Culture Wars, Corbyn, & Cardinal Pell

"It's not a miracle. It's justice." That was how "Australia's Dreyfus", Cardinal George Pell, reportedly corrected a well-meaning prison guard on the morning of 7 April, when, after spending 13 months on jail for preposterous alleged historic sex crimes against two 13-year-old choirboys, the cardinal's conviction was overturned by the unanimous judgment of the full bench of Australia's High Court, 7:0.  As is well-known, the cardinal had been convicted on the accusation of a single accuser, with no corroborating evidence whatsover, and despite the countervailing testimony of defence witnesses. 

The High Court's decision was a stinging rebuke for the two Victorian Supreme Court justices who last August rejected Pell's Appeal to have his December 2018 conviction quashed, and a ringing endorsement of the careful analytical judgment of the third Supreme Court judge, Justice Mark Weinberg, who had shown good reason why the conviction was unsafe. Weinberg, a brilliant legal mind with an impressive curriculum vitae, was the only one of the three Supreme Court judges with expertise in criminal law.

A conservative cleric: Herald Sun, 13 February1997

Although the Pell Case has often been compared to that of Alfred Dreyfus, in so far as two innocent men were robbed of their liberty and reputation on trumped up charges, their principal persecutors markedly differ, the conservative Pell's being overwhemingly men and women of the left and far left, often atheistic and militantly secular, as well as in many cases being hostile to Israel. Many embody the mindset, seen in an odiously inappropriate tweet on the day of Pell's release from jail by Victoria's state premier Dan Andrews, as well as in comments by the extreme feminista Twitterati, that the accuser in sexual assault crimes must always be believed.  (Although, the hypocrisy of the left being ever-present, that mindset does not apply in the case of a former Australian Labor Party leader accused by a young woman of rape.  Same regarding Joe Biden.)

To their shame, some lefty Jewish acquaintances of mine have joined in the foaming-at-the-mouth demonisation of Pell (that continues from leftist sources since his release) with such social media statements as "We all know he did it" (imagine what these libellous folk would say had they been around to witness such prejudiced comments about the exonerated Mendel Beilis) and with ill-informed claptrap, reminiscent of dark antisemitic tropes about the global power of the Rothschild Bank, declaring as fact that the financial power of the Vatican secured Pell's release (in fact, he received no church funds whatsoever to finance his defence).

Ballarat Courier, 4 June 2002

The principal villains in the decades-long persecution of Cardinal Pell (who since his release has quite rightly deplored the "guilt by accusation" mindset that underlay his case and threatens to underlie others if not discarded) is the ABC (taxpayer-funded, left-dominated, and habitually flouting its obligation to present news and analysis in a fair and balanced way), which has engaged in a scandalous campaign of "vigilante journalism" against him,  led by reporter Louise Milligan, whose book Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of George Pell anticipated his "fall" long before his trial and incarceration and is apparently riddled with errors, with a supporting case of ABC personnel too numerous to mention here.  They and their leftist pals in the Fairfax media and the independent Guardian Australia are still at it, since his release, exulting in the highly unfair findings of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses into Child Sexual Abuse that had been redacted until now [document here]  and pushing calls that he be defrocked. (On that unfairness, see, for instance, NewsCorp and Sky News journalist Andrew Bolt's interview with Peter Westmore here and Gerard Henderson's article here) Also in the vanguard of the anti-Pell crusade that saw the cardinal charged with the offences of which he has since been acquitted was the politically contaminated leadership of the police force in the state of Victoria, which, in what was effectively a Get Pell exercise, touted for complaints against him. (Incidentally, to see how low the anti-Pell forces have been capable of stooping, see this ABC report.)

The  interview which Cardinal Pell gave, days after his release, to one of his staunchest supporters, Andrew Bolt, discusses these sinister issues, and there are many more reports and videos online that do, one of the most interesting being this interview on the day of the release with Chris Merritt, legal affairs editor of The Australian newspaper.  There's also this, Gerard Henderson of the Sydney Institute talking to Andrew Bolt at the end of April. And be sure to have a look at Australian Catholic University vice-chancellor Professor Greg Craven's tongue-lashing of the so-called national broadcaster, on 7 April

Like their counterparts on the BBC, ABC journalists are a self-congratulatory nose-thumbing lot, who seem to forget that public funds pay their salaries. The nauseating tweet at right, a paeon of praise to her boss, which came amid a veritable frenzy of Pell-bashing tweets by Ms Milligan following the 7 April High Court verdict, is a case in point: in Aussie-speak it can best be described as "brown nosing", and one of the co-presenters of ABC's breakfast news show gets into the act.  Odiously, and arrogantly, the ABC (like the BBC) handles complaints about itself in-house, and one result was Paul Barry's contemptuously conceived and delivered riposte to its critics concerning the Pell Case, as excoriated here by Andrew Bolt. To quote briefly from Bolt's column in the Melbourne Herald-Sun of 11 April denouncing the ABC's "stunning denialism" (ABC Denies its Pell Witchhunt, Then Proves It):

Can anyone believe the ABC's claim that it didn't vilify the innocent George Pell and help hound him into jail? The ABC should be ashamed, humiliated, repentant and begging for forgiveness for its starring role in the vilification, destruction and jailing of an innocent man.... Not one single ABC presenter or reporter at any time pointed out that the many allegations the ABC aired against Pell were inherently implausible - in fact, some impossible. Not one. ABC staff instead routinely treated them as not just credible, but often true.In fact, the ABC united behind ABC reporter Louise Milligan as she peddled allegations against Pell that were so weak that every one of them - like the ones she devoted an entire 7.30 report to - was either dropped by prosecutors or now overturned by the High Court. But not before Pell spent 405 days in jail....'

One of the bloggers and journalists who has done laudable service in the cause of showing that Pell could not have committed the heinous crimes for which he was convicted is Dr Chris Friel.  No rightwinger, he. In a very recent piece that highlights the anti-Pell tweets of a certain unidentifiable person called Lyndsay Farlow and which demonstrates the ABC's despicable role in Pell's persecution, Dr Friel explains that before he became interested in securing justice for Pell he investigated the role of pro-Israel "hawks" in casting Jeremy Corbyn as an antisemite.  A footnote to his article claims:

'This mirrors the antisemitism crisis in which a significant minority of Corbyn supporters are Jewish (and who are therefore deemed anti-Semitic!) a fact that the mainstream have difficulty acknowledging."

 Inter alia, in the main text:

 'Let's now turn to the ABC. The organisation would no doubt espouse values of fairness to all including Catholics, and aspire to treat controversial topics such as sex abuse and redress even-handedly. Insofar as my analysis of Farlow would be accepted, I am sure that the ABC would repudiate the idea that Farlow's concerns are that of the state broadcaster. Even if Farlow "hunts witches" the ABC does not.

Here it may be worth offering a general description of the likes of Farlow (or CLAN), namely, that they are "hawkish." A typical hawk is both polarised and polarising. Hawks will have a particular, single focus and view everything through that lens. They will then divide the world into friends and enemies accordingly, sometimes mirroring the equal and opposite pole.

The example that I spent a year studying in fine detail before I ever wrote on Pell was the "grass roots Zionist hawks" that agitate for Israel having a special concern to ward off the threat of boycotts. No doubt pro-Palestinian pressure groups exist that mirror such hawks, but from my experience it is the pro-Israel faction that is especially well-funded and organised. Although quasi-autonomous from the state of Israel, such groups will be well briefed (winning the information war is compared to winning the skies in military warfare) and also (covertly) funded by Israel as indicated by the exposure of Shai Masot delivering £1,000,000 to Joan Ryan MP to discredit her leader Jeremy Corbyn. It was my impression that the shrill, unreasonable, and abusive "group-think" ("group speech"?) of the redress-for-abuse hawks was astonishingly similar to the pro-Israel-anti-boycotts hawks.

Now, just as the BBC would officially distance itself from the pro-Israel hawks, in reality they and the mainstream tend to treat them uncritically, not least because the hawks can and do provide kompromat. In the case of Jeremy Corbyn, an MP on the fringes who was surprisingly victorious in the 2015 Labour leadership (after changes to the voting system that gave power to his grass roots), it was the hawks who had already been collecting information on him regarding his Palestinian Rights activity since 2010 well before he was prominent that supplied the data to the mainstream. This was then distorted and reproduced amidst artificial hysteria at a time of acute tension in Israel and after Corbyn had done surprisingly well in the 2017 election and might well progress further.

In other words, the hawks act like a "ginger group." Their aim is always to "ginger up" (agitate, enliven, stimulate) the mainstream. To repeat, hawks are not merely polarised but they are polarising, agitating to normalise an extreme agenda. I would argue that this is what we see with Pell and the Australian mainstream.

In the case of the ABC, with reporter Louise Milligan especially, it seems that the hawks have infiltrated the state broadcaster, something that was no doubt made easy given that many in the ABC loathe Pell's Conservative social values (on gender issues such as abortion and gay rights, but also climate change).' [Footnote numbers in original have been omitted here]

While praising Dr Friel for his support of the cardinal, I can't but regret Dr Friel's comments about Corbyn and Zionists.  I mean, "Zionist hawks" have infiltrated the BBC? Seriously?!

The ABC and the BBC are very much birds of a feather. 

In the interview that he gave to Andrew Bolt on 14 April, Cardinal Pell quite justifiably observed that "the culture wars are real".  He cited the determination that the militant left has to divest western civilisation of the Judeo-Christian foundations on which it rests.

He is quite correct of course. And complicit in this determination are leftists who infest the news rooms of both ABC and BBC, as well as sections of academia.

As Pell's longtime friend, the distinguished American Catholic scholar Dr George Weigel has remarked, in his capacity as a member of the Friends of Israel Initiative,

 ".... Israel, which has a clear right to self-defense, is beset today by a unique combination of threats: it must defend its people from attack while defending its very right to exist. No other state in the world faces this dual challenge. To deny Israel’s right to confront some of the world’s most vicious terrorist groups in order to ensure the safety of its citizens is to corrode international norms from within”a process that is already well-advanced at the United Nations, to that organization’s shame.

The assault on Israel is one part of a more general assault on the West, on democracy, and on the moral and culture heritage that grew from the fruitful interaction of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome. One especially threatening part of this assault is the effort to use human rights claims and claims of universal criminal jurisdiction as weapons against Israeli democracy. Should these efforts succeed, similar efforts will certainly be turned against other western democracies.

Peace in the Middle East, to which all of us are firmly committed, is not a matter of Israel-and-the-Palestinians only. Responsible Israelis and responsible Palestinians both know that there will be no peace in the Middle East absent a pan-Arab recognition of Israel’s sovereign legitimacy.

Israel and the West are both confronted with two particularly grave threats in the early twenty-first century: the threat of Islamist jihadism, which has already caused enormous suffering while altering patterns of daily life throughout the world, and the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran, led by men who believe that a new holocaust of the Jews will hasten the advent of the messianic age. Israel must not be put into a position of facing these threats alone. Those in the West who do not understand this should ponder the lessons of the late 1930s more carefully.

The campaign of delegitimation against Israel includes aspects of that anti-Semitism that has fouled parts of western culture for centuries and that must be forthrightly condemned by all who share the moral values of the Judaeo-Christian tradition...."

 (See the rest of Dr Weigel's relevant remarks here)

And see an example of a naive and foolish Catholic priest in the Australian Catholic Church's ancestral Ireland here