Tagged with halal certification

The Q Society @ Victoria University : February 10, 2017

Update (February 14 2017) :

1) Kirralie Smith got a bit angwy:

2) Otherwise:

• On Monday the media pimps eventually reported the fact that Victoria University did indeed host The Q Society. See : Victoria University under fire for hosting Q Society fundraiser, Benjamin Millar, Star Weekly, February 13, 2017 | Q Society meeting: Victoria University apologises for ‘inadvertently’ hosting controversial group, Ben Knight, ABC, February 13, 2017 | Cory Bernardi and George Christensen’s Q Society event stirs anger at Victoria University, Tom McIlroy, The Sydney Morning Herald, February 13, 2017. Note that the SMH report incorrectly states that the ‘Q Society event attracted more than 100 anti-racism protesters outside Victoria University’s city convention centre’; the protest was actually in St Kilda (see below).

• Overland has published an open letter in which ‘We demand an apology from Victoria University’.

• The event attracted a glittering array of stars, from too-cray-cray-even-for-the-IPA Alan Moran to trollumnist for The Australian Jennifer Oriel to Kane ‘Smash cunts!’ Miller (below), putative leader of the now largely-defunct gang the ‘True Blue Crew’. See : How Reclaim Australia hid a ‘terrorist’, Martin McKenzie-Murray, The Saturday Paper, August 16, 2016.

Update (February 12, 2017) :

1) After being the subject of numerous complaints, VIC Uni has finally copped to having hosted The Q Society on Friday. It will be interesting to see what the response is from this point …

2) The Campaign Against Racism & Fascism (CARF) has published an open letter to Victoria University, republished below, detailing its concerns over VU’s decision to grant The Q Society use of its facilities to host the fund-raising dinner, and is urging concerned staff and students to add their names to it.

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SIGN ON TO THE OPEN LETTER BELOW – CONDEMN VICTORIA UNIVERSITY FOR ALLOWING THE RACIST Q SOCIETY TO MEET ON VU PROPERTY.

CARF urges both VU staff and other university students to sign onto the letter below. If you would like to – please Private Message the campaign group and we can organise to have your name added to the letter.

Melbourne, February 11, 2017

“Victory” not for VU students but far-right hate group Q Society

To Vice Chancellor Peter Dawkins and the Victoria University Council

It is with alarm and disappointment that we protest Victoria University’s decision to provide a platform to the far right anti Islam organisation Q Society.

On Friday February 10, the Q Society, hosted a fundraising dinner at Victoria University‘s city convention centre in Melbourne. The event, deceptively titled “defend freedom of speech”, was to raise funds for legal fees related to a defamation law suit by Mohamed El-Mouelhy, a Halal certifier. The Q Society is well known for associating Islam with terrorism and lobbying parliament to ban Halal certification.

In 2014 the Q Society toured far-right Dutch MP Geert Wilders, who advocates a total ban on Muslim migration. At the Q Society fundraising dinner held in Sydney on Thursday night, Larry Pickering, cartoonist and VIP guest said “Let’s be honest, I can’t stand Muslims.” Cory Bernardi, former Liberal Party senator, was a key note speaker at Friday night’s event in Melbourne. Bernardi has been a vocal opponent of Islam, opposes reproductive freedom for women and has linked same sex marriage to bestiality.

Victoria University has a very diverse student and staff population whose human rights and freedom to go about their daily lives are threatened by the repressive and reprehensible ideas of the Q Society.

Providing a venue for the Q Society contradicts the university’s vision of being “…open and excellent, creating exceptional value for any student from any background and uplifting the communities in which we operate.”

It also threatens Victoria University Safer Community strategy which is designed to foster an inclusive and safe environment for staff, students and the broader community.

Hosting the Q Society contravenes the University’s policy that clearly states that facilities will NOT be made available for:

a. Unlawful activities or activities that may be a breach of University policies.

b. Activities that are in conflict with or deemed incompatible with the University’s values or strategic direction.

We demand the university issue an apology and donate any money received from the Q Society or any affiliated institution to the Islamic Society of Victoria University or other related student and/or staff bodies.

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On Friday, February 10, 2017, Victoria University’s City Convention Centre played host to a fund-raising dinner, dubbed ‘Defending Freedom of Speech’, organised by The Q Society. According to reports, around 150 people attended the event, paying $150 each for the privilege. The event was intended to raise money to help Kirralie Smith of ‘Halal Choices’ and the Australian Liberty Alliance fight a defamation action brought against her by Mohamed El-Mouelhy of the Halal Certification Authority. The Society is reportedly hoping to raise $1 million to fund the defence — a gofundme campaign has to date raised over $75,000.

Speakers lending their support to the cause on this occasion were LNP MP George Christensen, former Tory now doublelplusConservative MP Cory Bernardi and Christian theologian Mark Durie. Christensen is a supporter of Reclaim Australia while in 2015 Bernardi spearheaded a rather farcical inquiry into food certification (see : Cory Bernardi’s anti-halal crusade unleashes torrent of hate, Adam Gartrell, The Sydney Morning Herald, June 20, 2015; Cory Bernardi And The Little Halal Truther Campaign That Couldn’t, Michael Brull, New Matilda, December 3, 2015).

The decision by VU to host The Q Society is a questionable one, not least because some of its staff have identified the risks associated with granting legitimacy to the far-right, and in particular to fringe discourses propounded by the likes of Q. Indeed, the article below explicitly identifies Reclaim Australia, the Australian Liberty Alliance and United Patriots Front as fringe actors whose ‘radical’ messages have received direct and indirect support from more ‘mainstream’ sources; a category which now includes their employer:

Anti-Muslim agenda drags discourse to political right
Mario Peucker and Debra Smith
June 16, 2016

Fringe parties that spread racist or anti-Muslim propaganda are subtly shifting public discourse to the political right in the lead up to the federal election, say two Victoria University researchers.

Dr Mario Peucker and Dr Debra Smith say the process of ‘mainstreaming’ the far-right agenda is reaching new dimensions as a growing number of local and national politicians, directly or indirectly endorse the messages of groups such as Reclaim Australia, the Australian Liberty Alliance or even the United Patriot[s] Front.

“Most people disregard these groups as extremists who represent only a small and electorally marginal minority of Australians, but their radical messages are not as disconnected from some mainstream politicians and opinion leaders as we’d like to think,” says Dr Peucker.

He says the process of shifting discourse and moving social norms to the political right is most palpable in the public discourse around the place of Islam and Muslims in Australia.

Dr Peucker points to a recent Senate inquiry set up to investigate links between halal food certification as a conduit for funding terrorism.

Although the link was completely unfounded by the inquiry, Dr Peucker says it remains part of the “Islamaphobia tool kit” used not only by unelected extremist groups but also by elected politicians such as Cory Bernardi and Jacqui Lambi[e].

Recent conflicts about mosque-building in Bendigo and Narre Warren that involved local councillors taking up the cause of anti-Islam movements reflect a logic, according to the researchers, that Islam has an inherent problem that needs fixing to fit into Australia’s liberal society.

A very similar message was sent by former Prime Minister Tony Abbott when he called for “a Reformation, an Enlightenment” within Islam.

Fringe groups can gain a certain degree of legitimacy through these public statements of leading politicians, and by protesting in support of government policies such as off-shore detention centres, as evidenced by recent protests in Coburg, Dr Peucker points out.

“A dangerously self-reinforcing circle allows electorally marginal movements into a space from where their agenda around equality, multiculturalism and religious freedom doesn’t look so extreme anymore.”

As it happens, the dinner didn’t go very smoothly for the Society …

While the venue for the event was kept secret — or at least, the Society did its best to ensure this was the case — a number of attendees, around 40, were instructed to meet at St Kilda Marina at 5.30pm in order to catch a bus to the Convention Centre. As a result of obtaining this information, which was relayed to the public by the Campaign Against Racism & Fascism, a group of around 100 or so anti-racists assembled at the rendezvous point to protest Q. As the bus was elsewhere, the group marched the brief distance to where it was parked, on Marine Parade, a hundred or so metres away from the Marina entrance. The bus, chartered by Bayside Coaches, was then surrounded, and effectively prevented from leaving at its scheduled departure time (6pm).

In the end, the bus was delayed from leaving St Kilda for an hour, before being allowed to go on its way at 7pm: kick-off time for the fund-raiser. There was some minor argy-bargy when a handful of younger patrons tried and failed to make their way onto the bus, but the picket was otherwise uneventful, with many passing motorists expressing support for the action.

St Kilda is indeed a long way from Mackay.

See : Anti-Islam group Q Society dinner disrupted by protesters in Melbourne, ABC, February 10, 2017; Protesters obstruct people going to anti-Islam event attended by Bernardi, Christensen, SBS (AAP), February 10, 2017; Anti-racism protesters clash with far-right Q Society supporters at St Kilda Marina, Marika Dobbin Thomas, Bianca Hall, The Age, February 10, 2017.

The Q Society dinner in Melbourne on Friday was preceded by another in Sydney on Thursday night, at which the very special guest speakers included cartoonist Larry Pickering and former Tory MP Ross Cameron, now the host of a batshit show on Uncle Rupert’s Sky. Hosted by North Ryde RSL, The Sydney Morning Herald published an account of the speechifying which made a lot of people angry, as well as mildly embarrassed some of Cameron’s colleagues at Sky. Larry Pickering’s hilarious quip that, while he hatesss the nasssty Muslims, ‘They are not all bad, they do chuck pillow-biters off buildings’, both badly-tarnished the respectable face that Q hopes to present to the world but also brought to mind Australia’s history of murderous homophobia.

See : Inside the far-right Q Society’s explosive dinner, where Muslims are fair game, Jacqueline Maley, February 10, 2017; Ross Cameron defends claim New South Wales Liberal party is ‘basically a gay club’, Chistopher Knaus, The Guardian, February 10, 2017; Transcript: Ross Cameron’s full remarks at controversial Q Society dinner, Georgina Mitchell, The Sydney Morning Herald, February 10, 2017.

Bonus Latham!

In The Guardian, Jason Wilson writes (Australians are worried about Trump. But there’s a lot to be worried about at home, February 10, 2017):

Last week, for the second time, former Labor leader Mark Latham appeared on The Convict Report, aka The Dingoes, an Australian “alt-right” podcast. It’s part of the network of podcasts hosted by The Right Stuff, a major international far right hub. That’s the same website whose major players have been recently doxxed by the left, and whose unmasking as promoters of fascist ideology has, in some cases brought suitably ruinous consequences.

In previous episodes, the pseudonymous hosts of the show have aligned themselves with Richard Spencer and other alt-right figures.

The Dingoes attempt to produce the same edgy fare as The Right Stuff flagships like The Daily Shoah, but they sound a little too much like chinless Young Liberal nerds to bring any real menace.

It’s significant, though, that Latham is prepared to go on their show more than once. Apparently, a show with previous episode titles like “I never want to see your race again”, which regularly spouts casual antisemitism and undergraduate race theory, and which has open fascist links, is not beyond the pale for a Sky News commentator. Despite the fact that disclaimers were offered about opinions not necessarily aligning, Latham was happy to be there.

As a former Labor leader turned trollumnist, Latham is obviously a bit of a wanker, but appearing on a neo-Nazi podcast suggests that he may have well and truly jumped the shark by this stage. As noted above, a number of podcast hosts on The Right Stuff (TRS) were recently doxed — seemingly in collaboration with some of the site’s critics on the far-right. (See : Meet Mike Enoch &/Or Mike Peinovich : They’ve got ‘The Right Stuff’, January 14, 2017.) Note that TRS obtained its semi-popularity on the AltRight, in part, by its willingness to address The Jewish Question, ie, to Name The Jew as being responsible for All The (Bad) Things. In any case, the revelation that the founder of TRS and host of The Daily Shoah, Mike Peinovich, was married to a Jewish woman caused some turmoil among its audience, with some podcasts — for example, Fash The Nation — being abandoned. (See : Pool Party’s Closed: A Timeline of The Right Stuff’s Meltdown, Eyes on the Right, January 18, 2017.) One neo-Nazi who did come out in defence of Peinovich was Andrew Anglin, founder of the Daily Stormer website. The latest issue of the SPLC’s Intelligence Report contains an essay on Anglin, and names his site as now being ‘the top hate site in America’, having recently eclipsed the veteran Stormfront:

On July 4, 2013, Anglin started what would become his main project, The Daily Stormer. The site took its name from Der Stürmer, an astoundingly vile and pornographic Nazi newspaper started by Julius Streicher and specializing in attacking Jews. Streicher was later hanged for war crimes at Nuremberg.

The new site, created from the ashes of Total Fascism, specialized in punchy, image-heavy stories that often rely heavily on quoted material. It used hyperbolic headlines — “All Intelligent People in History Disliked the Jews,” for instance, or “SS Auschwitz Guard Dies Days Before Scheduled Lynching by Kikes” — to grab readers’ attention, build up participation and shift people’s thinking.

Anglin relied heavily on the daily news, although it was news poisoned by his particular views, to drive his message home. “You make a very simple message, where you hit the same points over and over and over again and you repeat them,” he explained in a podcast on his site last year. “That’s been my style. That’s why I do the news. Because it can be new information all the time while still repeating the same points over and over again. … It’s about creating a gigantic spectacle — a media spectacle, which desensitizes people to these ideas.”

One of those who seems to have been “desensitized” to ideas like genocide and race war was Dylann Storm Roof, the young man who murdered nine black churchgoers in South Carolina in 2015 in a bid to start a race war. Posting under the moniker of AryanBlood1488 (the numbers are references to white supremacist slogans), Roof wrote about black-on-white crime — a central topic on The Daily Stormer and Roof’s self-described motive for mass murder.

See : Eye of the Stormer, February 9, 2017.

antifa notes (may 18, 2015)

In response to the announcement of a Senate inquiry into food certification, Guy Rundle has written the following article for Crikey, arguing that the local Jewish community (among others), needs to adopt a more public position on anti-Muslim prejudice. See : Food industry back Senate certification inquiry, hopes to address ‘misinformation’ about halal, Anna Vidot, ABC Rural, May 14, 2015 | Cory Bernardi Has Won A Senate Inquiry Into Halal Food And Goshdarnit, People Still Aren’t Taking Him Seriously, Meg Watson, Junkee, May 14, 2015 | Cory Bernardi forces parliamentary inquiry into halal and kosher certifications, The Sydney Morning Herald, May 14, 2015.

A few notes below …

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Rundle: why Jews (and everyone) need to stand up for halal
Crikey
May 14, 2015

The moral degeneration of the right continues apace, with the announcement that hard-right Catholic Senator Cory Bernardi has won support for his inquiry into halal food certification. The halal certification furore — the suggestion that it is somehow being used to fund Islamist terror abroad — is known in other Western countries, but only in Australia has it become a dominant obsession. If they have any evidence of halal certification companies funnelling money to shady groups overseas, they should present them to the police. There has been none, and the bizarre inquiry is simply a way of harassing and disrupting Muslim religious practices.

Bernardi is simply continuing his long and obsessive history of trying to construct Muslims as non-citizens, outside the rights and freedoms extended to everyone else. His position — celebrating “Australian values” in this — is utterly incoherent, since one of the few codified rights we do enjoy comes from section 116 of the constitution, guaranteeing freedom of religious observance. His focus on Muslims comes from his chauvinist Catholic beliefs — a conviction that there is not merely one truth, but The Truth, and that all others must toe the line. For chauvinist Christians of this type, Muslims are particularly egregious, because their religion breaches the injunction contained in Revelations, the final book of the Bible, that nothing should be added to the holy books after that one. That Muslims incorporate Jesus into their traditions and treat him as a prophet but do not recognise his divinity drives people like Bernardi wild. They can’t let it go.

Of course, there was another religion that the Catholics couldn’t leave alone for centuries, and that was the Jews. They came before, not after, and that meant they didn’t accept Christ’s divinity either. Furthermore, their maintenance of taboo practices was an affront to Christianity. Christianity is simply a fusion of Jewish monotheism with the universality of the Pax Romana that had conquered Judaea. The Pax Romana said that all who lived under the empire were part of it, from Cumbria to the Persian border. The Pax Christi adapted that and said that all humanity was open to salvation, not simply one tribe — and, in doing so, said that tribal taboos were thus abolished by Christ’s divinity, by God coming down to Earth in human form.

For that reason, Jewish taboo laws formed the focus of Christian persecution for centuries — and would become central to it when, in the late 1800s, some obscure Russian-Christian sect created an earlier hysteria about “certification” and argued that the blood of Christian children formed part of Jewish food rituals. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion formed one strand of the refocusing of Jew-hatred/anti-Semitism that would end in the Holocaust.

Let’s be clear about this: halal and kosher are pretty much the same thing, with variations, and an attack on halal is an attack on kosher — and on the concrete practice of religions that involve taboos and observance. Concerns about the alleged money trail of halal certification is, paradoxically, a cover for an obsessive interest in the “purity” of food that has been subject to halal certification. For Muslims, halal food is pure, or at least, permitted; for the obsessive right, the very act of halal certification is a form of contamination. It is a part of the Australian right’s intellectual collapse into myth and magical thinking. It’s inevitable that Bernardi is joined in his obsession by Andrew Bolt.

Personally, I have no doubt that there is no trace of Jew-hatred/anti-Semitism in either Cory Bernardi or Andrew Bolt, but in pushing their line on halal they are playing with fire, because many in the Reclaim Australia and other movements that hang on their every word are Jew-haters and channel every shitty obsession about Jews that has filled the 20th century. Islamophobia? That’s a substitute. Islam was a separate world for centuries, and could be warred with or dealt with as seen fit. Judaism lived at the heart of Christendom for two millennia, and would not die, and its community had solidarity and enterprise — and thus it is a standing abomination to Roman Catholic chauvinist thinking, which has to see the Roman/Christian version as originary and without precedent. It is this need to eradicate the original, Jewish, root of Christianity that has fuelled the frenzied nature of Jew-hatred/anti-Semitism in the modern era.

And it’s time Jewish peak bodies, rabbis and others got a bit interested in this — not merely out of solidarity with a fellow taboo-anchored religion, though that would be nice — but because Jew-hatred/anti-Semitism is on the march again in Australia. Not the confected kind, whereby anyone who crticises Israel is an “anti-Semite”, the real kind, channelling all the obsessions of the last century. Talk to bikies — not all bikies by any means — at a Reclaim Australia rally, and you’ll hear the old Jew-hatred, anti-Semitism, the “socialism of fools”, all the old tunes: how sneaky the Jews are, how they run things, how an ordinary bloke can’t get ahead, 9/11, Building 7, the works. Then ask them about Israel, and you’ll find they’re Zionists to a core. Why? Well anti-Semitic Zionism has a long history, but in this case it’s about plain sight. Israel is “the good Jews”, i.e. landed, nationalised and not a tribal presence in Christian society, who are the “bad Jews”.

This crap is spreading again in Western society, and the cynical determination of Jewish/Zionist peak bodies to label all critics of Israel as anti-Semitic has helped it spread far and wide. Jew-hater/anti-Semite used to be a serious charge — it’s junk now, used to forward Israel’s foreign policy, with the interests of non-Israeli Jews coming a distant second.

In Australia, Jewish community peak bodies need to get really interested in this — because an attack on halal is an attack on kosher, an attack on the legitimacy of relatively autonomous cultural communities within a wider whole. They need to understand that the current no longer runs with them as it did in the hey-day of multiculturalism. Quite aside from actual Jew-hating fascists in Reclaim Australia, there is a reduced tolerance for difference in … middle-class society, compared to say the 1980s. The neo-atheism of Dawkins, Hitchens, etc, has had its effect — there is less tolerance for, say, the orthodox communities of Caulfield, with their strange clothes, their gender-assigning roles, etc, than there once was. Anti-halal can easily flow into anti-kosher, and when they come for the gefilte fish, and I said nothing because gefilte fish, meh … if only there were a poem that said all this.

The leaders of a lot of Jewish community peak bodies are so desperate to run interference for Israel that they won’t speak up about this stuff. They need to. If they don’t, then groups of prominent Jews need to, to defend the right of religion to organise itself without harassment. That’s solidarity. But it’s also forward defence, against an Australian right that is, bizarrely, channeling every crackpot and pernicious obsession of old Europe, at pace, and disguising it with a cloak of pseudo-rationality.

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• On my reading, the local Jewish community has not been as silent on the anti-halal campaign as Rundle believes. See : Senior Rabbi Moshe Gutnick says anti-halal campaign ‘ignorant and prejudiced’, The Age, April 26, 2015. Prior to this (April 7), the Jewish Community Council of Victoria (JCCV) issued a statement condemning Reclaim Australia for “advocating and inciting religious intolerance which took place over the weekend”.

• The link between the neo-Nazi right and Reclaim Australia (RA) is an intimate one: it was present at its beginnings and is ongoing. In the context of a discussion of the position of Jewish groups in Australia, it’s therefore worth keeping in mind that ‘Nationalist Republican Guard’ — the neo-Nazi groupuscule responsible for collaborating with Shermon Burgess in promoting the event — is largely the work of Neil Luke Erikson, a neo-Nazi with a criminal conviction for harassing a local (Melbourne) rabbi. See also : “Give me the money Jew or else I will get you” (antifa notes, feb 16, 2014) | No jail for Melb man for racist calls, SBS/AAP, February 14, 2014. Otherwise, the neo-Nazi and fascist right has hopped on board the RA bandwagon, was present on April 4 and will also make itself known on July 18/19.

blaironrace

• There’s another kid on the fascist bloc: the ‘National Democratic Party of Australia’ (which is neither national, democratic nor a party). The group had a rather inauspicious beginning, ripping off a WA design company (and the WA RSL) to produce NDP agitprop. A convinced racialist, its chief spokesperson, Blair Cottrell, has some association with the Australia First Party and Nationalist Alternative, both of which had a presence on April 4 and are also committed to returning on July 18/19. The sometime leader of NAlt, Mark Hootsen, was also once ‘White Australian’, one of two mods on Stormfront Downunder. As such, he summarised his opinion on the role of The Jew in Australian politics by way of the following:

whiteAonjewstralia

• The NDP, NAlt, other neo-Nazi groupuscules and various Muslim-hating folks have declared that on May 31 @ 2pm they will be assembling at Richmond Town Hall in order to publicly denounce Islam and leftism. The rally appears to have been triggered by the presence of Steve Jolly on Yarra Council and the Socialist Party’s role in promoting opposition to RA. On the same day and at the time in the city a forum is taking place to discuss ‘Uniting Against Islamophobia: How can we stop Islamophobia?’.

Among those who’ve indicated that they’ll be attending the rally in Richmond is Croatian neo-Nazi Matty Ljubic:

madmattymay
MattyLjubic2
mattyljubic

Note that Ljubic has invited Jamie Lazarro of the ‘Full Blooded Skips’ gang to join him on May 31; the FBS also having been in attendance on April 4 and seemingly having very close relations with a range of local neo-Nazis.