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

Stephen Sizer's Return (updated again)

Who can this be?  An actual or theoretical April Fool?

After a two-week propaganda tour of Australia, Peacemaker Trust's founder and CEO the Rev Dr Stephen Sizer, formerly vicar of Christ Church, Virginia Water, has returned to Southampton. And so has his luggage, temporarily lost.

Despite his return, echoes of his visit live on, in the interviews that he gave while here.

A wily disingenuous campaigner, he said nothing, at least that I heard, about his support for the Right of Return, or about the support for a One State Solution that, as I showed here, he has avowed.

This screenshot dates to 2014.  But, at the time of typing this blogpost, our old mate is still listed as a "Liker" of "BDS for the Return", and when we click on the links provided on its Facebook page we find:

"This page is for Boycott, Divestment and Sanction (BDS) Actions that are directly relevant to the implementation of the Palestinian refugees right to return to their homes and lands of origin."

Screenshot in 2014

"Al-Awda, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition, is a broad-based, non-partisan, democratic, and charitable organization of grassroots activists and students committed to comprehensive public education on the rights of all Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and lands of origin, and to full restitution of all their confiscated and destroyed property in accordance with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, International law and the numerous United Nations Resolutions upholding such rights."

If the original Arab generation which fled (and were invited back by Israel) and the so-called "refugees" who are their descendants (the only such people with inherited refugee status in the world) were to "return" we all know how long the sovereign state of Israel would last.

On Good Friday the ABC (Oz's answer to the BBC, and just as biased towards the left and against Israel, if anything more openly) Sizer was interviewed by regular presenter David Rutledge, a lapsed Christian with a theology doctorate, about Christian Zionism.  The entire program was saturated with leftist propaganda, some of it more egregious than the rest, and the interview with Sizer fitted seamlessly into that predictable agenda.

"Many evangelical Christians today are convinced that recent events in the Middle East herald the imminent return of Christ and the establishment of his kingdom on earth - and Israel is central to the whole plan. These are Christian Zionists, and according to Stephen Sizer they're misguided — and possibly dangerous", runs the website.

At the ABC studios Sizer, pictured below with his minder Father Dave Smith, an anti-Israel Sydney clergyman, looks like the proverbial cat who got the cream:

Rutledge, in a somewhat lighthearted tone, described him as "a rather controversial Anglican cleric" and at the start of the interview mentioned the polarising effect he has.  But Rutledge was soon sniggering in the background at some of the ex-vicar's descriptions of Christian Zionist thought.  Sizer's spiel was his usual one.

Rutledge assured him "I accept that you are not an antisemite" and Sizer quoted the Bishop of Guildford (the one who suspended him from social media for six months, though that was not spelled out) as privately telling him "Stephen, on the Middle East you're on the side of the angels".

Are you a glutton for punishment?  The program is here

This weekend was broadcast former South Australian premier-turned-clergyman Lynn Arnold's recorded radio interview with Sizer.  It opened with such a lot of discussion about Sizer's early life (our old mate was eventually obliged to spell out his birthplace, Lowestoft, for Arnold, who kept mispronouncing it Lowerstoke) that I was lulled into a false optimism that Sizer's propaganda would be timed out.  But alas.

"This evening my very special guest is Rev. Stephen Sizer" said Arnold by way of introduction, before reciting the biblical passage (no random choice, for it was cited again later on to deny the validity of Zionism) that Sizer had chosen to preface the interview, from Psalm 87.  Suddenly, the interview turned to Sizer's views on the usual Christian pilgrimage to the Holy Land.  Our old mate's pleasant, plausible tones were heard declaring that the land is "occupied territory just as it was under the Romans" and that on the usual pilgrimage "On Day One you go to Yad Vashem ... because then you are not going to criticise the Israeli occupation of Palestine" and launched into his well-practised critique of Christian Zionism and support for BDS.

Overlooking Sizer's past excrescences (could he really have been ignorant of them?) the indulgent Arnold encouraged listeners to look at Sizer's website and the Peacemakers website to learn more about his views.  Deftly done. No word from Arnold about Sizer's chastisement by his bishop, his notorious 9/11 post, his reasons for quitting his pulpit ahead of schedule.  Nothing embarrassing to our old mate whatsoever was invoked.

I reckon Sizer left the studio well-satisfied.

Back in the 1980s and thereabouts, Radio 3CR, Melbourne, was one of the most virulent Australian  purveyors of anti-Israel propaganda, its most notorious anti-Israel voice being that of Bill Hartley, aka "Baghdad Bill", an extreme left-wing figure in the Victoria state ALP (Australian Labor Party) whose hagiographic obituary (2006) in Green Left Weekly notes:

"His dedication to the Palestinians, one of the most oppressed and mis represented people of the past 60 years, was well known, and his connections allowed many of us to visit the Middle East and gain access to refugee camps and contacts that allowed an invaluable insight into the issues."

While in Australia, Sizer was interviewed on 3CR by Robert Martin:

 'This week we are joined by Dr Rev [sic] Stephen Sizer with whom we have a discussion around Christian Zionism, its sway in America and the term “The Chosen People”.  We exchange thoughts about the Christians who are scared to criticize Israel in fear of being labelled as an Anti Semitie [sic], as well as Armageddon and the attacks by the Hasbara.'

 As Sizer posts triumphantly here, "Robert didn't need convincing":

No wonder he didn't.  Martin is a well-known anti-Israel activist:

In this video, which, like the above photo, can be found on his Facebook page, he buttonholes and then harangues a polite group of frum Israelis, including women and girls, his face growing contorted, and his voice strident, with rage:

"You're racist .... You don't care because you think it's God's will?.... I won't talk nicely, because you're a bunch of animals!"

A still from the video:

 Martin's Facebook page is littered with comments from feral antisemites.  For instance:
 

I listened to Part One of his interview with Sizer, here.

An Arabic-accented voice announced that the program, "Palestine Remembered", is brought to the listener by the only program in English "totally dedicated to the Palestinian cause", spoke of the program's honour and delight in having Dr Rev [sic] Stephen Sizer and Martin then declared: "I'm so honoured to be joined by Dr Rev [sic] Stephen Sizer today".

Sizer gave the usual spiel, preached to the converted that "Zionism is a form of racism", and answered Martin's eager questioning about the "Chosen" concept with an analogy to colonialism, observing that it is "used to justify the theft of land from the indigenous people, the Palestinians".  He declared that "the Bible affirms the one state solution", and told how the British government last year could not be persuaded to apologise for the Balfour Declaration ("the government were so in bed with the Zionist lobby").

Of the messianic hopes of religious Jewish settlers Martin remarked "Let's kill more Muslims, and kill more Christians — it doesn't matter does it?, and Sizer did not demur.

He identified five stages of reaction by "Zionists" to anti-Zionists such as he:

Update, 5 April.

1.  They try to buy you ...

2.  They try to intimidate you, with emails and articles.  People involved in Hasbara are paid to send emails, he alleged, before bemoaning this article in The Spectator by Melanie Phillips. It's "a shock" to be accused of antisemitism, he told Martin, when asked.

3.  They try to isolate you, turning publishers against you and causing people who have booked you to speak to cancel the event.

4.  They stalk and harass you, telling of his woes with the Seismic Shock blog (his interviewer makes some telling crack when told the blog owner's Jewish-sounding name) 

5.  They kill you. "They take people out."  (At this point the interview ended so abruptly that even the most pro-Israel of listeners could be forgiven for thinking Mossad had terminated it, but then came the Arabic-accented voice advising that Part Two will be coming soon.)

If Sizer doesn't want to be lumped among the antisemites, he could begin by defriending on Facebook people such as the prolifically-posting Derek Andrew Hands  (it would take him some time!):

And sever ties with this bloke:

Tony Gratrex, the PSC stalwart and  9/11truther, merits no fewer than ten pages in part one of David Collier's superb exposé of antisemitism in the Palestine Live Facebook group and is mentioned in part two of the same report.  Despite (surely not because of?) Gratrex's appalling record, Sizer has welcomed him into an exclusive Peacemakers (I'm sorry, I'll type that again, "Peacemakers") Facebook group.

As well as eschewing one of the commenters on this recent article:

In response to these comments on that article in Sight

Sizer has posted the following

and his pseudonymous Facebook buddy Harriet S Place chimes in

Anti-Zionist blogger Harriet, whoever he is, seems mighty tolerant of conspiracy theories.  Here's what I just found on his Facebook page, with no trouble at all:

Not a good look for a nice Christian boy, Harriet.

Not a good look at all.

Update: Australia's most-read columnist Andrew Bolt on Sizer and the ABC in press article  today (hat tip: Ian)  See also here and the next post but one.
With many followers, and given his intention to wean Christians, especially Third World Christians, away from support for Israel, I'm not so sure that Sizer is as comical-ish as this very useful article from AIJAC implies.

"We Are Afraid ... the Left May Abandon Us...The Muslim Community ... is Not Allowed to Speak"

Image credit: CultureWatch; see article HERE

The issue of whether same sex marriage should be legalised in Australia is a hot issue in Australia at the moment, with the ABC (which habitually guns for the Catholic Church) making little secret via subtle and not-so-subtle propaganda of where its sympathies lie. 

The Bible isn't meant to be taken literally, one of the other propaganda items scolds, reminding us of patriarchal attitudes and the practice of polygamy in the time of the Hebrew prophets (but strangely silent about the literal interpretation of ... (yes, you've guessed it!) and the patriarchal attitudes and practice of polygamy in ... (yes, you've guessed it again!)

"With few exceptions, including a statement from the National Imams Council, almost all of the talk of religious freedom and opposition to the bill on the grounds of faith has come from Christian leaders, particularly from the Anglican and Catholic Churches,"

 the BBC's Aussie counterpart told us last week. 

"But now one Muslim leader has offered an explanation." [Emphasis added, here and below.]

Watch the respectful silence and the sombre nods of the panellists on the ABC's program "The Drum" last week as that Muslim leader, Ali Kadri, spokesman for the Islamic Council of Queensland and the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils, offers that explanation:

"Unfortunately, in the current climate, the right and conservative side has attacked Muslims as terrorists and extremists, and naturally the left side has been allies in defending us for a long period of time.

We are afraid if we come out with our opinion then the left may abandon us for going against their view and we can't be friendly with the conservatives because they have been bashing us for 15, 20 years every chance they get … and that includes some Christian sects as well...

A lot of [the]Muslim community are concerned that religious rights will be trampled in Islamic schools [and that they] will have to follow a national curriculum that will teach things that go against the fundamentals of their religion, so they are concerned about it...

The Muslim community is not speaking because the climate which is created in this country, we are not allowed to speak. We speak up and are called a terrorist, unpatriotic and all those slurs.

So we are missing out on having our say in this debate and that's the wrong thing."

Contrast the respect accorded the conservative Islamic viewpoint with the derision and hectoring the ABC regularly metes out to conservative Christians who cannot in all conscience vote the way the ABC wants. Here's one of the latest examples, poking fun at, inter alia, Australian Christian Lobby head Lyle Shelton.