DAY OF RECKONING LONG OVERDUE FOR POLICE WHO IGNORED GAY HATE CRIMES

Day of reckoning long overdue for police who ignored gay hate crimes

Daniel Glick
Investigative journalist
19 January 2022

It really didn’t have to be this hard. More than three decades after a brilliant young man’s life was taken from us in a fit of homophobic rage, the killer stunned a closed courtroom with an admission: “Guilty. I am guilty. Guilty.”>

Yes, Scott White admitted to killing Scott Russell Johnson in December 1988. His conviction affirms the incredible 33-year-long odyssey of Scott’s brother Steve, who always believed that foul play took his brother’s life, not self-harm. But it also raises questions about why it took so long, and how many other gay bashers, killers, and their police enablers still roam free.

Steve Johnson, the brother of murdered Scott Johnson, has finally got closure over the death of his brother.

Steve Johnson, the brother of murdered Scott Johnson, has finally got closure over the death of his brother.

Through a mutual friend, Steve Johnson contacted me in early 2007 and asked me to go to Sydney to investigate his brother’s death. Even though a 2005 coronial inquest had detailed multiple brutal attacks on gay men in the Bondi area, police steadfastly stuck to their belief that homophobic violence miraculously stopped at the Harbour Bridge.

When I met Steve and first poured over the scant materials he had obtained from the original 1989 inquest finding that Scott had committed suicide, I frankly thought the cause of death was a toss-up. The picture painted in the inquest documents was vague, but it seemed possible that the 27-year-old maths genius was too sensitive for this world. His partner had stated that Scott had thought about suicide once before (which turns out to be an elaborately misleading if not completely false story). Being gay in 1988 was particularly difficult at the height of the AIDS epidemic and the era of the Grim Reaper ads. On the other hand, Scott was an incredibly high-achieving, kind, “out” and apparently happy young man who had moved to Australia to be with his lover and complete his PhD.

I agreed to go to Sydney in May 2007. Before leaving, Steve put me in touch with Stephen Page, a former NSW Police detective sergeant who had investigated the Bondi gay killings. Page had retired and didn’t want to get officially involved, but suggested I focus on two things: was the place where Scott died an active beat at the time; and had there been incidents of anti-gay violence on the Northern Beaches?

During that first trip to Sydney in May 2007, the balance of probabilities shifted so fast it was breathtaking. Within a few hours of arriving, I talked to a (presumably) straight man who had worked at the sewerage plant since the 1980s and who said that gay men met up at the headlands near Blue Fish Point area “all the time, mate”. I met a gay man who had been stabbed up there. I found names of more than a dozen men who were known gay bashers on the Northern Beaches around the time of Scott’s death, from Narrabeen to North Sydney. This all took place in one week. After an article appeared in The Manly Daily about Steve Johnson’s search for his brother’s killer with my email address on it, I received a deluge of leads from citizens, gay and straight.>/p> Man pleads guilty to Scott Johnson's cold case murder

A man has pleaded guilty to the cold case gay hate murder of Scott Johnson in 1988.

What I couldn’t figure out, and still can’t understand, is why police at the time pretended not to know any of this or make any possible connection to Scott’s death.

Over the ensuing years, this second piece — police culpability — became almost as much a question as “who killed Scott?” The intransigence of the police towards Steve in 1988 continued through 2006, even after the Taradale findings into the Bondi cases, which is why Steve hired me.

When presented with our initial findings in 2007, which clearly raised questions about the initial suicide verdict, we were met with stone silence. That continued for years, even as we amassed more evidence that Scott had been murdered and we had compiled a credible list of people who might have done it or knew about it.

After public pressure on the police when ABC’s Australia Story aired an episode about Scott’s case in 2013, we thought we had turned a corner when the Unsolved Homicide Unit formed a taskforce to investigate Scott’s death. Unfortunately, that turned into one of the most monumental wastes of taxpayer dollars I have witnessed in my 30 years as a journalist. That team roundly ignored evidence and doggedly pursued its own theory that Scott had killed himself.

Steve Johnson persevered and petitioned for a third inquest, which returned a homicide finding – and a gay-hate motivated one at that. It was only after the third inquest that new police leadership took this investigation seriously and by all accounts did an amazing job.

What I still want to know is this: Where is the accountability for all of the past mistakes that individual police officers made, for the anguish they perpetrated not just on Scott Johnson’s family but for the dozens if not hundreds of other people who were murdered, beaten, marginalised, and otherwise ignored as this epidemic of homophobic violence swept through NSW? We know who the police officers were. We know many of the perpetrators of this violence, unlike Scott White, are still walking the streets, their crimes unsolved and solvable.

.

Most touchingly, we know that hundreds if not thousands of gay men and their loved ones have lived with nightmares from their bashings and the fear of going to the police to report it. I hope that in some small way, they will also find vindication in this guilty verdict in Scott Johnson’s case. I also still hold out hope that the responsible parties — police and perpetrators — face some sort of reckoning.

Daniel Glick is an American investigative journalist.

Were so many of us wrong? Christos Tsiolkas on the new uncertainty

The Sydney Morning Herald

Were so many of us wrong? Christos Tsiolkas on the new uncertainty

In times of uncertainty, you deserve understanding.

By Christos Tsiolkas

April 3, 2020 

He who has not lived in the years before the revolution cannot know what the sweetness of living is. – Talleyrand

We are on day six of our self-isolation. Has it been less than a week since we caught the flight from London to Dubai, then Dubai to Melbourne? The COVID-19 virus has done many things, the most daunting and terrible being the lives that it has taken, but one of its aftershocks that has surprised me most is the alteration it has caused to our sense of time.

Christos Tsiolkas: ''I know, in my gut now, that Melbourne, that Australia, is home.''Credit:Eddie Jim

Three weeks ago, we landed in Britain and though we joked and bantered about touching elbows rather than kissing, we did hug and embrace friends, we went out to dinners and we got drunk and sat shivering around outside heaters, shoulder to shoulder, in the freezing English spring night. Day by day, however, the anxiety and fears grew.

Throughout the first week, and then into the second, I receive constant emails from home announcing that first this festival and then another would be cancelled. On a train to Glasgow, preparing my reading for an event, my phone vibrates and a text informs me that the AyeWrite Festival has also been cancelled. By the third day in Scotland, reading the escalating warnings on the internet, my partner, Wayne, and I make the decision to return home.

We are fortunate. We booked our journey through a travel agent and within minutes of emailing him, he has got us on a flight departing London in two days. We know that there are many people not so lucky. The websites of all the airlines are crashing. The phones are not being answered. All we want is to return home. That very notion, home, one that I have questioned and resisted and challenged for so many years; that notion, too, has been altered by the virus. I know, in my gut now, that Melbourne, that Australia, is home.

There is a strange and befuddling moment in Dubai airport. All the world seems to be there. We are Australians and New Zealanders, Nigerians and Ghanaians, Pakistani and Bangladeshi, North American and Latin American, many of us scrolling on phones and laptops and iPads, seeking information on which borders have been closed, whether we can indeed go home. Some of us are sitting still and staring out into space, shifting in those uncomfortable vinyl chairs, trying to not touch and not to breathe on one another.

I am two seats away from a young woman, poised and elegantly dressed, her hair hidden under a rainbow-coloured turban. She is speaking on her phone in rapid French. My own French is weak but I gather she has managed to get on a flight to Lagos and from Lagos she will do her best to head home. Wherever home may be. “Paris was strange,” she says into her phone. “Everything was closed, everything was shut. I’ve never seen it like that.”

And it’s at that precise moment, overhearing her conversation, looking around me at the people staring at their screens, that it strikes me how bizarre and ridiculous it is that we all have only so recently been zig-zagging around the world, taking this freedom and this movement and this privilege for granted. It isn’t a moral aversion that I am experiencing. It isn’t righteousness; it is more a recognition of absurdity. I turn to Wayne when he comes back from the long wait for the toilets.

“All of this, it’s unnecessary.”

“No, we need to get home, this is serious.”

“No, not that. All this travel, all this movement, that is what is unnecessary.”

''All this travel, all this movement, that is what is unnecessary.''Credit:Getty Images

On returning home, I find a series of emails from Australian literary festivals and arts organisations bemoaning the deleterious effect of COVID-19 on the arts sector. I understand and share these fears. I’m one of the lucky ones, able to support myself from writing. But for most of my friends, their creative work is subsidised by work in hospitality, in retail, in the public sector and in non-government welfare organisations. The abrupt and shocking collapse of the economy has us all reeling. And has us all frightened. Theatres are no longer putting on plays and cinemas are shut; book launches and writing classes are cancelled.

Again, time has refracted back on itself and the arguments and politics and conversations we were all so engaged with, so furious and so passionate about only a few weeks ago, seem ephemeral and unimportant. Unemployment is now the most pressing issue affecting us all.

It isn’t an abrupt leap from where we were only yesterday to the dystopian end-of-times of apocalypse. The in-between will be our lifetime.

Of course, there is the desire to avoid the getting and the passing on of the virus. But those images of thousands of desperate souls lining up outside Centrelink are what has brought the severity of what we are all undergoing into deepest focus. The people in the queues are clearly ourselves – how we dress, how we use our mobiles, that negotiation of both digital and physical space – yet they also are evocative of a past that we never really imagined we would see again: the echoes of the Great Depression.

Writers and filmmakers and artists have always imagined apocalyptic scenarios, and climate change and rising inequality has made that a central concern of recent speculative art and fiction. But whether it is the savage and nihilistic violence of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, or the scenes of zombie rampage and annihilating natural disasters that have proliferated in popular cinema, what we hadn’t conceived was the moment of in-between. I think this is why the dole queues are particularly frightening. They remind us that it isn’t an abrupt leap from where we were only yesterday – blithely assuming that the future would be ever-progressive and ever-prosperous – to the dystopian end-of-times of apocalypse. The in-between will take years. The in-between will be our lifetime.
So I worry for my friends who are writers and artists and playwrights and filmmakers. But I am equally worried for my friends who are nurses and couriers and administrators and teachers. All those differences we were extolling and idolising only a few weeks ago, they don’t matter much any more. In this moment, community trumps difference.

In between the pinging emails announcing the cancellation of one more writers’ festival and one more play, there have also been links to performances and artwork that people are creating online. There is indeed something exhilarating and defiant in the determination of the artist to keep making work. It might be my age or merely my disposition but I also sense something melancholy in the production of such work. A chamber orchestra plays in an vacant auditorium, a drag artist mimes in front of a DJ in an empty room. What is missing, and what is wretched, is that without the physical bodies of an audience, the work seems mere rehearsal. It is not unlike the few minutes of an AFL match I watched played without a crowd. The emptiness was deafening. I switched off the game. Guiltily, I switched off the music.

In some ways, I have been surprised by how much I have enjoyed this period of enforced isolation. In saying that, I know that I am fortunate. That I have a partner, a lovely home and shelves stacked with books and with LPs and with DVDs. We have friends and family and neighbours who make sure there is food on our doorstep and wine in our fridge.

I’m not a complete Luddite: YouTube and streaming have also kept me company. Yet it is the pleasures of the analogue world that have been the most satisfying and the most sustaining. I am halfway through a wonderful book, Jean-Michel Guenassia’s The Incorrigible Optimists Club, a tender requiem for the generation of eastern European dissidents who fled totalitarianism and wound up lost and exiled in Paris. It has been sitting by my bed for nearly two years now.

This morning, I was dancing to Hiperasia, a cheerfully inventive album by the Spanish electronica artist, El Guincho. As with the Guenassia novel, I’ve had it for some time. Only now do I give it a proper listen. Refracted through the changes brought about by the virus, the recent past seems an aeon ago. All the same, it has made me thankful for the present moment. Real time. The time of minutes and hours. The time of patience and reflection.

I miss people. Wayne and I discuss the progression of the virus, the responses globally and locally, the uncertain future that is coming. We both miss other voices, other perspectives, the opportunity to have one’s argument contested and opposed. Of course, this is possible online but Skype crackles and falters, the thin sounds on the other end don’t have the resonance of the human voice. Digital communication also exacerbates the limitations and prejudices of only speaking to those who think the same way you do.

There will come a time when we can return to the world, when social distancing will be the past. But there will be a ruined economy and there will be fractured communities. It is inevitable that this ruin and this fracturing will be part of the writing and the art that is to come. Every day, I wander the hall, the rooms of our house, I walk into the garden and tell myself I should write. But all my ideas seem paltry and inadequate. It is a cliche, and also a truth, that writing is a solitary labour. It is only now, physically separated from friends and colleagues, that I realise how much sustenance and inspiration I receive from their insights, their conversation and their argument. A room of one’s own is a necessity. It is not enough. These are the conversations that I want to have.

So many of us writers are progressive and left-wing, feminist and anti-racist. In one sense, the virus and its consequences have been a validation. Our coalition government, who for so many years rubbished the stimulus choices of the Rudd Labor government during the Global Financial Crisis, is now legislating for the state to commandeer and protect the economy. The tenets of economic liberalism that have dominated the globe for more than 50 years have been smashed by the urgency and virulence of this virus.

Yet there is another canonical ideal of liberalism that has also been demolished by the recent weeks, and that is the belief in open borders. While we waited to get out of Europe, country after country closed itself off from the rest of the world. In this sense, the virus and its consequences have validated the conservative voices that defend the nation state. It is not transglobal entities that are doing the work of looking after communities. It is the nation state. Were so many of us wrong? Were we shouting over people when maybe we should have been listening? Had we assumed racism and xenophobia whenever we heard an argument that challenged our beliefs? Had we forsaken questioning for certainty? And if so, what does that mean for the fiction we’ve been writing and the arguments we have been mounting?

I worry about the overreach of state power in the responses to the virus. They are necessary, they are medically and scientifically sanctioned, but the powers of surveillance and control now being deployed are deeply illiberal. And once enacted such powers may be difficult to reverse. I am shocked at how little weight the notion of liberty seems to have among my peers. A formative political awakening for me was the politics of AIDS. Some of the finest writing and the best art of the 1980s came out of provocation and resistance at the demonisation, and the attempts of state control, over people’s bodies. That suspicion of the state – of its courts and judiciary, of its police and its military, of its bureaucracy and of its power – seems to be a matter of little concern to a present generation of writers and artists.

An equal shock has been the relative silence over the actions of the Communist Party of China. Other governments have made mistakes or have had to backtrack on initial responses but it has been the CPC that has been the most appalling actor in this short history of COVID-19; in its initial recklessness in turning a blind eye to the conditions that allowed for its incubation, and in the terrifying repression it has visited on its own citizens.

I worry that we writers and artists have been woefully undergraduate in our rage over the past decade, tilting at the same bloody windmills. And maybe our understanding of history has been equally pitiful. The greatest gift reading history has done, is make me suspicious of certainty. Maybe that’s the conversation I’m really hankering to have. After the past few months, after these transformations, can a writer still adhere to certainty?

When we emerge out of our isolation, the world will be smaller and our horizons will be local. The priority will be solidarity and communion with the unemployed; everything else is not unimportant, but everything else will be secondary.

I also hope we emerge hungry for argument and conversation and debate. I hope our writing and our art asks more questions and doesn’t pretend to have all the answers.

Anti-war artworks removed in censorship row

By Linda Morris

From Sydney Morning Herald - 9 December 2019 

An internationally renowned Australian artist whose anti-war works were removed from a gallery has accused conservative politicians of misrepresenting his art and stoking outrage.

What Nationals MP George Christensen slammed as an attack on the reputation of Australia's armed forces amounted to fair political comment on the emotional cost of war, Sydney artist Abdul Abdullah says.

Abdul Abdullah in his St Leonards studio.Credit:Sam Mooy

His works were pulled from a Queensland gallery show intended to examine difficult truths around racism, violence, and discrimination.

The works featured tapestries of an anonymous soldier overlaid with a smiley face, part of a national touring exhibition of works by nine notable Australian artists.

''In a strange way, it's the voices who rail against political correctness that seem to be the first to want to have politically correct speech  - in their minds - from an artist who comes from a background which they see as violent or threatening," Abdullah said.


"I wonder if I had a different name or a different religion whether this would have been news at all."

Mr Christensen and former NRL player turned councillor, Martin Bella, led calls for the removal of the two works, For we are young and free and All Let us Rejoice, from a council-run gallery. They were joined by the local RSL which said they feared for the mental health of local servicemen and women.

A spokeswoman for Mr Christensen directed the Herald to an October statement in which the member for Dawson said he was all for free speech and freedom of expression but taxpayers and ratepayers should not subsidise political messages that attacked soldiers. Clr Bella did not respond to questions put by the Herald.

For we are young and free' by Abdul Abdullah, which was pulled down from a Queensland art gallery because they were deemed to be an attack on soldiers. Credit:Äbdul Abdullah

Tensions got so heated that extra gallery security was needed, the artist received hate mail and poppies were dropped at the gallery entrance.

The tapestries bear Abdullah's signature style of an emoji, cartoonish character or motif over a traditionally painted backdrop. This year the artist was a finalist for the Sulman and Wynne prizes for paintings with similar imagery.

"The smiley face is an emoji I've used in a few different series of works where I've talked about the difference between a person's lived experience and the perception of them and what they project - the difference between how we feel and how we seem," Abdullah said from his studio in St Leonards.

"In the case of these images of the soldiers, there's the dark experience of war and all the turmoil they've experienced but in every case where I've met a soldier they've said they've always had to put on a brave face."

Mr Christensen took issue with the artist's description of soldiers as surrogates
involved in "'illiberal, destructive actions in other places'' and that those coming across Australian soldiers in action would see them as an ''existential threat''.

The MP said it was particularly affronting to veterans that the exhibition would have run during Remembrance Day.

After initially defending the artist's right to freedom of expression, Mackay Mayor Greg Williamson announced the work's removal. He declined to respond to the Herald.

Abdullah said he was never asked to explain his intent and he'd be the last person to disrespect servicemen. Two of his great grandfathers fought in Belgium and France in World War I. One grandfather fought in Papua New Guinea in World War II, the other with the British Navy in a submarine torpedoed in the Indian Ocean.

"What’s happened here is so unfair," said Esther Anatolitis, executive director of the National Association of Visual Artists. "It’s deeply unfair to the veterans and veterans’ groups who’ve been misled on work they never saw by an artist they never met."

Following its opening in Noosa Regional Gallery on Friday, the exhibition Violent Salt is scheduled to travel to Toowoomba Regional Art Gallery, but those dates are also in doubt with the mayor Paul Antonio telling local media he did not want Abdullah's works displayed. Staff at Noosa Regional Gallery elected to add kids labels to the interpretation of the touring exhibition including one for Abdullah’s works, and a sign at the entrance with a Lifeline number.

Independent curators Yhonnie Scarce and Claire Watson said that they were surprised and disappointed that Abdullah’s embroideries were taken down from the exhibition in Mackay without consulting with them or the artist.

Censorship of the work, they said, and particularly "hostile remarks" leveled towards Abdullah, only demonstrated the value of exhibitions such as Violent Salt.

The show is scheduled to travel to Lake Macquarie City Art gallery in June, then Canberra Contemporary Art Space and Swan Hill Regional Art Gallery and Bundoora Homestead Art Centre in Victoria.

Linda Morris

ZIONIST FAIRFAX - DEPENDENT - ALWAYS

It has long been known that the media in Australia tug their forelocks to the Australian zionist lobbies, but never has it shown itself to be so subservient as what happened in Sydney with the Sydney Morning Herald over an article by Mike Carlton on 26 July 2014 and the outcry from the zionists during the week of around 4 to 8 August 2014.

This is a long story and in Melbourne only bits and pieces have filtered through the fog, but as much as possible will be detailed.

Here is the Mike Carlton article - without the cartoon at the centre of some explosive attacks about the cartoonist's and Carlton's supposed anti-semitism - the expression all zionists use for any criticisms of their beloved country Israel:

Israel's rank and rotten fruit is being called fascism

July 26, 2014

Mike Carlton

·                             

The images from Gaza are searing, a gallery of death and horror. A dishevelled Palestinian man cries out in agony, his blood-soaked little brother dead in his arms. On a filthy hospital bed a boy of perhaps five or six screams for his father, his head and body lacerated by shrapnel. A teenage girl lies on a torn stretcher, her limbs awry, her face and torso blackened like a burnt steak. Mourners weep over a family of 18 men, women and children laid side by side in bloodied shrouds. Four boys of a fishing family named Bakr, all less than 12 years old, are killed on a beach by rockets from Israeli aircraft.

As I write, after just over a week of this invasion, the death toll of Palestinians is climbing towards 1000. Most are civilians, many are children. Assaulting Gaza by land, air and sea, Israel has destroyed homes and reduced entire city blocks to rubble. It has attacked schools, mosques and hospitals. Tens of thousands of people have fled, although there is nowhere safe for them to go in this wretched strip of land just 40 kilometres long and about 10 kilometres wide. There are desperate shortages of food and water, of medical and surgical supplies.

In an open letter to US President Barack Obama, Dr Mads Gilbert, a Norwegian surgeon working at Gaza's al-Shifa hospital, writes of "the incomprehensible chaos of bodies, sizes, limbs, walking, not walking, breathing, not breathing, bleeding, not bleeding humans. Humans! 

"Ashy grey faces – Oh no! Not one more load of tens of maimed and bleeding. We still have lakes of blood on the floor in the emergency room, piles of dripping, blood-soaked bandages to clear out ... the cleaners, everywhere, swiftly shovelling the blood and discarded tissues, hair, clothes, cannulas – the leftovers from death – all taken away... to be prepared again, to be repeated all over."

The onslaught is indiscriminate and unrelenting, with but one possible conclusion: Israel is not fighting the terrorists of Hamas. In defiance of the laws of war and the norms of civilised behaviour, it is waging its own war of terror on the entire Gaza population of about 1.7 million people. Call it genocide, call it ethnic cleansing: the aim is to kill Arabs.

As none other than Malcolm Fraser tweeted this week: "If any other country went to war killing as many civilians, women and children, it would be named a war crime." But it is not, although the UN is asking the question of both sides.

Yes, Hamas is also trying to kill Israeli civilians, with a barrage of rockets and guerilla border attacks. It, too, is guilty of terror and grave war crimes. But Israeli citizens and their homes and towns have been effectively shielded by the nation's Iron Dome defence system, and so far only three of its civilians have died in this latest conflict. The Israeli response has been out of all proportion, a monstrous distortion of the much-vaunted right of self defence.

It is a breathtaking irony that these atrocities can be committed by a people with a proud liberal tradition of scholarship and culture, who hold the Warsaw Ghetto and the six million dead of the Holocaust at the centre of their race memory. But this is a new and brutal Israel dominated by the hardline, right-wing Likud Party of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition. As one observer puts it: "All the seeds of the incitement of the past few years, all the nationalistic, racist legislation and the incendiary propaganda, the scare campaigns and the subversion of democracy by the right-wing camp – all these have borne fruit, and that fruit is rank and rotten. The nationalist right has now sunk to a new level, with almost the whole country following in its wake. The word 'fascism', which I try to use as little as possible, finally has its deserved place in the Israeli political discourse."

Fascism in Israel? At this point the Australian Likudniks, as Bob Carr calls them, will be lunging for their keyboards. There will be the customary torrent of abusive emails calling me a Nazi, an anti-Semite, a Holocaust denier, an ignoramus.  As usual they will demand my resignation, my sacking. As it's been before, some of this will be pornographic or threatening violence.

In fact, that paragraph within the quotation marks was written by an Israeli. Gideon Levy is a columnist and editorial board member of the daily newspaper Ha’aretz. Born in Tel Aviv to parents who fled the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939, he despairs of what his country has become and the catastrophe its armed forces are visiting upon Gaza. After a recent column calling on Israeli pilots to stop bombing and rocketing civilians, his life was threatened and he now has a bodyguard day and night. It has come to that. In the worst insult of all, Levy is branded "a self-hating Jew".

Israeli propaganda is subtle and skillfully put. "If Israel were to lay down its arms tomorrow, she would be destroyed; but if Hamas were to lay down their arms, there would be peace," goes the line, parroted endlessly.

But in all these long and agonising decades, Israel has never offered the Palestinians a just and equitable peace. They would have only a splintered, vassal state, their polity and economy and even their borders and freedom of travel and trade managed and determined by Israel. The occupation of Palestinian lands would remain with the relentless expansion of illegal Israeli settlements on the West Bank of the Jordan and the Dead Sea.

As the Palestine Liberation Organisation official Hanan Ashrawi put it this week in a television interview with the Australian journalist Hamish Macdonald: "No nation can accept being imprisoned, being besieged by land, by air, by sea and deprived of the most basic requirements of a decent life: freedom of movement, clean water. For seven years they have been under a brutal and lethal Israeli siege ... You shell them and you bomb them; you destroy homes, you destroy whole neighbourhoods. You obliterate, annihilate, whole families, and then you come and say that this is self defence?" 

That is why the killing and the dying goes on. Ad nauseam, ad infinitum. And the rest of the world, not caring, looks away.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

That was the start of a very ugly saga which revealed the zionist influence on not only the Fairfax media, but also the Murdoch media and left both groups with mud on their faces.

At the end of his article, apparently Carlton provided his email address for people to send comments, and apparently they did, in large and abusive numbers. In responding to many of the nastiest, Carlton used language which the SMH took exception to, and the Murdoch media got hold of some of them and between them all they made a gigantic issue of it.

Carlton told some of them - and I am on his side about this, although many are not - to fuck off.
Many comments called him anti-semitic and many other crudities, probably too numerous to list here, but you get the drift!

My take on all of it is that the zionist community in Australia think they have the right to insult and abuse anyone, Jewish or otherwise, who dares to criticise apartheid zionist Israel which has been behaving as revoltingly as any police state with which we have become acquainted in the last 150 years.

The Sydney Morning Herald decided to suspend Carlton and called him in to tell him, at which stage he promptly - and correctly - resigned. In my view he had nothing to apologise for, but of course thousands have seen it differently.

The Murdoch media, who are incapable of keeping their paws off anything they deem to be fair game, climbed in with an article and cartoon, all of which were as to be expected, disgusting. The cartoon has since been withdrawn and is no longer available on the web.

The same has happened with the Glen Le Lievre cartoon which appeared with the Carlton article, and it was, together with the cartoonist, accused of the vilest anti-semitic slurs and insults known to the semi-literate newspaper classes.

If we have reached the stage when comments about Israel are off limits, then censorship of the worst type has arrived and the intimidation of journalists and those who respond to articles and blogs will be complete.

It is up to all of us to complain about those in Australia who support Israel at all times and under all circumstances, and those of the so-called Jewish religion need to take themselves off to Israel and stop pretending to show any joy at living in Australia.

I don't think the story is finished yet. Practically all politicians in Australia are zionists, whether they are Jewish or several other religions and they are all in the pocket of the Australian Jewish zionists who have them literally eating out of their pockets with their wonderful free trips to Israel.

It is all to nauseous to contemplate, and as one of our friends says when reading some of these disgusting goings-on, have a bucket handy!
 

MEDIA MATTERS AND MEDIA NON-MATTERS

This has been written as a letter to the editors of the Sunday Age and the Sydney Morning Herald in response to their editorial on Sunday 30 December 2012 headed “Show some resolve and give us the politics we deserve”, (link: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/editorial/show-some-resolve-and-give-us-the-politics-we-deserve-20121229-2c0hl.html?skin=text-only) and what it DIDN’T say!

The letter will doubtless be ignored and so, apart from being published in the blog, it will also be posted on my web page which has letters the media will not publish.

The editorial in the Sunday Age mentions many items about which people in this country have concerns.

These include politicians, equality of opportunity, care for the most vulnerable and marginalised, Peter Slipper, Craig Thomson, asylum seekers, carbon tax, Kevin Rudd, policy, voters, education, health, infrastructure, drugs, and the indigenous population, managing to squeeze them into the second-last paragraph.

I looked in vain through the article and read it and re-read it to see mention of the media for a record of what has been playing out in newspapers, radio, television and on the web where all or some of the above issues have or have not been discussed.

Not a word!

The fact that the media reports what it wants to, how it wants to, when it wants to, and if at all, would give some measure of the responsibility of the media in distortions of the news in Australia.

What about the wars in which Australia is and has been involved, the dollar expenditure on these wars, the loss of lives and damage to the lives of survivors and all their families? To say nothing of what has been inflicted on the countries in which these wars have occurred.

Israel and Palestine don’t get a mention, but then Palestine doesn’t even exist as far as the main stream media (MSM) are concerned. And on that topic, Greens and members of that party have been vilified and denigrated for their stand on the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement which was instrumental in helping to end apartheid in South Africa.

And what about Australia’s own closet apartheid issue – or are the Aborigines no longer to even be talked about?

Why is it that investigative journalists on the web have been able to uncover stories relating to the Health Services Union, the Ashby/Slipper/Brough affair but the MSM hasn’t been able to do it themselves with their vastly superior resources?

The MSM are controlled by their owners who are for the most part right-wing reactionary bigots who hire people to do as they are told, toady to their bosses, and generally carry out the discriminatory and biased reporting required by their bosses who want to put in place governments of their political persuasions who will do as they are told, not some wishy-washy pseudo-liberals who work around the fringes and who, themselves are guilty of discrimination in fields which suit their own policies and also accord with the business people whose interests they are protecting.

The editorial mentions voters and says they are more sophisticated than they are generally credited with being and then goes on to simplify the major issues of the day by under-reporting them, distorting their real meanings and also at the same time not reporting on issues that matter and become urgent over time.

The main-stream-media have been guilty of demonising asylum seekers in keeping with the requirements of both major political parties and we are all the poorer for the reactionary outcomes from these reports.

Not mentioned at all in the editorial is a group of people in the community who continue to be discriminated against and are vilified whenever possible. This group of people is part of the gay, lesbian, transgender and HIV (GLTH) communities and homophobia continues to be a major disease in our society, aided and abetted by the MSM.

A society which is ageing and those parts of it which are part of the GLTH group, continue to be treated as if they should shuffle off this mortal coil and stop costing society so much as they age.

Religion and paedophilia which has become so “main-stream” for the moment because of the announcement of a Royal Commission, abortion rights, equality for women, GLTH people, euthanasia, suicide and youth suicide, the main stream media occasionally broaches these topics and then conveniently forgets about them when it suits, and they never get resolved, but continue to fester just below the surface.

The media have shown an unprecedented bias in attacking the government and many members of the cabinet and shown how this bias relates to silences when it comes to the opposition and its ongoing denigration of the government in the opposition leader’s grim determination to bring down the government and become the prime minister. The polls have shown their support for these tactics.

Dorian Gray is seen as never ageing as his hidden portrait shows the ugliness of his deeds. The media’s deeds are hidden as they murder truth, honesty and integrity. Those who want to know what is happening here and around the world, and rely on the media to inform them are short-changed all the time by MSM but now fortunately have alternative means of finding the truth.

Bradley Manning and Julian Assange exposed the truths we have all been denied for so many years and, like most whistle-blowers who are trying to right the wrongs of the societies they live in, they are being pilloried and hounded and prosecuted for exposing crimes which they have not committed, but governments around the world have, aided and abetted by the media who do an excellent job of cover-up!

Talk about censorship and self-censorship!

Welcome to 2013!

FAIRFAX MANAGEMENT AND JOURNALISTS HAVE ONLY THEMSELVES TO BLAME!

Mark Scott moved from Fairfax to the ABC, and the ABC has followed a downward path on a similar trajectory to that of Fairfax in the ensuing years.

Fairfax management agenda has been on a particularly right-wing reactionary path since the Howard years, following a political direction set since at least 1996 onwards.

Instead of responding to what many of the Fairfax readers have hoped for over the years, Sydney Morning Herald and The Age journalists have allowed themselves to forget about in-depth investigative journalism, and being seduced into the reactionary maelstrom of gutter journalism at its worst.

Where stories cried out for "deep and meaningful" investigation into allegations and counter-allegations of various breaking-news issues, most journalists have gone for the superficial, meaningless slurs and innuendos, the latest of which is the story about Peter Slipper, Craig Thomson, James Ashby and Kathy Jackson.

Why is it that independent journalist investigators, people who are not working for Fairfax, News Limited, the ABC and other like-minded media outlets, managed to get the factual information so lacking in those organisations' reporting of the important parts of the story?

Is it because they illustrated graphically their determination to bring down the Federal government and cast aspersions on all those who support it in the current parliament to the extent that most Fairfax journalists have worn their politics on their sleeves, and in the process shown what their mettles are like as journalists and reporters.

Some of the most senior reporters at the Fairfax newspapers have become so reactionary in their reporting of stories from the current federal parliament that they could easily be mistaken for members of the opposition parties without too many doubts about their interests and aspirations.

The only difference Rinehart would make to the editorial direction of Fairfax is to put the stories in her own image.

As things stand at the moment, they are not far off!