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.