Je suis Bill Leak: where is the Left now?
Tony Abbott damns the laws that now have cartoonist Bill Leak being taken to the Human Rights Commission.
But where is the Left that once cried "Je suis Charlie"?
Tony Abbott has declared that the use of section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act to stifle free speech is getting “out of hand’’ as criticism surrounding the lodging of a complaint about a provocative cartoon by Bill Leak mounted.
The former prime minister, who walked away in 2014 from a commitment to change 18C, said the problems with the provisions regarding “offence” and “insult” were now more apparent.
“It’s now much more obvious than it was two years back that section 18C is getting completely out of hand as a weapon to stifle free speech,” he told The Australian. “At the very least it should be amended to remove ‘offend’ and ‘insult’.”
Mr Abbott’s comments came as indigenous adviser Warren Mundine yesterday criticised a complaint against Leak and The Australian under section 18C...
“If the allegations are that (Leak) has incited racial hatred, I don’t support that at all,” Mr Mundine said. “...I think what he was saying — how I took it — was that a lot of people are ignoring or … avoiding the bleeding obvious in this space.”
But where is the Left that once cried "Je suis Charlie"? I said last year they were lying:
PROTESTERS around the West, horrified by the massacre in Paris, have held up pens and chanted “Je suis Charlie” — I am Charlie.
They lie... Are we really all Charlie? No, no and shamefully no...
In Australia, Charlie Hebdo would almost certainly be sued into silence, to the cheers of some of the very protesters now claiming to be its great defenders.
Freethinker Bill Leak is a victim of prejudice so entrenched in our legal and political system it is sparking anti-establishment revolt across the West. It is the conversion of the human rights movement into a bigot rights industry.
The principal victims of bigot rights are heterosexual men of Anglo-European descent whose advocacy of freedom, rationality and reason places them on the Right side of politics in the 21st century. The political repression of freethinkers by the bigot rights movement is calculated...
The Australian Human Rights Commission is handling a complaint over the Leak illustration that depicted a drunken man neglectful of his son. Some people have chosen to take offence because the inebriated figure was depicted as indigenous. So too, however, was the sober authority figure of the cartoon, the police officer reprimanding the drunken father. Whether intentional or not, Leak’s illustration revealed a well-documented empirical truth: that some men are alcoholics, some alcoholics neglect their children and some alcoholic men who neglect their children are indigenous...
In the world of the bigot rights industry, however, feelings of offence have superseded empirical truth as the highest standard of Western jurisprudence.
The Racial Discrimination Act classifies acts that people feel offended about as unlawful if they choose to feel offended because of their race, colour, national or ethnic origin. Section 18C is anti-enlightenment revolution codified as law. It effects the erosion of truth, rationality and reason as the foundations of Western law by replacing them with ideology, feelings and a consequent culture of unreason.
Following the cartoon’s publication, Race Discrimination Commissioner Tim Soutphommasane .... wrote on Facebook: “If there are Aboriginal Australians who have been racially offended, insulted, humiliated or intimidated, they can consider lodging a complaint under the Racial Discrimination Act with the Commission”...
The Marxist dictatorship of the proletariat has been replaced by the neo-Marxist dictatorship of manufactured minorities.
UPDATE: Leak is my guest on tonight's The Bolt Report.
(Thanks to reader Peter of Bellevue Hill.)