You know you have really crossed the line when that champion of free speech, Andrew Bolt, says you should have been “booed off the stage.”
Yet this is exactly what he said of Larry Pickering’s performance at Kirralie Smith’s fundraiser to pay for the defamation case ensuing from her false assertion that halal certification funds terrorism.
Why should I care what Bolt, Pickering, or the pretty blonde trying to out-hate Hanson to also join the political gravy train have to say?
Mainly because several politicians, past and present, are championing Smith’s cause, appearing at two fundraising dinners organised by the anti-Islam Q society to help fund Ms Smith’s defence which is expected to cost $1 million. That is a very dangerous precedent in my opinion – using your parliamentary status to back someone facing a defamation suit.
Aside from the odious Pickering, we had Ross Cameron, Angry Anderson, George Christensen and Cory Bernardi all taking part to offer their personal support.
Thursday night was hosted by Angry Anderson with Pickering and Cameron both giving rambling diatribes peppered with Muslim and gay bashing.
Cameron, who was at pains to reassure us that he was heterosexual, said “the thing I love with Kirralie Smith, the first time I saw her on television I thought there could not be a more authentic expression of the goodness of Australia than Kirralie Smith.”
Reading the transcript is tortuous. I doubt Mr Cameron will be getting too many gigs on the speaking circuit.
He constantly mentioned homosexuality in his speech.
He spoke about the classical philosophers, who valued reason over orthodoxy, and said Socrates “might have had a bit of same-sex attraction”.
He said the Roman emperor Hadrian had a young male lover who “fell off the back of a barge. I’m sure he was snorting coke at the time.”
In front of two Sydney Morning Herald journalists, who were in the room, he called the paper the “Sydney Morning Homosexual”.
“Trigger warning for the Herald, there are some heterosexuals in this room. I don’t want you to be offended by that, but there are some males who are attracted to females in this room,” Mr Cameron said.
“Now, I know, the NSW division of the Liberal Party is basically a gay club. I don’t mind that most of our parliamentary class is gay. I just wish, like Hadrian, they’d build a damn wall. That would be my preference.”
Pickering’s contribution was predictably despicable.
“I can’t stand Muslims,” he said. “If they are in the same street as me, I start shaking. But they are not all bad, they do chuck pillow-biters off buildings.”
On his website, Mr Pickering later said his remarks were nothing more than “the sort of bullshit banter exchanged between holes on a golf course”.
Pickering donated for auction one of his own works depicting the rape of a woman in a niqab by her son-in-law – the cartoon fetched $600. Another Larry Pickering cartoon auctioned depicted an imam as a pig, being roasted on a spit, with a “halal certified” stamp on its rump. A case of wine called “72 Virgins” was also up for grabs.
This caused Andrew Bolt to call on defenders of free speech to condemn Pickering.
When a Pickering speaks so fouly, we must say so. We must condemn. We must with our good speech damn the bad.
To fail in this is to give the cops-calling Left their excuse to say we’ve been exposed: that what we really seek is not the freedom to speak but the freedom to vilify, free of even the restraint of any goodness.
And that, Andrew, is the consequence of unleashing the hounds. You may consider your motives pure but they embolden others who make false accusations, whose irrational hatred and fear is being stoked by the media and, even worse, legitimised by the support of currently serving politicians. This gives them an extraordinary platform to spread their discontent which grows like ripples in a pond.
Cory Bernardi and George Christensen both attended another fundraising function the following evening.
Christensen said, “I attended the ‘defending freedom’ event because I believe we are slowly seeing the erosion of free speech with the myriad of anti-discrimination laws we have in this country and the threats of violence from Islamist and leftist groups like [anti-fascist] Antifa.”
Senator Bernardi told the $150-a-head fundraiser that those there were described in pejorative terms as “hard right” but were actually just normal “people with concerns”.
I find it farcical that they called the evening defending freedom when what they want to do is take away freedom from Muslims. But Ms Smith is good at casting the wrong people as victims. Apparently the media should stop picking on Larry and Ross.
“I felt in the context of his speech and his dry humour he had every right to say those things at a dinner defending freedom of speech. His walk through history and his dry, sharp humour highlighted the danger we now live in when the media elite and political class censor, abuse, deride and isolate people because they hold a different view. The SMH article was actually a perfect illustration of how when the media don’t like something they throw their full weight behind whipping up offence and shutting people down without engaging in debate,” she wrote.
So much for the freedom to criticise which, in Ms Smith’s world, only goes one way.
Australians must resist this attack on our social cohesion and help defend the constitutional right of our Muslim brothers and sisters to live as they choose without Kirralie Smith telling them what they can eat, what they can wear, and how they must worship.
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