VicPol Finds Its Inner Ghandi
Should Australian politicians and their police forces, so vigorously let loose on innocent citizens these past years with every weapon – literally – at their disposal, now man-up a little and stop allowing marauding hordes of terror supporters to dominate our cities? Perhaps do a Bibi.
During the Covid policy madness, we witnessed tasering, pepper spray, rubber bullets, physical violence, wrongful arrest and (in Canberra during the Convoy of February 2022) LRADs (long range acoustic devices). My, how the cops love their toys. Now, at the Melbourne (where else?) Docklands Crowne Plaza Hotel, we have this latest sickening confrontation engineered by the peaceniks of Palestine:
More than a dozen pro-Palestinian protesters have confronted family members of Israeli hostages at a Melbourne hotel.
Police responded when 20 people turned up to the lobby of the Crowne Plaza on Spencer St, Docklands about 10pm.
They were holding “Free Palestine” and “Zionism is Fascism” signs and chanting.
A number of Israelis have flown to Australia to speak to dignitaries about their ordeal. Some of them have family members who are hostages.
It is understood they had just arrived back at the Melbourne hotel after a speaking event when they were confronted by the protesters.
Police were called and said the protesters were quickly moved on. (Emphasis added).
Moved on? Moved on? Trespass, at least, surely? They got Al Capone on tax evasion, after all. This time, Peter Dutton has it right.
Hotel protesters should have been arrested: Dutton
Source: The Australian 30 November 2023, paywalled.
The Prime Minister, while condemning the actions of the “protesters”, seemed to be mainly concerned about the impact of the events on the image of Palestinians and their cause. No talk of arrest or deportation from the losing-the-plot Prime Minister.
What are we to make of the gentle stroking of these non-Australian infiltrators by our law enforcement and elected representatives? They are either in the tank for Hamas, a terrorist organisation, or they are spineless in the face of a relentless campaign of intimidation against Jewish (and other) Australian citizens as well as our guests from Israel.
(Channel Seven might also have mentioned that the “protesters” were waving “fake babies covered in blood” in the faces of anyone trying to get through the Crowne Plaza foyer. Just as a reminder of what the Hamas terrorists did to Israeli babies on 7 October 2023).
No, it is apparent that VicPol has called a halt to its formerly vigorous modes of policing. World famous, it was. Now, VicPol has discovered its inner Ghandi. What it once did to the innocent, it now refuses to do to the guilty. To those who wish to turn our streets and cities into no-go zones for anyone not waving a black, white and green flag. I wonder what Monica Smit – who went to prison for Covid crimes – thinks of this change of heart by Danny Boy’s military police.
Which brings us the right of “free speech”. Peter O’Brien writes at Quadrant:
Free speech is now a very amorphous object. Like ‘racism’ it can now mean whatever you want it to mean. But, essentially it means that, except in extreme circumstances, one cannot suffer adverse personal consequences for expressing one’s genuinely held beliefs. Generally, this would mean you cannot be prosecuted for expressing an opinion that the government does not like. But free speech does have consequences. It can cost you friends or family members. It can cost your business, if potential customers choose to stay away. It can limit your opportunities for employment. You cannot be protected against these consequences.
It also has another price, as we are discovering. It is now commonly accepted that the right to protest is an extension of free speech. But protests come with a financial cost. NSW Premier Chris Minns has revealed that policing a major protest can cost up to $1 million. What is the current bill for the many Pro-Palestinian protests that have already occurred? And how much more will we rack up before state governments say, ‘enough is enough’?
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/the-law/2023/11/anti-semites-get-the-red-carpet-treatment/
I have previously written about the scamming of taxpayers. Now we can add the cost of “policing” the Palestinian peaceniks to the already-long list of Government scams. We are paying for these warrior-impostors to take up almost permanent residence on our once peaceful streets, and on private property.
Perhaps, as citizens who are endlessly reminded of the foundational status of free speech in a liberal democracy, we need to pause for a moment, step back, and have a second look at just how free speech is panning out for the innocent people who are getting caught up in all the melees. It is beyond ironic that just as hate speech laws that will crush all sorts of (online) free speech in this country are hurtling through parliament, our State police forces seem to have decided that real hate speech perpetrated by evil and vile people is given a pass and a “move on”.
Jason Thomas of Frontier Assessments is right.
The terrorism unleashed by Hamas in collaboration with Iran, on October 7, 2023, is one of these revolutionary moments. Its aim is to advance the insurgency as the West looks weak. Its means is to use Western enablers to mainstream their cause. Terrorism is the tactic used by the insurgent to push forth their strategy. The strategy is co-opting as many nodes of power and influence as possible within our civil society, using our principles against us. The success of this strategy is now evident as the October 7 attack was as much a psychological operation as it was a physical act of terrorism. And it worked. The sight of many Western women celebrating or offering excuses for a movement that rapes, mutilates, and kills women is an example. While Israel is using rockets to defend civilians and Hamas is using civilians to defend its rockets, many University lecturers, media commentators, and democratically elected politicians have become willing participants to the insurgency. The very people we looked to for guidance, turned the terrorists into the victims and the victims into the terrorists.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/11/the-war-against-the-west-stirs-on-the-eve-of-november-11/
After years of inaction, the Islamists have decided to go big. I maintain – it isn’t rocket surgery – that 7/10 was a deliberate and strategic play to ignite a new war-by-terror. A local, regional and global intifada. “Shake off” the Jews, and then take on the rest of the infidel. That would be us. And the streets (and hotels) of our cities are, clearly, a front in this war. We watch, and we twiddle our thumbs. We say, gosh, that was nasty.
The sons and daughters of Osama Bin Laden are winning the soft terror war 2.0, despite all our in-vain efforts to wipe them out in Iraq, Afghanistan and all the other seed-beds of Islamism. Terrorism 2.0 involves insurgency, as Jason Thomas points out, but also propaganda, marketing, public relations, psychology, manipulation of history, the use of words to change meaning and all sorts of dark arts. And now there is social media to help things along.
We have seen all this before.
It is as if the Islamist terrorists have all taken courses in the history of the cold war. Perhaps they have all read Martin Sixsmith’s 2022 book The War of Nerves: Inside the Cold War Mind, about the war of ideas and infiltration that took place alongside the build up of missiles and bomb shelters. And all seen The Manchurian Candidate.
The “soft” cold war was core to the efforts of the Soviet Union to win the battle of ideas, and involved Western useful idiots like the Australian historian, Manning Clark. Manning Clark may or may not have actually received the Order of Lenin, but if he didn’t, he should have. And he wasn’t alone. There was a whole generation of leftist academics and journalists who defended the Soviet Union even once we all knew what they were doing to their people. We didn’t need Solzhenitsyn to tell us, by then, but he did help. After all, we found out about the Soviet Union back in the 1930s when Malcolm Muggeridge blew the lid on the collectivisation of farms and the deaths of millions of peasants.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/1933/mar/25/mainsection.fromthearchive
Now, pro-Islamist forces infiltrating the academy, the political parties, the bureaucracy, the media and other Western institutions is routine practice. It is already a job done, carried out over a generation. With all the clever tactics under the sun. Just as the communists did. The latter infiltrated the Vatican, after all. And MI6. As well as any new infiltration, there was already a whole generation of Marxist academics there, in place. They haven’t needed much encouragement to slide seamlessly into a new, pro-Palestinian project. Many have been embedded in the pro Aboriginal voice movement, for example, what with their obsessions over real and assumed colonialism.
https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2023/12/intifada-dreaming/
Infiltration, yes, but also intimidation. Peter O’Brien says:
Protests are more than just an expression of free speech. They are also political action. They are designed to pressure – even to intimidate – governments to act in a certain way. They attempt to circumvent the Parliamentary process.
And inappropriate intimidation at that:
I would argue that, in a practical sense, such inviolability as the right to protest possesses is limited by the extent to which a protest is designed to protect the rights and interests of Australian citizens from the actions or inactions of an Australian government. In other words, it must relate to an issue that is within the power of an Australian government to redress. And protests must be proportionate. Their purpose is to send a message to government. Not to punish it, and by extension the Australian people. We punish governments at the ballot box.
These pro-Palestinian protests relate to matters which are outside the power of the Australian government. Certainly, the government could accede to demands to call for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, to recognize Palestine, to condemn Israel and so forth. But none of these measures would have the slightest effect in the Middle East. Israel is fighting for its very survival. And they would be anathema to the majority of Australians.
All are valid points.
Finally, can one be both a critic of the neocons and of the military industrial complex and its endless wars, an international relations “realist” and an opponent of casual nuclear escalation – sleepwalking into another global conflagration – and also a vigorous defender of civilised Western values and a supporter of strong action at the local and regional levels in the new war that we did not start and do not want?
Now that is a question. And a wicked problem. There is a great danger of cognitive dissonance. Mark Steyn is one who has struggled with it since 9/11. I don’t know the answer. But I do know that we shouldn’t be simply making victims out of terrorists and allowing our country to be taken over by terrorist-adjacent thugs who are using our tolerance of free speech and “the right to protest” against us. It certainly is beginning to feel like a real war against the West, and not merely a continuation of the local “troubles” in the Middle East. In which case, the what is to be done question, too, is real.
Perhaps it is time to dust off our just war theories. And also to figure out how to fight the next war rather than the last one. The Americans took all of their Vietnam military baggage into twenty years of useless occupation-as-strategy conflict in foreign countries where they had no hoping of “winning”. They couldn’t even define “winning”. We could make a start right there. But, closer to home, there are things we can do other than simply to whimper.
When the Hamas-sympathising mob can take up (temporary) residence in the foyers of hotels in our major cities and thrust dolls covered in blood in the faces of those they oppose, it is beyond time to strategise a vigorous response, and come up with something that involves more than taxpayer funded soft policing.
Paul Collits
30 November 2023
The Doctrine of Seperate of Powers seems to be a forgotten rule. The police now are politically driven. Having been a police officer for over two decades I cannot believe how the police in most States have been politicised. I was always outspoken in my profession (finished as a Senior Sergeant) and I would never have complied with orders I considered either unlawful or unethical. From what I saw during Covid, I would have had fellow police officers in cuffs…
What we are seeing in both NSW and Victoria is down to supervision. Directions have been given NOT to arrest and to placate the criminal behaviour occurring right in front of these police. As far as the marches and police escorting these illegal marches, that is just cowardice of the police and police management.
Don’t forget that during the time of Christine Nixon as an Assistant Commissioner in NSW, physical minimal standards and minimal height, weight and chest expansion were discarded. The ‘Force’ cannot back up against those who will fight back like we used to. That is why when radicals want to roll, they will regardless of permission. They know they won’t be stopped if in large and aggressive mobs. As we saw during Covid, isolated groups and individuals are easy prey for the police.
Queensland Police now recruiting with ads stating over $100k p.a. Starting wage, six weeks leave and, incredibly, NO QUALIFICATIONS REQUIRED…. How to get mindless, controllable foot soldiers who won’t say ‘No’ or ‘Why’…
The sentence below in your last paragraph will never happen even under Dutton i think;
it is beyond time to strategise a vigorous response, and come up with something that involves more than taxpayer funded soft policing.