Appropriately dubbed the “new Mr Coal” by an excited Andrew Bolt on his weekly Channel Ten slot yesterday, the new Minister for Resources, Energy and Northern Australia, Josh Frydenberg averaged a lie every 3.5 minutes as he raked over the Abbott Government’s legacy on climate change and coal.
Source: Four Lies In 14 Minutes: Josh Frydenberg And His Andrew Bolt Report Porkies | newmatilda.com
![Alton Nolen allegedly beheaded a woman at a foods distribution plant in Oklahoma [EPA]](https://i0.wp.com/www.aljazeera.com/mritems/imagecache/mbdxxlarge/mritems/images/2014/9/29//201492982830638734_20.jpg "Muslim-Americans: Presumed guilty?")
Since April 19, 1995, Oklahoma has held a special place in the USA’s terror imagination. For Muslim-Americans, their current state as social pariah number one, holds unpleasant reminders of the post Oklahoma City indictment of Islam. (link – http://articles.latimes.com/1995-04-22/news/mn-57460_1_oklahoma-city-bombing). Almost two decades later, conditions are being replicated following a beheading outside Oklahoma City on September 25th. Alton Nolen, a 30-year old local, severed the head of Colleen Hufford – a former colleague at the food-distribution company that had recently fired him (link – http://www.aljazeera.com/news/americas/2014/09/us-man-shot-after-beheading-colleague-2014926233713271290.html).
Following the gruesome incident, media outlets immediately sought to link this savagery to the man’s recent conversion to Islam. (link – http://docapp065p.doc.state.ok.us/servlet/page?_pageid=394&_dad=portal30&_schema=PORTAL30&doc_num=634241&offender_book_id=391688&imageindex=5) His extensive criminal record was merely a sideshow, skipped over, in order to focus the public attention on the presupposed
Since April 19, 1995, Oklahoma has held a special place in the US terror imagination. For Muslim-Americans, their current state as social pariah number one, holds unpleasant reminders of the post Oklahoma City indictment of Islam. Almost two decades later, conditions are being replicated following a beheading outside Oklahoma City on September 25. Alton Nolen, a 30-year-old local, severed the head of Colleen Hufford – a former colleague at the food-distribution company that had recently fired him.
Following the gruesome incident, media outlets immediately sought to link this savagery to the man’s recent conversion to Islam. His extensive criminal record was merely a sideshow, skipped over, in order to focus the public attention on the presupposed “guilt” of Islamic doctrine.
Naturally the subhuman violence popularised by ISIL, including, but not limited to beheading, allowed pundits with little information of the crime motives, to blithely connect Nolen’s act with a terrorist network. Worse still, for a community already under an aggressive media spotlight – clear efforts were made to seek a connection (however tenuous) between Muslim-Americans and ISIL.
As the media hype about the first workplace beheading in the US reached fever pitch, it became nauseatingly clear that the true motive and the specific personality of the culprit were considered by news desks as something of an irrelevance to the story. Which by now had its own wrong-headed “terror-based” momentum.
But these days, no burden-of-guilt on the Muslim community is complete without a desperately worded and rushed out apology by community leaders and imams for crimes at home or abroad.
Politics of apology
These days, the quintessential hallmark of being Muslim in America is neither faith nor citizenship. Rather, the essence of Muslim-American identity right now is the collective fear which arises during national security crises. It is increasingly these “interim moments, between catastrophe and discovering the real culprits [of terrorism],” which most aptly defines so much of the experience of being Muslim and American today.
Although the overwhelming majority of terrorist attacks are committed by non-Muslims, the prevailing narrative conflating mass violence with Islam trumps statistics, easily shifting the presumption of guilt onto every adherent of the faith, via hyped up news bulletins.
| These days, no burden-of-guilt on the Muslim community is complete without a desperately worded and rushed out apology by community leaders and imams for crimes at home or abroad. |
The immediate search to indict Islam after every atrocious act has, systematically, bred a defensive posture among Muslim-American citizens and our institutions. The practice of assigning instant guilt, combined with the American understanding of Islam as a spiritual, ideological and demographical monolith, has pushed Muslim-Americans into the proverbial corner. Trapped between “supporting terrorism” and a hard place, Muslim-Americans are perpetually burdened with guilt by association of faith.
And we ourselves are not without blame for this sorry state of affairs. Muslim-American leaders (some self-appointed) and too many of our major institutions have largely ceded to intimidation. There are various elements at play.
Being the first to speak out when a new atrocity breaks, can mean a great deal of airtime and publicity for the “Muslim spokesperson”. And it is a long accepted fact that an invitation to White House dinners is on offer to Muslims who are willing to jump on the blame bandwagon. Those who sadly may be putting personal ambitions above long term community strategy, curry favour with government agencies that profile, prosecute, and persecute Muslim-Americans.
An apology is far more than an act of remorse when made to the media by Muslim-Americans. It is an admission of tacit guilt. Let me give you an example: If someone living on my road whom I’ve never met, steals your bike, do I apologise for it? And if I did, wouldn’t you wonder why I was linking myself to the crime?
Eroding stereotypes
Oklahoma, aptly named the “Sooner State” represents the American rush towards judging Islam as responsible for violent atrocities before facts are collected and assessed. This was the case in 1995 with the Oklahoma City bombing and with last week’s workplace beheading.
Now social media activists are seeking to breakaway from the confines of apologia. The Twitter hashtag kicked off by frustrated Muslim youth living in the West #MuslimApologies has brilliantly poked fun at the societal pressure to say sorry continually, nonsensically almost impulsively for all of the worlds ills – if you are Muslim.
Deftly catching the real atmosphere in the Muslim community humour is soothing our community’s soul and giving others an insight into the ludicrous nature of our dilemma.
Assed Baig: “I’m sorry that we keep getting in the way of your drone strikes.” Or how about this from “Raz”: “I’m sorry my beard scares you. It’s hormonal, I swear.”
Choosing to demonstrate that Muslims are diverse, this budding outlook may very well offer the strategic means to move beyond the bleak, dated, sorry state, that grips many organisational gatekeepers, and fails all of us in the US with its vacuousness.
Khaled A Beydoun is an Assistant Professor of Law at the Barry University Dwayne O Andreas School of Law. He is a native of Detroit.
News Corp, which produces The Bolt Report for broadcast on the Ten network, has declined to confirm the Andrew Bolt-hosted Sunday program will not be back on air in 2015. Now four years old, The Bolt Report was offloaded by Ten to News Corp for two years in 2013 because of the network’s dire financial situation. It is unclear whether the contract will be renewed. Ten broadcasts the show but News pays for its production, staff and transmission costs. Bolt has never out-rated the ABC’s Insiders with Barrie Cassidy.
The education minister and conservative commentator tangled on television as Bolt refused to toe the Coalition line, denying his role was to help the government get re-elected
Christopher Pyne has rebuked colleagues for backgrounding the media about the Coalition’s current political woes – but has been rebuked in turn by the conservative commentator Andrew Bolt for implying the broadcaster and blogger was helping the Abbott government with its task of re-election.
Underscoring the scrappy end to the parliamentary year, the education minister fronted the Bolt Report on Sunday morning with an explicit appeal for party unity.
The past three weeks has been characterised by strategic missteps and by damaging internal leaks about Cabinet tensions. Pyne’s argument on Sunday morning was colleagues should hold their tongues – not fuel the media’s appetite for stories about disunity because journalists were not “trying to help the government be re-elected.”
Pyne made an honourable exception for Bolt, his host.
“What my colleagues need to understand is they are advocates for the government’s agenda, they are not background commentators for the media,” Pyne told Bolt.
“They also need to understand that – present company excepted of course – the media are not trying to help the government be re-elected, they are trying to get a story, therefore disunity is always a story.”
Bolt looked distinctly nonplussed with Pyne’s inference about his motivations.
He told his guest he was not, in fact, trying to get the government “re-elected” – he was trying to “get a better performance”.
The two tangled again during the interview, when Bolt asked his guest to shed more light on why the prime minister had despatched the trade minister Andrew Robb to oversee the foreign minister Julie Bishop at climate negotiations in Lima.
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Pyne told Bolt that Robb had not been despatched by anyone but was, in fact, going to the climate change talks because he was already in the region in order to pursue negotiations around the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
The education minister insisted that contrary to some reports, Robb’s task in South America was not to chaperone Bishop at the climate conference and make sure that Australia didn’t overcommit on new emissions reduction commitments. He was just in the neighbourhood.
Pyne also pointed out that Bishop was actually the senior portfolio minister, so if anything, she was chaperoning Robb.
Bolt rebuked Pyne again.
“You are denying what I know is a fact,” the broadcaster declared.
“I certainly am,” Pyne replied. “Julie Bishop doesn’t need help from anyone. That’s been proven in the last 15 months.”
When he wasn’t tangling with his host, Pyne used the interview to encourage his colleagues to stay the course. He conceded the government had finished 2014 “in a slightly ragged position but we still have two years to go before an election is due”.
Pyne said many of the current political flashpoints would be gone over the next couple of years.
It was not entirely clear from his remarks whether one of the flashpoints he was consigning to the past tense was his higher education package, rejected by the Senate. “Many of the issues running now will be bedded down over the course of the next two years and I think we’ll have a very different end to next year than we’ve had to this year.”
The education minister said the Coalition just had to keep “ploughing on with our messages” and he added “forward momentum [was a] great salve”.
Bolt zeroed in on the treasurer Joe Hockey, who has been the recipient of some of the negative internal backgrounding over the past few weeks, and also the focal point of some of the negative commentary from conservative quarters outside the government.
Bolt wondered what Hockey could do to win greater confidence from his colleagues. Pyne said Hockey enjoyed his confidence, and the confidence of colleagues within the government.
The education minister also defended the contribution of another Coalition player who has been the target of negative commentary recently – Tony Abbott’s chief of staff, Peta Credlin.
Bolt thought Credlin might need a better communications manager. Pyne thought not.
The education minister noted Credlin had done a “superb” job and his desire was that she stay and do “even better into the future”.
NEW YORK (CT&P) – Last Wednesday during his online radio show, Pastor James David Manning of the ATLAH Worldwide Calvary Missionary Outreach of Our Lady of the Impure Latte Church, exposed yet another fiendish conspiracy perpetrated on the American public by the dark forces attempting to turn us all gay.
This week the unhinged pastor has convinced himself that Starbucks is adding “sodomite semen” to lattes in order to control American’s sexual preferences.
“My suspicion is that they’re getting this semen from sodomites,” said Pastor Manning. “That’s what my suspicion is. My suspicion is that semen, like cord blood, has millions and millions of little zygotes in it, and it flavors up the coffee. And it makes you think you’re having a good time drinking that cup of latte with the semen in it.”
He then claimed that the story was the reason he was criticized for calling the company “ground zero for Ebola,” calling their clientele “generally upscaled [sic] sodomites” who go there to “exchange a lot of body fluids.”
“Now I know why I don’t go to Starbucks,” Manning said. “But now I know why these other untoward types hang around that Starbucks. This investigation has not been closed as of yet.”
Indeed, the investigation is ongoing, and Pastor Manning has put some of his top woefully uneducated researchers in charge of the ongoing probe.
“We postulate that the zygotes act on the nervous system and put you to sleep while a pod is formed nearby, and when you wake up, you’re a flaming fag with an insatiable thirst for lattes,” said Manning.
This is not the first conspiracy that the right reverend has uncovered. He was the first radio personality to reveal that aliens were urinating in McDonald’s soft drinks, and he also exposed the deadly plan by the Obama Administration to introduce Ebola to the nation’s food supply by contaminating Hardee’s breakfast biscuits.
Pastor Manning, also known as “that black kook from Harlem,” is scheduled to appear on the Bill O’Relly show next month as part of Fox’s ongoing coverage of the imaginary “War on Christmas.” He is expected to reveal the ringleaders of a nationwide conspiracy to ruin Christmas by contaminating the Strategic Eggnog Reserve (SER) with fecal material from atheists.
Turn off 2GB , give up on News Corp and the Bolt Report
“I say “myth” because of one telling fact above all: this country actually has as many Buddhists as Muslims. Yet where are the Buddhist terrorist plots? Where are the angry complaints about “alienation”? Where the warnings to change our foreign policies … or else?”
The buffoon opens his mouth and out come the flies so filled with Islamic hate he must have a gut full of maggots. Andrew Bolt this government isn’t waging war in any Buddhist,Hindu,Sikh or Confucian country. The last time we did we got into a lot of shit and lost. It was called Vietnam and you would have rushed in if you wern’t too young wouldn’t you. Europeans were at risk sitting in public places and soldiers took off their uniforms then in Saigon. A young Mike Carlton was and experienced the brutality of war up close and personal, unlike you. How do you think we’d go if we entered the fight in Punjab ,Amaritsar at the Golden Temple and we started taking out the rebel Sikhs that were crying out for independence?
“It is that belief which has already landed 21 Muslims in jail for previous terrorist plots against Australians.”
You make thing up as you go along its bullshit. Who are the 21 convicted persons in jail cretin are they some of the ones found not guilty Mr Bolt. As for deaths caused by these conspirators none. Maybe you need to be reminded of Andrew Knight he was not a Muslim. He was a trained cadet though from Melbourne High who knew the meaning of alienation.
With regard to 1000 bombs a man like yourself calls Obama piss weak and Abbott strong a true blue world leader who you openly encourage to humanitarian bomb (an oxymoron) another nations citizens in the hope of degrading a criminal element without UN sanction. Bombing in itself is indiscriminant and your up for it. Your far more dangerous because you incite a mate who has the capacity however you wont do it in public will you only behind the security of locked doors.
You accuse the multitude of critics of the terrorist raids as being conspiracy theorists. What a lode of cock and it’s all in your mouth. It’s common sense when you give a government department $650 million that it’s going to be eager to show that spend was justified. If that justification seems like an overkill in the secret operation of 800 personnel raiding Australian citizen houses in a public televised and photographed event 3 days after the PM announced “we have no specific intel”. The questions are reasonable. Particularly when the Murdoch Press falsely headlined plots of beheadings when there were none. That the raids were instigated on one phone call the information withheld due to “operational matters” and more so that the departments running the gig have fucked up so badly in the past. How Dr Muhummed Haneef at the behest of Kevin Andrews under the Howard government was put under control in jail. How Kevin Andrews refused tell where his information was sourced from. Tht the court findings revealed that ASIO and the AFP had given Andrews contradictory reports due to the cock up of an over zealous agent wanting to please. Then yes Andrew Bolt we are entitled to ask questions and make suggestions on how this all seems to fit so well for the government. Andrews thought it did back in 2007 as well.
Climb back under your rock Bolt. Why doesn’t this government lay Section 18C charges against you? That’s every days question
Bolt Report 24/8/14: Andrew Bolt & Piers Ackerman sang “the Moral Way is the Murdoch Way” on Sunday……… Halalujia
Im
“The power to conceal or reveal sensitive personal information turns out to be just like the power of the bully in the school playground. The bully need only batter one or two children for the fact of his power to be established: fear will then ensure that the others do all they can to placate him.”
Whether in response to the prelude to an attack or to prevent the threat of future attack, Shorten has opted to attempt to short-circuit the issue by coming out, unexpectedly, and on his own terms, to discuss it. But it’s a high-risk play in that it elevates what until now has amounted to social media abuse into a mainstream media issue that can be openly discussed. Bolt is certainly pissed his media team didn’t get to it first don’t for a moment think he wouldn’t have used it accompanied with the word ‘alleged’. Instead he was running down the media straight last yelling ‘I’m Galahad of the press’ Shorten had ‘Bolted’ and has made it the subject of public debate.
But it also undermines the threat from Murdoch on the issue: his papers can still run a smear campaign against Shorten, but he has got on the front foot and ensured it can’t be used to blackmail him. A direct attack designed to destroy Shorten, who has proved unexpectedly competitive against a government that has spent a year stumbling from error to error, may not have been the only thing playing on Labor minds. One of the key elements of Rupert Murdoch’s success, according to The Guardian’s Nick Davies, is his ability to blackmail key figures based on the threat that they will be punished via personal attack in his newspapers. As Davies wrote in July:
UNHINGED
You can watch the episode here, but if you’re not quite up to it, the relevant discussion began at around the 33-minute mark, when Bolt and Johns started hashing out whether recognising indigenous Australians in the document would divide the nation by race.
According Andrew Bolt Adelaide Universtity failure “Indigenous should not be mentioned in our constitution as they can’t prove they were here before us”
UNHINGED
Bolt likes to say he dropped out but that sullies
the reputation of a number of good people
olddogthoughts 