounted the role of faith in their enlightenment. They discriminate and call it equality. They unreasonably seek to force the faithful to heel.
This is not wise.
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Waleed Aly of The Project warns rent freeze favoured by the Greens poses a 'massive risk' to housing supply
High-profile host of The Project Waleed Aly has pushed back on the Greens proposed rental freeze - which if implemented could have already saved Aussie renters thousands of dollars.
In a spirited segment on The Project on Thursday, Aly debated founder of the popular rental property review website S*** Rentals Jordan van den Berg, also known online as 'Purple Pingers'.
Mr van den Berg told The Project he is in favour of the rent freeze, revealing the positive impact it would make on renters' lives.
'It's pretty simple, give renters a bit of breathing room and let them spend money on something that isn't an ever-increasing human right.
'I know people who are choosing between medicine and their rent. You should never have to choose between those two fundamental things to be alive, or like putting food on the table for your family and that kind of stuff,' he said.
Aly agreed that no should ever have to make the choice between medicine and their rent, but it was then he challenged the proposed rental freeze.
He said evidence from around the world on the concept of a rent freeze isn't that encouraging.
'In the US, the result was a whole lot of houses were just left to become uninhabitable as landlords then made insurance claims on damage,' he said.
Aly said there was an increase in black market rent bidding, where the official rent is one thing and rent bidding occurs in the background
He said issues with freezing rent weren't just limited to the US.
'In the UK they found social segregation, so it just meant landlords gave all the properties to professional families without kids and actually it was the most disadvantaged who missed out.
'In Berlin there was a huge fall in the rental supply. These are really serious side effects. Isn’t it a massive risk to just take something on like this?'
Mr van den Berg disagreed, saying Aly was not comparing like-to-like.
'In Australia we have this culture of investing in housing, we’re not comparing the same government subsidies, the same demographic breakdown, the same capital gains tax discounts, the same negative gearing concessions to investing.
'So in America where those things don’t exist, putting a rent freeze in place we’re not having like-for-like outcomes,' he said.
Aly was adamant a rent freeze could even potentially make the problem worse.
Mr van den Berg refuted that a rent freeze would stop people from becoming landlords.
'At the end of the day, even if you can charge a little bit less for rent you’re going to get a capital gain when you sell the house, that’s just how it’s going to work.
'But also we need to consider this isn’t the only answer to the housing crisis, this is a little Band-Aid we can put on a gaping flesh wound, that we need to do with long-term policy solutions,' he said.
Mr van den Berg expressed the urgency of implementing a rent freeze. 'Renters need some immediate assistance right now, then let’s also work on the bigger picture.'
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Graphic footage of the alleged stabbing attack on a bishop will be unlocked at 5pm today after judge hands temporary victory to Elon Musk
Elon Musk has had a victory in an Australian court with a judge shooting down the eSafety Commissioner's request to temporarily ban graphic videos of an alleged violent church attack.
The Albanese government and eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant are locked in a bitter standoff with Musk after he failed to comply with an order to remove from his X app violent video of an attack on a bishop during his church service on April 15.
During an interlocutory hearing on Friday, Justice Geoffrey Kennett issued a three day extension to an injunction which ordered Musk's social media platform X temporarily remove the footage while the matter played out in court.
On Monday morning, he refused the eSafety Commission's application to extend the injunction. The current injunction will lapse at 5pm Monday.
A case management hearing is scheduled to take place on Wednesday ahead of proceedings to determine the validity of Ms Inman Grant's order.
She wants to see the offending footage wiped from X servers, arguing that simply geoblocking the content to hide it from an Australian audience does not go far enough to protect the community.
The court heard on Friday Musk's initial attempts to block Australians from viewing the content were easily thwarted by technology up to 25 per cent of all Aussies use: a VPN.
Bret Walker SC, acting for X, told the court the Australian government's request to remove the footage from the app across the globe was an example of overreach 'literally larger than anything else could be'.
'It is at odds with what one would expect or hope for from one national regime,' he said.
Meanwhile lawyers acting for the eSafety Commissioner argued that X's move to geoblock disturbing video of the violent crimes - meaning they would be unavailable to Australian users - was unsatisfactory.
While Meta moved swifty to remove the content entirely from its services, Musk's X instead simply geoblocked the content from Aussies - 65 posts in total.
But lawyer Tim Begbie KC told the court that staff at the eSafety Commissioner's office 'were able to use standard VPNs to access videos banned from Australia'.
They did so on multiple occasions 'from an adult's account, a child's account and not logged in at all'.
A VPN can mask a user's IP address and re-route a connection so that it appears as though it's coming from anywhere else in the world.
Mr Begbie said this proved that the measures X took to protect Australians from violent content did not go far enough.
'To say that the geoblocking system has holes in it... is a profound understatement,' he said.
'The fact that those really not very sophisticated ways of accessing it could immediately be done is something your honour would be troubled about.'
The eSafety Commission won a temporary injunction in April from the Federal Court to have the footage removed globally while the matter played out in court.
Mr Walker, for X, argued the only way to block users in Australia from viewing the content via a VPN would be to effectively remove the footage globally.
'The idea that it's better for the whole world not to see this obviously newsworthy matter... that nobody can see it pending determination following a hearing which has not yet been fixed... that notion is a startling one,' Mr Walker said.
'That is a really remarkable proposition. This is very concerning that this country would take the approach of: "If this is the only way to control what is available to users in Australia then, yes, we say it is a reasonable step... to deny to everybody on Earth".
X faces daily fines of $785,000 for noncompliance, but Musk has vowed to challenge the ruling on two fronts.
Lawyers for X argue the content depicted in these videos should not be banned under Australian law, and that, regardless, the eSafety commissioner should not have the jurisdiction to order footage be removed globally.
'We believe that no government should possess such authority,' the company said.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13410517/Elon-Musk-victory-eSafety-violent-X-content.html
************************************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)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Evelyn Rae, a conservative Australian political commentator
Sahara Ray is undoubtedly a good-looking woman. Since she is Australian-born there is even a possibility that we may be distantly related. I hope she recovers soon from her encounter with Guillain-Barré syndrome
Margo Robbie -- a beautiful australian
My son Joe at ANU
One of the happiest pictures ever -- Cleo Smith, aged 4
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