Nemesis

Con George-Kotzabasis

For people who are not dazzled by the bright “surface” of Kevin Rudd’s “unsetting” polls can see that the leader of the Labor party is no political or military strategist. The Opposition leader’s commitment that if he would become the next prime minister of Australia he will withdraw our troops from Iraq is the epitome of political and military irresponsibility. That he has no personal, historical, and moral compunctions to pull off a “Spanish Zapatero” to the anti-war Australian electorate so that he would astronomically augment his chances of winning the next federal election, shows him to be just another political opportunist in his “sweaty run” to the Lodge. He has enfeoffed himself to the populist cause of No to War, to paraphrase William Shakespeare, hence preparing to lead the country from behind instead of the front in these dangerous times of potentially nuclear- armed global terror. The leader of the Opposition, like the Democrats in the US, is far from unwilling to sacrifice the vital interests of the country to his self, and shortsighted, interest to achieve his lust for power. Rudd, like the Senate Democrat leader Harry Reid, in the US, who in an amazing and incredible statement said, that the Democrat’s stand for an early withdrawal of US forces from Iraq would bring them more seats in the next election, also believes that a bonanza of votes will come to Labor with their stand for an early withdrawal of Australian forces from Iraq. Hence the wedlock of the political Scarlet O’Haras Kevin Rudd and Harry Reid with political opportunism and its consummation on the matrimonial bed of political power, will beget the offspring of betrayal to the vital interests of their nations.

Kevin Rudd is deliberately blind to the following facts, since the “dog of opportunism” is his guide in his walk to the Lodge, first that the war against global terror will be a long campaign, and secondly, it will be fought in different countries and regions over a long time. It is and will be a borderless war since the initiative will always be in the hands of the holy warriors who started this war against the West, and they will decide where to fight it. Hence, Western powers that are engaged in this combat against the Islamists will have to assail the latter wherever they raise their warhead. And indubitably, al Qaeda and its affiliate fanatics at the moment have decided to fight this war on many fronts against the infidels of the West and the treacherous Muslims to the cause of their fundamentalist Islam, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, and Northern Africa. But beyond a shadow of doubt, Iraq at the present moment is the frontline of global terror, and not Afghanistan as both Kim Beazley and Kevin Rudd claim. Indeed, this assertion of theirs is shot down by “friendly fire”. Michael Costello, a former advisor to Beazley and a staunch supporter of the Labor Party, mounts an unassailable argument that Iraq is the forefront of global terror, and not Afghanistan. He cogently argues, that Iraq being a modern nation rich with an abundance of oil resources and an educated populace, in comparison to an economically barren and ill-educated Afghanistan, would pose a great danger to the West and to America if it became a terrorist base as a result of a premature withdrawal of the coalition forces from Iraq.

It’s precisely this great danger and its spread in other regions and especially our own, that the leader of the Opposition so insouciantly disregards at the peril of Australia’s future security. A danger, moreover, that the country will not be able to confront on its own successfully and will desperately need the help of its ally, the US, to rescue it from this deadly peril. Not to mention the by far higher cost in the lives of our armed forces and materiel that the nation will have to pay, in comparison to what is paying presently in Iraq, as a result of the unimaginative, effete, and opportunistic leadership of Kevin Rudd if he became the next Prime Minister of Australia.

Rudd’s commitment to withdraw Australian troops from Iraq with his elevation to the prime Office of the land is logically an oxymoron. While fully accepting the reality that the US and its staunch allies Britain, Australia, and a sundry of European nations, are engaged in a long global war against terror, he nonetheless wants to fight it on a regional basis. It’s this blatantly illogical position of Rudd and all the above reasons that totally disqualify him to become the leader of our country. In these dangerous times Australia is in no need of political shysters and dilettantes, but of leaders of Gulliverian stature and of Churchillian mettle and sagacity. On this benchmark, Kevin Rudd is of a Lilliputian stature.

Con George-Kotzabasis

The following article was written on March 8, 2004, and it’s an extract from my book Unveiling The War Against Terror published in Melbourne on May 9, 2004. It’s republished here in the wake of both the Mufti’s indefatigable support of Iran in its refusal to abide to the demands of the International Community in regard to its nuclear program, and of the statement of his present loyal supporter and spokesman, Keysar Trad, made on the ABC on April 10, 2007. Mr. Trad let the cat out of the bag! To the question of the interviewer from the ABC whether al Hilaly should resign from his position, Trad replied that the Mufti ‘still had support’ in the Muslim community. This essentially means, as my article argues, that the radical fundamentalist views of the Mufti are reflected and have support among many Muslims in Australia. Furthermore, this is strongly corroborated by the hesitancy and the dilly-dallying of the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils to sack the Mufti from his position. Afraid and concerned that such an action would trigger a backlash against it from the community.

It’s therefore incumbent upon the government, indeed, of any government of whatever political hue, to win this battle against the radical Islamists in our midst. Since it’s beyond the ability or inclination of moderate Muslims to deliver this victory.

THE MUFTI OF LAKEMBA IS A GREAT THREAT TO AUSTRALIA

The praise with which Mufti Sheik Al- Hilaly, the religious leader of Australian Muslims, anointed suicide bombers and the terrorists of Hezbollah, and his reference to September 11 as ‘God’s work against oppressors’, in his sermon at the Lebanon mosque, should be of great concern to all Australians, from whatever cultural background, and should be raising the hackles of the government. This is in despite of the denials and the renunciatory statements of his spokesman Keysar Trad, with his by now repeated refrain, that the comments of the Sheik had been taken ‘out of context’, which Mr. Trad uses as an escape hatch for the inflammatory statements of the Mufti, and as a means to cozen and deceive the Australian public. However, Australians should not allow themselves to be tricked by this mouthful of deceptions belched forth by his spokesman, and should vehemently reject them as another attempt by Mr.Trad to fool them.

Keysar Trad’s conduct and behaviour reminds one of the typical cunning of a vendor in a bazaar, who uses guile and lies to sell his shoddy products to the public. And one would be foolish not to assume, that both the Sheik and his spokesman have a bountiful storage of guile and lies, by which they will attempt to cover up their treacherous actions and statements, and hence, hoodwink the Australian public. Moreover, it is well known that most Arabs trade on lies in all spheres of life. Especially in the present circumstances, when radical Islam considers itself to be engaged in a deadly holy war against the infidels of the West and of Israel, the telling of lies is part of its holy armour. Radical Islam can seek and find justification for this in the sacred writings of Mohammed, where he states that in war Muslims are not banned from telling lies.

Certainly, the telling of lies is not an exclusive trait of a particular people. In certain circumstances all people will tell lies. But usually in human conflicts of all kinds, mendacity is the “armour” and “shield” of the weak, not of the strong, as the former have no ample means at their disposal, like the latter, either for offence or defence, and therefore resort as a result of this lack of means to disingenuousness and guilefulness against their opponents. Undoubtedly, radical Islam in its implacable confrontation with the West, and more precisely with the U.S.A., is the weaker foe in contrast to its opponent. It would therefore be prudent to take all the denials of the Mufti and his spokesman, with more than a grain of salt. However, no veneer of lies can hide and conceal the real beliefs and intentions of the Mufti. Sheik Al-Hilaly’s, “Sermon of Lebanon” represents and embodies these real beliefs and intentions in the most transparent and limpid way. His incendiary and inflammatory statements and his direct inciting of the youth of Islam to be heroes and martyrs in its cause, which according to the Mufti is advancing everywhere, reveals lucidly that he is a man of war and not of peace. Moreover, his comments to this congregation of believers that they should not be surprised if in the near future Islamic ideology would pervade into Western countries, and indeed, that one would even hear ‘Állah is great from the top of the White House’, shows that the Mufti is no mere defender of Islam, but an aggressor, who really believes that the goal of radical militant Islam, his cause, is the subjugation and domination of the West.

Furthermore, his sermon also reveals a grim aspect of the Muslim Community in our country. The existence, among the majority of moderate Muslims, of an aberrant dangerous fundamentalist breed of “snakes” that are lurking in the “grassy lawns” of Australia, and that he has rivals within the country who are even more radical and militant than himself. His sermon therefore, from far off Lebanon, had the further aim of passing on a message to the followers of those fundamentalist imams (whose followers obviously are not small in number), that he himself is as radical as their leaders – all in the hope of winning them over to his side. The Government and ASIO therefore, need to be aware of this portentous danger that lies within the borders of our country, and to take the appropriate hard measures against it.

It would be the ultimate folly of any government not to take these statements of Mufti Hilaly as being most dangerous to Australia. At the present moment, Australia is involved in an implacable and relentless war with global terror. The Howard government has wisely chosen to join the U.S., the U.K. and its other allies in this war against terror, which threatens the civilised world with catastrophic annihilation. For this purpose, it has committed and sent its brave young men and women to fight both in Afghanistan and Iraq, which is pivotal to the defeat of global terror and which can only be accomplished by fighting it on two fronts, i.e., also against the rogue states which support directly and indirectly terrorists and which are more likely than not to supply weapons of mass destruction to the latter, with devastating consequences upon the survival and viability of open and free societies. It is for this reason necessary, not merely to denounce the statements of the Mufti, as the Foreign Minister Mr. Downer has done, but to take firm unrelenting measures against the Mufti and his cohorts, for inciting young Muslims to join the ranks of suicide bombers and to become martyrs in this holy war against the infidels.

Sheik Al-Hilaly is an Australian citizen, and as such his statements are treasonable since they support the enemies of Australia, with whom the latter is currently engaged in war. It behoves therefore that the government enact immediately preventative measures that would restrain the Mufti and other radicals from inciting Muslims in this country to engage in a Jihad against Australians. If a Muslim country such as Indonesia could charge the religious leader of Jemaah Islamiah, Abu Bakar Bashir, with offences related to terrorism that would put the latter in jail, why should Australia not do likewise? Does it have to have a Bali bombing on its own territory perpetrated by local Muslim terrorists, inspired and instigated by the teachings and statements of the Mufti, or of his rival fundamentalists, before the government will find the grit, fortitude, and resolve to jail Sheik Al-Hilaly? But no wise, imaginative, and strong government acts retroactively.

As predicted above, the Mufti has an abundance of cunning and duplicity in the storage of his mind. On his return to Australia he tried to conceal his insidious, sinister, and treasonous statements – this time behind the facade of Arab poetry. In his interview on the ABC on the 7th of March 2004, he said that his comments had to be taken within the poetic context in which they had been expressed and must be interpreted within such a context. However, the enormity of the Sheik’s cover up has been exposed by his fellow Arabs themselves. The chief executive of The Australian Federation of Islamic Councils’ Amjad Mehboob, said that many Muslims were concerned that Sheik Al- Hilaly’s speech had been interpreted (no poetic interpretation by his fellow Muslims?) as ‘a call to arms’, although in the same interview Mr.Mehboob said that the Sheik was a ‘moderate and tolerant leader’. But this contradictory comment of Mr. Mehboob reveals the Janus nature of many Arab leaders and the many faces with which they “double-speak”.

The war against global terror will not be won easily unless governments also uproot the breeding grounds of terror, which many Islamic schools and mosques are, not only in the East, but also, in the West. It is therefore of the utmost importance that the Australian government takes prerequisite and firm measures that prevent Islamic schools and mosques from propagating, either openly, or by insidious and devious means (the use of poetry?), the radical teachings of the fundamentalists, and if they continue to do so, the government should take the most severe measures against the teachers of these schools and mosques and should immediately stop subsidising these institutions with tax payers’ money.

It is about time that the cocoon of lies under which the Mufti of Lakemba hides and conceals his true beliefs and intentions be broken, and he be exposed for the real and great danger he poses to Australia. No volume of dissembling by his spokesman Keysar Trad will hide the fact that the Sheik is a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

THE INTELLECTUALLY WEAK DECISION OF THE HIGH COURT ON WIK

Con George-Kotzabasis

The following article was written on November 1997, but no newspaper at the time had the gumption and the historical insight to publish it. It’s published here for the first time hoping that the readers of this blog will find it of some historical interest and will enjoy reading it. Since its writing many lawyer’s reputations have been irreversibly tarnished and most of all the reputations of the majority of the august justices who passed this historically ignorant, ignominious, and most unwise decision.

The High Court’s decision that Native Title could coexist with pastoral leases, will remain in the annals of legal decisions as one of the most intellectually weak, matted, mechanistic, and unimaginative decisions that have ever been issued from the highest bench of the land. The decision has breached Aeolus’s casks releasing the winds of controversy, that generations of lawyers will have to contend with, and be haunted by, until “atonement” day. As no less is, and will be, at stake, than the professional and intellectual integrity of present and future generations of lawyers, and, indeed, their amour propre.

The paramount, the profound importance of the Wik Case, has been conceded and acknowledged by the eminent justices themselves. By the fact that all seven of their constituent members sat and adjudicated on the case, which rarely happens, except in the most important cases that come before the court. Hence, the eminent justices were deeply conscious of the unfathomable significance of their decision. However, they were completely unconscious that their decision had the potential to be the catalyst that would raise the ugly face of racism from the atavistic miasma that afflicts parts of the country, and from which no other parts of the world are immune.

It’s for this reason therefore, that the decision of the justices should not have been limited and confined only within the domain of the law, and its pros and cons should not have been debated and resolved solely by judicial arguments, without considering the widespread and portentous repercussions such a decision could have upon the country and its institutions. As it was inevitable that such judgment, on this grave and contentious issue, would “somersault” beyond the issue of “juridical” justice. And one must note, that even the strict legal arguments of the case were not clear cut to the justices themselves, as the decision was split four to three, and that in itself should have alarmed the begetters of the majority opinion and should have awakened them from a most serious lapse of cognitive awareness, since the Law itself upon which the decision rested was disputable. But there is no doubt that the majority judgment emanated from “a fine cloud of solicitous idealism,” to quote the great Austrian writer, Robert Musil.

It was this “seraphic” zeal of the justices to render ideal justice to the Wik case, that has sundered the aborigines from a substantial part of the rest of the community, and is threatening to unhinge the reconciliation process–a process which, like everyone else, the justices themselves are sensitively concerned with, as by “reading the lips” of their judgment, one can easily tell that the latter “secretes” this lofty desire and aspiration for reconciliation–as the nature of the decision imperils the interests of the pastoralist, logging, and mining industries. And causing all people whose income is derived from these, to rise up in arms.

The eminent justices “shelved” in the ethereal atmosphere of their glasshouse existence, could neither imagine nor foresee the upheaval their decision would bring forth amongst the contending groups and were obliviously ignorant of the mundane interests of ordinary mortals. All they could see in the reflective glass of their craft, was the reflection of their perceived law–even if the law itself was misty and far from clear. And in their idealistic and romantic innocence pursued its shadowy beauty, and by coupling it with their unimaginative and mechanistic thinking, they hatched this cerebrally “ugly” judgment.

The judgment proved to be a veritable Pandora’s box placed on the bosom of the contending groups, if not on the bosom of the country. As it was evident, that by pitting the interests of the aborigines against the interests of the pastoralists, the loggers, and the miners, the justices would unleash the destructive emotions of the cave amongst them all. Furthermore, they were unable to anticipate that their decision would passionately rally all those who care for the disadvantaged in our society behind the aborinal cause, especially the good Samaritans of the middle class. Whose involvement and concern in the plight of the disadvantaged often is, an escapist distraction from the ennui of their economic comforts, if not a sedative for their collective guilt, for their disinclination to pay higher taxes, which would be the most effective way to help the disadvantaged to cross the street of their plight. As well as all the “fief-holders” of the welfare protectorate and their hangers-on, who long ago abandoned their status of a volunteer calling and transfigured it into a profession. With all the “fixtures” (including those of the mind) of vested interests that inexorably accompany all professional bodies.

Hence the venerable justices, fugitives from reality, bondaged to their mechanistic thinking, and unfailingly callow in human affairs, committed the “caring” folly that not only divided the contending groups and their auxiliary supporters on economic and political lines, but, also, because of the pigmentation of the contestants, on racial lines too. (Despite the fact that we are all subject to the vagaries of chance for the colour of our skin, the latter always seem to have, in disputes between humans, the last word.) Therefore, the judgment of the Court has lit the fuse of a time-bomb that threatens to explode into a ferocious and ugly war fought on racist lines. Such an outcome would seriously harm the reputation of our country of being generally free from the perniciousness and woes of racial intolerance. It would diminish Australia in the eyes of the rest of the world and could damage some of our economic interests, particularly those of our tourist trade with countries in our region that are justifiably sensitive to the rise of even a semblance of racism.

The claim of Sir William Deane, a former Chief Justice of the High Court and presently Governor-General, that the violent settlement of the continent is a shameful aspect of our history and will ‘haunt us as a source of bitterness’, and if we don’t come to terms with it he would ‘weep for Australia’, is singularly puzzling, to say the least. It would have been wiser for Sir William to weep for the un-illuminated judgment of his former colleagues of the High Court that has thrown the country into this social and political upheaval, before he considered and condescended to weep for Australia. One is tempted to ask Sir William, where in human history the “transmigration” of peoples to other areas and continents of the world has been non-violent? Does the Governor-General believe that the building of nation states has been an immaculate conception? History has been an endless “play” of violence of human beings against one another, as depicted by the great tragedians, from Sophocles to Shakespeare. If Sir William widened the horizon of his humanitarianism and religious fervour to encompass all the victims of mankind’s violent history and weeped indiscriminately for all of them, his weeping would have dried the oceans of the earth. Not that such weeping of intellectual weariness, coming even from the highest office in the land, would have changed anything.

The Wik decision not only lacks, and is totally devoid of, historical and anthropological groundings, but is also an attempt to cross and hybridize Aboriginal culture with the values of Western culture. As it grafts upon the former the values of proprietary rights and possession which are totally alien to it. The aborigines have a spiritual bond with their ancient territories that is linked to their dead ancestors. But as nomadic tribes always on the move in search of food and water, this spiritual bond had no fixed territory and hence historically they never developed the sense of private or collective property. This is illustrated by the present fact, that when they are moved in more modern homely surroundings their houses are soon run-down, as a result that their occupants have no regard for private or communal property. Moreover, the question is not whether the High Court “created” these rights to property, but whether by the Wik decision it acknowledged and reinforced this figment of their imagination. The decision, furthermore, spawns among aborigines a destructive divisiveness, in the form of the sacred and the profane, i.e., between the purists who resolutely want to uphold the sacredness of their vital bond with ancestral territories, and the “less pure”, the more “entrepreneurial”, such as the misters ten percent of the aboriginal elite, who want to sell these sacred grounds to the highest bidder. Such a conflict was clearly illustrated by the Carpentaria’s Land Council coordinator Murrandoo Yanner, who, representing the purist side, refused to sign the 1.1 billion Century Zinc project agreement, and by those other less pure representatives of aboriginal communities who were willing and desirous to sign the agreement , and hence receive their pound of flesh for the sites of their sacred bones. And one must also note, that the beneficiaries of Native Title will not be the aborigines of the woodlands, but the urban aborigines, of the “plastic mobile” elite, whose affinity with the former is becoming more and more slender and frail.

Ostensibly, the justices of the majority opinion, had a greater desire to tack the halo of “saintliness” on their “headlong” decision, than the halo of sober earthly reason. Not that the latter would have been an easy task! Since in their deliberations they had aborted prudence and reason, as a result of their abject failure to consider the events that their umimaginative decision could set in train. Being temperamentally unable to be instructed by reality, they found it easier and more congenial to their mental make-up, to be instructed by the simulacra of their idealism. “Victims” of their training and profession, the precedents of law had priority over the precedents of history. Effete descendants of Blackstone, von Gierke, justice Holmes, and our own, Sir Harry Gibbs, unburdened with the heavy weight of philosophy and history, they craved nonetheless to set an historical foundation to this most unwise judicial judgment. But to erect such a statue of their “weak” justice on Wik, is like erecting a statue of Napoleon riding a donkey. Alas, such is the fate of farcical judgments and the deconstruction of reality by idealistic simulacra.