“Sadly, you can say what you like around the kitchen table at home.”– Gillian Triggs, HR & SJW on half a million of taxpayer dollars.
LOOKING back, it’s almost quaint how united we all were following the slaughter of 3000 people in the US on September 11, 2001. In those simpler days, it was universally agreed that we might just have a problem with Islamic extremism.
The only holdouts were so-called 9/11 truthers, who simultaneously believed that then-president George W. Bush was a simpleton yet also capable of pulling off the greatest conspiracy in history. There are still some who insist Bush and his evil minions somehow loaded the World Trade Center towers with explosives and then set in train the events leading to 9/11.
Run a Google search on “controlled demolition” and prepare to enter a parallel universe of absolute madness. Among normals, however, the cause of 9/11 was clearly apparent: a bunch of crazed Osama bin Laden devotees took over four passenger jets and aimed them at targets throughout the US.
This was understood across the political spectrum. Leftist Christopher Hitchens, for example, had this to say a couple of months after 9/11: “I should perhaps confess that on September 11 last, once I had experienced all the usual mammalian gamut of emotions, from rage to nausea, I also discovered that another sensation was contending for mastery.
“On examination, and to my own surprise and pleasure, it turned out be exhilaration. Here was the most frightful enemy — theocratic barbarism — in plain view … Other and better people were gloomy at the prospect of confrontation. But I realised that if the battle went on until the last day of my life, I would never get bored in prosecuting it to the utmost.”
Hitchens continued the fight until his death 10 years later. But something strange has happened among many of his fellow leftists, and indeed throughout the community of civilised nations. Despite some 30,000 Islamic terrorist attacks since, at a rate of more than five per day, the world is now less inclined to face reality than it was 16 years ago.
The modern fashion is instead to turn away from reality and then applaud your own decency and virtue.
In Australia, one alleged media organisation will, these days, actually omit information about a murderous terrorist’s appearance if it hints at a fondness for Islam.
“I won’t go into reports about what the man identified by eyewitnesses as carrying a gun was wearing or what he looked like,” The Guardian’s Calla Wahlquist wrote in her coverage of Curtis Cheng’s shooting in 2015. She was referring to news that Cheng’s killer, Farhad Khalil Mohammad Jabar, had been wearing black robes.
Islam in general offers a cloak of invisibility. By contrast, try wearing a Donald Trump-style “Make America Great Again” cap at the next leftist rally against reliable energy, ABC cuts, traditional marriage or civilisation in general. For that matter, try wearing a crucifix around your neck during a stroll through Sydney’s southwestern suburbs. You’d want to make that stroll a brisk one. As Miranda Devine reported in The Sunday Telegraph, a 30-year-old Greek Orthodox Christian named Mike was wearing a crucifix around his neck last week during a train trip to Bankstown when four saintly Allah adherents engaged him in some light religious tuition. This allegedly took the form of them ripping off the crucifix and stomping on it while punching and kicking the young man and his girlfriend amid cries of, “F … Jesus”. Greek community leader Rev George Capsis now warns Christians not to wear religious symbols when in the occupied southwest.
Even that precaution won’t do you much good if you’re in the path of an Islamist-directed truck, the modern smaller-scale variants of 9/11’s jets.
Remember two months ago when that silly Trump fellow asked people to “look at what’s happening” in Sweden? Oh, how we all laughed.
Sweden’s former prime minister Carl Bildt mockingly posted on Twitter: “Sweden? Terror attack? What has he been smoking?”
Following last week’s Stockholm truck attack, which killed four people, Sweden’s current PM Stefan Lofven wasn’t quite so jovial.
“Terrorists want us to be afraid,” he told a press conference, “to not live our lives normally, but that is what we are going to do. Terrorists can never defeat Sweden.”
And then he announced that Sweden would strengthen its borders.
So we’re now at 30,000 Islamist attacks with new terror fronts opening in formerly peaceful and tolerant Scandinavian nations to keep pace with established terror targets like France, England, Spain, the US, Canada, Australia, much of Africa, the Philippines and, of course, the Middle East.
But don’t dare mention the robes or anything else to do with a particular faith, no matter how many bombs explode, Christians are bashed or trucks scythe through crowds.
As Hitchens wrote in the same piece referenced above, back in 2001: “Some people never learn, but then some people never intend to.”
SADLY, THE HRC BOSS NEEDS TO BE SCRUTINISED
POLITICAL figures often provide the media with their speeches in advance of making them. Typically, these speeches are marked “check against delivery” in case the speaker deviates in any way from the script.
Sometimes those deviations are very significant.
For example, Australian Human Rights Commission president Gillian Triggs recently gave a speech in Hobart in defence of her absurd organisation and its damnable, divisive mission.
One line leapt out.
“There has never been a more important time to stand up for laws which prohibit racial abuse in the public arena,” Triggs told her adoring audience. “Sadly, you can say what you like around the kitchen table at home.”
Sadly? Really? Critics of Triggs, me among them, last week highlighted this latest example of the HRC social justice warrior’s tax-funded jihad against free speech. Who on earth would think it a good thing to police private conversations? But then something very odd happened. Triggs supporters — yes, she has them — began appearing online to claim their idol had been misquoted.
“Did Triggs say what is alleged?” one Triggs fan queried.
“She did not even say ‘sadly’!” another insisted. “The ‘sadly’ bit is a misquote from Andrew Bolt. It’s a lie that he can get away with because the people who read him are not going to do their own research.”
The mistake these characters made was to rely on the version of Triggs’s speech published at the Human Rights Commission’s website. In that version, the HRC commissar is far friendlier to the notion of people expressing thoughts and ideas in their own homes.
“The key point, often ignored in the current debate, is that to attract the civil prohibition under the RDA, the verbal abuse must be ‘because’ of race in the public arena; that is on public transport, in shopping malls and in the street,” the pre-delivered speech ran, followed by this key line: “Of course, you can say what you like around the kitchen table.”
“Of course” is very different to “sadly”, which was the word used by Triggs in Hobart. Evidently she thought her presentation needed a touch more totalitarianism (it was a fundraiser for former Greens leader Bob Brown’s foundation, after all). Sadly for Triggs, the speech was recorded.
Her dopey defenders subsequently failed to “check against delivery”. And if anyone genuinely needs constant checking, it’s our darling Gillian.
Sadly, you cannot get anyone in political circles to admit that Islam is the problem. We see the possibilities for Australia in real life overseas. Bob Brown would be strung up because he is gay. Gillian Triggs would be relegated to nobody status because she is female(I would not mind that at all!) Freedom? Well the liberal left would get exactly what it wants. A newspeak dictatorship but ruled by Islam.