2Day FM Telephone Hoax Call – Where Lies The Blame?

Much has already been written on this topic and the latest consolidation from a reliable news source appears to be this one :-

2DayFM responds to growing royal hoax backlash

Given this background, there seems to be no doubt that the call was pre-recorded and did not go live to air.  While it can be argued that the DJs should not have proceeded with the prank, they referred it management for approval to broadcast.  Had the approval not been given, nobody would've been any the wiser, there would be no furore from the other side of the world, no hate-mail to the station and DJs, no withdrawal of advertising from the station – and, importantly, no evidence of a recording that may have been made illegally.

As is now clear, however, approval was given for the broadcast and some are now saying that 2Day FM has broken New South Wales law relating to recording of conversations.  Be that as it may, where lies the real blame in this whole saga?  Is it the exclusive domain of the radio station, or was there complicity due to negligence on the part of the hospital itself?

It beggars belief that a high profile hospital such as King Edward VII Hospital does not employ "Caller ID" on the telephones, to ensure that those who call them are genuine callers.  If the hospital is genuine about its duty of care for the privacy of their patients, I'd have thought that such a measure would be the logical first step.

Some are saying that the death of nurse Jacintha Saldanha resulted from the hoax call.  How could that possibly be the case if, as the Hospital itself claims, they held her blameless and treated her with every courtesy and consideration.  It can only be hoped that the Police investigation will uncover the truth in the issue.

Either the suicide was the result of personal issues that had nothing to do with the hospital and her employment, or the hospital actually did blame her. Let the truth prevail, without any whitewashing of the facts.

Regardless of this, the management of radio station 2Day FM needs to be concerned because it was they – and they alone – who created this situation.  Two of their DJs are off-air and undoubtedly scarred for life by the reckless action of responsible managers.  Is it possible that the station is "protecting" the 2 young DJs to delay testimony against the station's management?  Yet again, we must hope that the truth will prevail without any whitewashing of facts... or feeding the DJs to the lions.

Where Did We Go Wrong?

The news is full of it these days and I have to wonder how much longer we’ll have a free media in Australia – or anywhere else in the so-called “free world” – to learn and understand it.  Is it a surprise to anyone in this “land of the free” that we can read about religious intolerance that attempts to kill 14 year-old Malala Yousafzai for seeking freedoms that WE take for granted?

What is the story here, about another religion that, unlike our own, seeks to muzzle the media with threats of violence, backed up with actual violence?  Is this a religion at all?  Is there a God of love, as the various churches have tried to tell us about since we were kids?  Or is there a God of hate – with all the same weaknesses as every human being on the planet?

Or is there some sort of middle ground?

No, there is NO middle ground here.  Make no mistake my friends, we are now in the fight of our lives to preserve OUR way of life against those who would muzzle the media and, lest it not end there, want to continue to perform Female Genital Mutilation (aka FGM) against those who can’t defend themselves.

Here’s a link to a story that everyone needs to see.  It comes from Australia’s ABC TV – one of many free and independent resources that the radicals would wish to silence.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-10-29/concerns-raised-about-female-genital-mutilation/4340090 

This is NOT a story for the faint-hearted, but now is not the time for that sort of heart.  Now is the time for lion-hearts to fight back and say to the world at large that Australia will not permit this savagery to continue.  Not in the name of any religion, but in the name of human rights – the very human rights that radicals in the Muslim world actively seek to take away from us.

And what of that brave young girl from Pakistan who was shot in an attempt to silence her demand for equality in education?  Did she ask for the world to go and kill the Taliban?  No!  Did she ask for the world to change anything at all in Pakistan?  No!  All she asked was for the right, within her own country and her own faith, to have equality in education.

And for this she was the target of an attempted murder!  And here is the story, from their own perspective, about their own failure to kill a young girl as well as an idea :-

http://www.jihadwatch.org/2012/10/taliban-threaten-media-over-coverage-of-their-attempted-murder-of-14-year-old-girl-malala-yousafzai.html

If we all merely sit back and accept this news, we are encouraging those forces of evil to threaten US directly.  I do not capitalise “us” to mean the USA, I do it to identify us – ourselves, our families, our descendants.  Do we REALLY want our children – and our children’s children – to have to live under this curse?

If the answer is yes, then fine, that is what will happen and all those family members, friends and close acquaintances who have already died in Iraq and Afghanistan will have died for nothing at all.  I truly hope that you can live with that but I cannot.  Should there be an attempt on my life, as a result of this blog, will it make the slightest difference to anyone?  If not, then I too will die without an appreciable reason – perhaps like the Christians who were fed to the lions in the ancient times.

The difference, for me, is that I’m not a Christian.  Indeed, I’m an atheist, but at least I’m prepared to stand up to defend a way of life that has bound all of us in the western world since the Roman Empire became Christian.  Death holds no fear for me, it is merely the end of everything that is and was “me” – it’s a shame that those Islamic radicals won’t realise how they’ve been conned into making a sacrifice that will not result in 7.2 virgins, let alone 72 of them.

If Christian religion is a lie, Muslim religion would seem to be an ever bigger lie!  When my time comes to die, I’ll have that thought uppermost in my mind.  I can do nothing more than alert my fellow “western” human beings to a threat that will destroy our way of life, our religion and our morals, to be replaced with greater threats against publication of the truth.

Ignore me, western world, but this is not a religion of love as you’ve come to understand it.  Continue to heed the words of those who seek to blind you with passages from the Quran where double meanings permit you to snooze while your way of life ends.  Think about the way Vampire Bats drink the blood of their victims while anaesthetising them – it’s the same thing that’ll be happening to you.

I wish us all the best of luck and, meantime, echo the request of that very brave young girl, Malala Yousafzai, for education to be provided to all in Pakistan, regardless of sex, race, creed, religion... or Taliban threats. How many more brave young girls must die before this very simple and basic request is accepted and actioned?  If WE cannot stand up to support this, we will know where we all went wrong!

Toughen Up Princess!

At the outset here, I need to say that I oppose sexism and misogyny anywhere in public, perhaps most especially when it comes camouflaged in an internet joke.  There is no place for this in today’s society.  That said, as a male, I do not place females on any sort of pedestal because we are, in the eyes of the law and of common decency, equals.

I have a problem, however, when it is used as a battering-ram to silence reasoned and sensible debate.  When this happens, we end up with a situation where one side seeks to dominate the other – much as happens in some male-dominated societies around the world.  There is NO place for that, so there is no place for the vice versa view.

With all of that said, I turn to the events in the National Parliament of Australia, specifically the House of Representatives.  There are laws that govern what can be said there, much as there is everywhere else – which require the topic to be debated, rather than the person who originates the debate.  The real difference is that, in Parliament, things can – and should – be said under Parliamentary Privilege that cannot be repeated elsewhere.

As a result, we – the people who elect our representatives – expect and demand robust debate of issues that lead to good governance that improves laws that are supposed to protect us all and, indeed, the Australian national identity.  We expect that Australian elected representatives will get to the heart of issues, all issues, no matter how sensitive or controversial.  We demand that our representatives do this, in OUR interest.

What have we seen in Federal Parliament of late?  Accusations of sexism, misogyny and who knows what else.  Why can’t we allow robust debate of issues that affect us?  Why is our National Parliament so quagmired in debate of issues that resolve into the petty politics of each individual political party?

I watched “Question Time” yesterday (Tuesday, 9 October 2012) when the Leader of the Opposition tabled a legitimate motion.  The response by the PM – and the speakers from the government – was, for the most part, based on killing the messenger because of the message.  As part of this, I saw character assassination, allegations of misogyny and sexism that did nothing but derail the debate – rather than dealing with THE debate.

What happened today (Wednesday, 10 October 2012)?  Quite apart from the Speaker of Parliament resigning from that exhalted position, a continuation of allegations of sexism and misogyny that had so consumed the Labour government yesterday!  The fundamental issue remains suppressed by the vested interests of those who have no intention of debating the real issues.

No, I do not want to see any Parliament in Australia degenerate into the fisticuffs that we see, from time to time, in other democracies that are, shall we say, more robust in their own particular points of view.  What we see instead, however, is the next worst thing and it does nothing to encourage any of us who are obliged, by law, to cast a vote at each election.

It seems to me that our Prime Minister needs to heed that time-honoured call to “toughen up, Princess”.  Politics is a rough-and-tumble affair and, as another old saying goes, "if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen"!  Make way for others who can stand up to that “rough and tumble” situation, in the interest of the rest of us who are confused as hell about who to vote for next year.

By all means, debate the issues.  By NO means, debate or attack the person – that is the first lesson taught in High School debating but it seems that many of those that we elect have forgotten this basic tenet of debate.  We want our politicians to come to grips with the issues and to debate them in the most robust terms possible and we expect this no matter whether our particular representative is male or female because we are supposed to have gender equality in this country.

If this cannot be exercised in our National Parliament, how can we (the ones who have to follow the law and the lead of our responsible, elected leaders) be expected to follow the path that promotes gender equality?

Federally, the Australian Labour Party is on the cusp of a very unlikely victory next year, courtesy of the Leader of the Opposition who is a loose cannon of the worst sort.  If the Liberal Party replaces him, the ALP will lose in a worse way than happened in Queensland.  And, yes, I will vote for that.  I'm a long time Liberal supporter who has serious doubts about Tony Abbott but I'll never vote Labour, so Gillard will not get my vote anyway – but there are many others who are still confused by BOTH sides of politics.

To all our elected representatives – male or female – I say “toughen up Princess” and work in OUR interests, not your own self-interest.

OK, let’s try intolerance

(Reproduced, in full as a public courtesy, from “Opinion” article in the Cairns Post, dated 20 September 2012, by Melbourne-based journalist Andrew Bolt.)

The problem isn’t us.  It isn’t even some YouTube clip posted by a filmmaker no one has heard of.  No, the problem is them.

Islamists.  Extremists desperate to take offence.  Bigots who use violence to frighten us into giving up our free speech.

I mean, not just the people setting the Middle East ablaze, but the hundreds of Muslims who in Sydney on Saturday staged a violent riot, allegedly over a video that insults Islam.  Enough.

May I ask : who let in these people who now demand the right to say who may speak and who must tremble?

Who let in those who bashed police, flew the black flag of jihad and Hammas, and had children hold up signs exhorting “Behead all those who insult the Prophet”?

If this comes from opening our doors, then shut them.  If this comes from multiculturalism, then scrap it.  If this is the fruit of our tolerance, let’s try intolerance.

Let’s debate whether we must restrict Muslim immigration until we better integrate those here already.

But already we hear the same old voices telling us the fault for the riot lies with the rest of us for being racists.  Hear them tell us to understand the anger, and do more to appease it.

They warn us to remove from the internet not the scores of propaganda videos of jihadists beheading Jews, Christians and journalists, but one that merely makes Mohammed seem silly.  Reality check.  This protest was not caused by a YouTube clip.

If Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists and atheists were to attack police and demand beheading every time we found something horrible on the internet, this country would be a war zone.

No, it’s the wanting to take offence – and to threaten, attack and censor – that is the feature of these latest riots from Tunis to Sydney.

Take the most violent of those alleged “protests” – the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi that killed US ambassador Chris Stevens and three staff.  That, too, was sold in the media as rioting over an anti-Islamic film made in the US by an Israeli Jew.

In fact, that “film” was made by a Coptic Christian originally from Egypt, and so far exists only as a YouTube clip of cartoonish quality.  Moreover, the Libyan “protest” has been claimed by Al-Qaida as revenge for the killing of the group’s deputy leader.  The video was just an excuse.

The violent demonstrations at the US embassy in Cairo that same day may seem more easily portrayed as a “protest”.  Yet the US Government had no involvement with the video.

Moreover, the radical Muslim Brotherhood that now forms Egypt’s Government issued tweets and statements whipping up anger against the video and the US.

Since then, other extremists have murdered US soldiers in Afghanistan, burned a German embassy in Khartoum, stormed a US embassy compound in Yemen and torched a KFC outlet in Lebanon.  The targets seem irrelevant, and the YouTube video a pretext.

Some Sydney protesters confessed that they hadn’t even seen it.

So, no, these protests aren’t understandable reaction to Americans or Jews giving offence.

They are the work of Muslim extremists determined to jump at any chance to make us submit to their dictates.

The video is irrelevant. 

The violence is all.