A cloud of Political Correctness burst over Fred Nile while Muslims dressed in burqas were planning to kill Christian children

Late November 2002, a blissfully unrepentant Fred Nile (Christian Democrat NSW Parliament) stunned the world by suggesting that certain forms of traditional dress for Muslim women be banned in some public places. The bulging grey cloud of political correctness that permanently hovers above poor Fred Nile began thundering and throwing out lightning bolts. Cries of indignation amidst the roar and flashing howled through every media organisation, and every dim-witted mind lazing in the swamps of political correctness began like a startled Gollum splashing around. Then came the cloud burst. There was no escaping it – not even in the darkest crack in the highest mountain.

Fred was an ignorant, intolerant, hypocritical Christian racist – emphasis on the Christian This charge was improvised upon a thousand times as every PC hack scrambled over the bodies of their colleagues to get their thoughts in the air or on paper. Editors of the newspapers’ Letters section threw open their columns to every dripping and drooling Philip Adams clone.

As usual, the Australian gave plenty of opportunity for the PC mind to have a rave. And as is almost usual, the editorial committee directed their leader writer to summarise the main points of the PC storm. Here is that editorial (22 November 2002) for the edification of our readers:

Let’s respect religious difference

IT would be unwise to simply laugh off the Reverend Fred Nile’s bizarre comments about Muslim religious dress as the irrelevant rantings of an unrepresentative and perennially provocative cleric. Mr Nile has a knack of attracting the notoriety he obviously craves – and he can count on some fellow-travellers outside clerical circles. Even more ludicrous is the suggestion on talkback radio yesterday that each Australian should ‘monitor a Muslim’.

Mr Nile wants the Muslim hijab, the headscarf worn by Islamic women, and the chador, the all-enveloping gown worn by others, banned. Apparently it is offensive to his Christian conscience. Yet he is not on record as wanting orthodox Jewish men to stop wearing the distinctive black hats some favour. And does he draw the line only at Muslims? After all, there are still Catholic nuns who wear the veil, and even the queen has been known to appear in Windsor Great Park with a scarf over her hair. The real reason behind the clerical politician’s complaints is religious prejudice, and an unworthy bigotry.

The Anglican Bishop of South Sydney, Robert Forsyth, states correctly: ‘It is very disappointing that a Christian minister elected to the NSW parliament and claiming to represent the Christian community would make such comments. It demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of the nature of religious freedom in a liberal-democratic society.’

Unfortunately the straitjacketed views of Mr Nile do not allow a real tolerance of difference, and religious difference in particular. The enrichment of Australian society by its influx of races and nationalities naturally includes a diversity of religious faiths and culture. The wearing of the hajib is hardly a subversive practice, although lately it has sometimes been a cause of abuse towards innocent Muslim women, courageous enough to own to their religion. If being identified by dress is offensive, just about everyone in uniform should abandon it all for mufti – and obviously ridiculous proposition.

This editorial is as lying, distorting, bigoted, and malicious as any I have forced myself to read in Murdoch’s Australian.

I would like to grab Michael Stutchbury, the Australian’s editor, by the ear and force him to watch my lips. Michael, I would say, if you have paid attention to what Fred Nile actually said, you would find that the issue he is bringing before the public is ‘security’ not ‘religion’. In all the reports I have seen and read of what he actually said, he did not mention the hajib and he raised no objection to Muslim traditional dress on the basis of religion. Indeed, Fred Nile's concern was not about the Muslim dress in itself which he quite rightly claimed was not religious but traditional or cultural. Not all Muslim women by a long shot wear the ‘chador’ and even less the ‘burqa’.

Fred Nile raised the issue because Muslim terrorists (you know, the ones who are indiscriminately killing Jews and ‘Crusaders’ without regard to age or gender – Bali?) are able to hide weapons or even disguise themselves in traditional Muslim dress. Michael, I recommend you flick back through the pages of your newspaper and count the many instances your flunkeys and gofers have reported. Below I will give you a pertinent example that recently appeared in an edition of the Australian.

But let’s first look at the tactical framework of the editorial. It is always a model for your ordinary everyday PC bigot. The meat of the accusations appears in the first two paragraphs with the following two paragraphs a flow of sanctimonious hypocritical waffle based on the lies and slander of the first two.

The first step is to discredit the victim (in this case Fred Nile) by sleight of hand misrepresentations, marginalising him with the claim of madness, stupidity or eccentricity, and by associating him with outlandish claims that bear no relation to the actual words of the victim. Let’s deal with these discrediting tactics.

The garment Fred Nile named, the ‘chador’, is not a religious garment – certainly not in the sense that a Catholic priest’s or nun’s habit is religious. The religious habit of priests and nuns distinguishes them precisely from their lay/civilian fellow citizens. The chador is a civilian garment. It is the equivalent of the traditional dress of any other culture, including the fast-disappearing traditional dress of European countries. That's the major misrepresentation. The major lie was the claim that Fred Nile named the headscarf, the hajib, as a problem. He made no mention of the hajib.

It is a common tactic of the PC mind to attack the man rather than the argument or the issue. Here the Australian's leader writer reduces Fred Nile’s motivations for raising the issue of Muslim dress and security to Fred’s supposed psychological state. (In general this is the mode of the media's attack on Fred Nile: ridicule him as eccentric, extremist, wacky and immoral.) It is pathetic to see the media blaming the victim for their psychopathic tendency to beat up stories they think have some mileage in them.

The second way of marginalising Fred Nile is to claim that he has few supporters – and these are just as disturbed and immoral as he is, anyhow. While it may be true that the circle of people who agree entirely with Fred is not great, I have no hesitation in saying that many more are sympathetic to and understand the issues he regularly raises. The Australian editorialist denies there is a more than a marginal support because he and his colleagues are either in lying mode or victim of their own propaganda. The reason that people like Fred Nile and Pauline Hanson garner support in the community is that they have the gall to raise concerns that are ignored by the media and the ruling class – even if Fred Nile and Pauline Hanson do not have the solution or lack the competence to deal with the problem.

The third way the leader writer attempts to marginalise Fred Nile is by using the commonest of media dirty tricks: associate the victim with someone who is truly suggesting something wacky. The suggestion of the radio talkback caller ‘to monitor a Muslim’ has absolutely no connection with an assessment or judgment of the issue that Fred Nile has raised and the manner in which he has raised it.

The second paragraph contains the charges against Fred Nile. They are:

- Fred Nile wants to ban the hijab (headscarf) and the chador
- These garments are offensive to his Christian conscience
- Fred Nile is being inconsistent in not demanding the same of other ‘religious’ dress
- The real motivation behind Fred Mile’s action is ‘religious prejudice and an unworthy bigotry’

Before I go on to deal with these claims I cannot forebear asking the editorialist where he has recently seen a Catholic nun dressed in full traditional religious habit, including the veil. Let me be brief about this, the reference is part of the colourful fantasy of the bigoted PC mind. It is a sort of lurid tactic to refer to the ‘medieval’ dress of the nun. The only place the average person is likely to see anything resembling the traditional nun’s habit is on homosexualists in the Sydney homosexualist Mardi Gras parade, and there the precise purpose is to mock, denigrate and degrade Catholics and the Catholic Church. If ever there was a case of outrageous religious bigotry, this is it. But it is ignored by the PC media because most people in the media agree with and support the homosexualist movement and its unrelenting unrestrained attacks on the Catholic Church.

Returning to the charges, the best response comes from the actual words of Fred Nile himself. He was interviewed on several TV programs and each time said something similar. The following is from Channel 7’s ‘Sunrise’ program and the interviewers are David Koch and Melissa whatshername. Melissa, who is no great heavyweight and obviously an attractive support for Koch and there for that reason, began by asking whether Fred Nile stood by his comments about the headscarf (hajib) and the chador, adding irrelevantly in feminist fashion that the comments were ‘obviously insulting for a lot of women’. Fred replied, first highlighting the lie about the hajib:

I certainly do. It’s not the head dress. I’m speaking about the Muslim chador, [spelling] C-H-A-D-O-R, which is a total black garment worn, that covers the whole head, the whole body. About a month ago six Muslim terrorist women [Chechnyan rebels] walked into a theatre in Moscow dressed in a chador which concealed explosives strapped around their body and possibly even weapons. And we also had a terrorist threat issued by the federal and state governments asking people to be alert and to watch what is happening at the Opera House, the Harbour Bridge and so on, and all I said was that there should be a consideration of a prohibition of people wearing a chador in those potential target areas not in Auburn or Lakemba where many Muslims live but in those city areas, in the CBD, and if people want to ignore that, then it’s on their heads.

Koch, ignoring the thrust of Fred's argument, replied that ‘comments like that prey on our insecurity'... that there are lots of good Muslim people and that the chador is part of their faith. Fred Nile's answer was immediate:

I was not talking about the majority of Muslim women in Australia. The majority don’t wear the chador. It is only worn by a small percentage and it’s not required by the faith. It’s not required by the Koran. It’s not required by Mohammed. It is laid down usually by extremist clerics. And in Iran and Saudi Arabia it is laid down by their governments and a lot of Muslim women are being forced to wear it in those countries and perhaps some of them are being forced to wear it here [in Australia] because of a particular….

[David Koch interrupting and talking over Fred Nile] I’m a bit out of my depth on that….

…[Fred Nile getting in] I’ve studied it, and I’ve talked to Muslim women and I have been to the Middle East and so on, so I’m not ignorant about these matters.

If Fred is not ignorant about these matters his interviewers showed they are. Melissa whatshername then raises the point about inconsistency. She quotes from an email: …‘Christians have been known to perform acts of terror as a trouser pocket can be used to hide a gun...’ Should men be banned from wearing trousers in public? she asks. There’s no doubt about Melissa, she really knows how to get to the point and raise the right sort of incisive objection. Fred Nile responded in the obvious way to this bit of dopey ridicule.

…if they want to make a joke about it, that’s on their head, I’m talking about an actual event that happened only a month ago when six Muslim women wearing the chador were carrying explosives. There’s no reports of nuns doing it, or priests or others. I’m just talking about a real threat. Bin Laden has just issued a message specifically directed at Australia in which he thanked the people for what they did in Bali and of course what they did under his directions to the Twin Towers in New York. And now, he says, we are going to attack Australia, and he used the words ‘bomb Australia’, kill Australians. Well, I don’t think we should be terribly relaxed about that. We should be very security conscious.

Melissa completely missed the point here and went on to repeat the argument about consistency. Fred repeated his explanations and the interview degenerated into the usual ridicule and mockery the media resort to when they want to eliminate someone like Fred Nile.

Melissa whatshername is certainly not up to the standard of Tracy Grimshaw on the opposition channel. If she wants to be a match for Tracy, she should first start listening, understand the argument, and then respond to it – and not to some event in her imagination. David Koch is doing a lot better on his second go on ‘Sunrise’. I suggest he have another look at this interview and isolate where he got off the track.

Fred’s Nile’s response in this interview shoots to pieces the Australian editorial and demonstrates what a load of lying malicious slander it is. It is very clear from the regular meaning of his words that his concern is security and not religion. If it is not clear how he answers the charge of inconsistency, let me try and summarise it in simple language for the rock hard PC mentality.

The issue of Muslim traditional dress (and not the religious garments of other religions) is raised because the terrorist threat to Western (‘Crusader’) countries is coming almost exclusively from Muslim groups. On the same argument, if traditional Catholic priests (modern priests don’t wear the habit) suddenly got it into their heads to start indiscriminately bombing the Christian West, then the same argument could logically be used: ban priests in religious habits from sensitive areas. It is arguing fallaciously to extend Fred Nile’s suggestion to the priests and nuns to demonstrate the charge of inconsistency. I don’t expect Melissa whatshername to follow this, and I expect the Australian's editorial writer to ignore it, but I’m sure it’s not beyond the capability of David Koch.

Finally, just to show further that Fred Nile had a substantial point to raise about security, the Australian ran this tiny report (partly reproduced) on 27 December 2002:

Girls die in Pakistan Church attack

Pakistanis police have detained three men, including a radical Muslim prayer leader suspected of orchestrating a Christmas Day attack on a church which killed three young girls and injured 16.

On Wednesday two assailants covered in burqas, a traditional women’s garb, tossed a grenade at a small church during a Christmas Day service in the village of Chianwala…Three Christian girls aged six, nine and 12 were killed

….Witnesses said the attackers wore burqas, the traditional garment worn by women in some Islamic countries. Male Islamic militants in neighbouring Afghanistan have worn burqas to hide their identities in at least one recent attack there….

I suggest that the leader writer of the above editorial note in this report in his own paper that the burqa is referred to as ‘traditional’ dress and not religious dress, and that not all Islamic countries adopt it. The chador would seem to differ from the burqa only in the extent of the body covered. The burqa covers the whole body including the eyes.

Judica Me, Deus recognises that Fred Nile raised a significant point about security. It does not agree with the proposal of banning traditional Muslim dress from sensitive areas in Australia. Such a ban would be counter-productive. The way to deal with the Muslim community in Australia is to guarantee all their rights as Australian citizens, to ensure freedom of religious belief (as a civil right), to make clear what their duties are as Australian citizens, and to help them enter into the fullness of the traditional democratic life of Australia. The leaders of the Islamic community have a duty to guarantee Australians that they are not governed by an agenda that seeks to import into Australia the cultural, social and political framework they left behind when they chose Australia to live in. This constitutes a grave duty.

The editorial committee of the Australian instructed their leader writer to accuse Fred Nile of 'religious prejudice and an unworthy bigotry'. The evidence in this case shows that if anyone is guilty of religious prejudice and an unassailable bigotry, it is indisputably Murdoch's Australian. That is simply consistent with an editorial regime that has shown itself through the years to be mindlessly anti-Christian, and possessed of an obsessive anti-Catholicism. What else is to be expected of a newspaper that puts at the head of its anti-Christian regime Australia's foremost professional bigot and hypocrite: the inimitable and incomparable Philip Adams?