It would be ridiculous to draw any sort of equivalence between Pauline Hanson and ISIS but there are some similarities.
ISIS followers brandish a particular black and white flag. Pauline’s followers drape themselves in the Australian flag.
ISIS wants to ban other religions. Pauline wants to ban Islam.
ISIS wants to dictate what women can wear. Pauline wants to dictate what they can’t wear.
ISIS uses social media to get their message out and to attract followers. So does Pauline.
ISIS refer derisively to “moderns.” Pauline mocks the “inner city intellectual elites”.
ISIS want their own state with strongly defended borders. Pauline wants the same thing, stopping immigration entirely.
ISIS have a caliph. Pauline has made it very clear she is the supreme leader of her party and has aspirations for greater power.
ISIS decry the western media. So does Pauline.
ISIS appeals to violent extremists who think their way of life is best and want to impose it on others. So does Pauline’s One Nation.
ISIS cannot accept the changes in the modern world and retreat to fundamentalism. Likewise Pauline.
Pauline definitely doesn’t encourage her followers to go around killing people but her special brand of ignorant intolerance mixed with the certainty of a fool comes with its own dangers.
She emboldens the racists, the bigots, those who are fearful of difference and those who cannot adjust to a changing world. She fuels their fears and gives them targets for their anger.
She passes on completely wrong information, as in her advice about vaccination, and then brushes it off saying “someone told me”. She is not interested, nor capable it seems, of being informed about anything by independent experts yet is putty in the hands of unscrupulous lobbyists and the weirdos she surrounds herself with. She is possibly the only person who could trust Malcolm Roberts about climate change, Brian Burston about the ABC, and James Ashby about strategy.
Pauline’s hysterical Islamophobia threatens our national security by attacking and alienating the very people who are keeping us safe – the Australian Muslim community. It is their children who are being seduced, radicalised and killed. It is their homelands that are being torn apart, their relatives oppressed, displaced or killed. It is their religion which is being blasphemed, their reputations questioned. They are working with our security and law enforcement agencies to keep us safe and to purge their ranks of this poison which has changed their lives far more than it has ours.
Pauline says she is defending Australian values yet she offends pretty much every value I hold.
