Rudd/Gillard adviser: Abbott drums up Islamophobia to help his election chances
The Abbott government and its supporters are doing Daesh’s work for it in creating a culture of fear. Wonder why that might be … Jeremy Hillman, former adviser to Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd, explains.
Phobia, or irrational fear, is an unfortunate hallmark of social and political discourse throughout the world, often exploited for gain by those who have a responsibility to do exactly the opposite. Rampant homophobia is used to stoke fears that gay people were sexual deviants out to destroy our way of life. Now rampant Islamophobia advances a fear of Muslims as terrorists who are out to destroy our way of life. And the government is driving a lot of it.
Although the Prime Minister has admitted he feels threatened by homosexuality, these days neither he nor his government would dare to publicly suggest that the gays are coming to get us (even if some still feel that way in private). Furthermore, if a public figure does spout any homophobic bile — think Liberal Senator Cory Bernardi and bestiality — they are rightly howled down by a cacophony of voices of reason and decency. But with few notable exceptions, Islamophobia in the public domain is running rampant and is largely unchallenged.
Back in 2011, a 10-year study on Australian attitudes to other cultures found almost half the population to have anti-Muslim sentiment. Undoubtedly this number is even higher in 2015. Our entrepreneurs of fear — certain public figures and media outlets — are irresponsibly riding this wave, content in the knowledge that such fear is useful to their cause and likely to result in political and ratings gains. In opposition, Scott Morrison urged his fellow cabinet to better exploit growing community concern about Muslims in Australia. In government this has clearly been embraced, with an unrelenting focus on terrorism and border protection, and even a parliamentary inquiry into halal certification.
Islamophobia appears to be a general fear of Muslims synthesised with our fear of terrorism, and compounded by our general inability to distinguish radical extremists from ordinary Muslims. Despite the likelihood of being harmed by terrorism being negligible, the fear created by terrorism has huge and enduring effects on human behavior and hampers our ability to assess risk objectively.
Exploiting such fear in politics is as old as politics itself, and is a tactic that all sides of the spectrum frequently deploy. Afraid of losing your job? Vote for X. Afraid of catastrophic climate change? Vote for Y. Afraid of asylum seekers? Vote for Z. So much of our political narrative is based on nurturing people’s fears and then offering a “solution” to them, and it persists because it works.
But when these fears are deliberately stoked and grossly exaggerated, it takes us from fear to phobia and further distorts reasonable thought, action and debate. All too often it also leads to the formation and growth of groups such as One Nation, the Q Society and Reclaim Australia. What do we gain when Abbott tells us that this “death cult” is coming to get us? What do we gain when the media airs sensational footage of Daesh (also called Islamic State, ISIS or ISIL) militants training, marching, fighting or torturing? The real winner is Daesh.
Since our media aren’t exactly there on the ground, nearly all the footage is propaganda — written, directed and produced by the terror group. Naturally they supply us with images that show them looking more powerful, organised and respectable than they really are. Terrorism aims to instil fear, and when we overtly promote that fear, we are aiding the cause. What does Daesh want most after it has conquered and subdued?
Ongoing legitimacy, power and attention. Excessive media coverage of Daesh might not directly encourage terrorism but at the very least it legitimises, promotes and strengthens such groups, and we should debate the security ramifications of this more openly. By broadcasting their propaganda, we freely give Daesh more power and fuel Islamophobic sentiment. We forget Muslims in the Middle East are the overwhelming victims of Daesh terror while Muslims in Australia are indirect victims, frequently deemed guilty by association. We increasingly fear and blame Muslims in equal measure and are encouraged to do so by the entrepreneurs of fear. There are no easy solutions, but it’s clear we need more “entrepreneurs of calm” to countenance the fear merchants and inject some context and sensibility into the discourse.
Malcolm Turnbull briefly tried to be one such voice, cautioning overreactions to the fear of terror or Muslims. Undoubtedly he will be increasingly silenced as the federal government gears up for the mother of all fear campaigns leading into the next election. Islamophobia feeds into our worst instincts and needs to be courageously opposed, not elevated further in the public domain. When prejudiced views are articulated by those in high office, they gain a degree of social currency and legitimacy that perpetuates them further.
John Howard wanted us to be alert but not alarmed while Tony Abbott wants us to be in a permanent state of alarm. He knows it’s his best, and perhaps only, chance of being re-elected. Like the activists who challenged the prevailing culture of homophobia, we need to confront the prejudice and phobias of those around us and those entrepreneurs of fear who stoke them.
In 1980, Federal Judge John Dooling, United States District Court, Eastern District of New York, declared that the Hyde Amendment, which prevented Medicaid payment for abortion, was unconstitutional. (Copies of Judge Dooling’s 328-page decision in McRae vs. HEW are rare. During a recent conversation with the Brooklyn United States District Court, I was told that their copy had disappeared and, for this reason, they were not in a position to reproduce it.) Judge Dooling had spent a year gathering evidence and studying the anti-abortion movement, and his findings showed that the anti-abortion movement was essentially a Roman Catholic movement with a little non-Catholic window dressing.[8] The amendment, says Dooling bluntly, was a ploy by anti-abortion congressmen frustrated in their attempt to pass a constitutional amendment that would override the Supreme Court’s 1973 pro-abortion decision; its purpose was quite simply to circumvent the Court’s ruling and prevent as many abortions as possible. Dooling, a practicing Catholic, makes short shrift of the anti-abortionists’ pretensions to be a spontaneous grass-roots movement that owes its political victories to sheer moral appeal. He confirms that the right-to-life’s main source of energy, organization, and direction has been the Catholic Church, and he describes in detail how the movement uses one-issue voting to put pressure on legislators, candidates, and the party organizations that nominate them—a tactic that gains influence far out of proportion to its numbers. Please see appendix one for excerpts from Judge Dooling’s decision in McRae vs. HEW.
What is most significant in this extract is Judge Dooling’s finding that the anti-abortion movement’s main source of energy, organization, and direction has been the Catholic Church. The bishops’ Pastoral Plan prompted the creation of the Moral Majority. Richard A. Viguerie, a Catholic, is the man most responsible for the development and success of the New Right, and he will be the first to claim that honor. He was also involved in the original discussions that led to the creation of the Moral Majority and, as its fundraiser, can be credited with its financial success. Paul Weyrich, a Catholic, claims credit for originating the idea for the group and the name itself. In their search for an attractive front man for the organization, they chose Jerry Falwell, who, according to intimates, has an insatiable lust for power—and, thus, Moral Majority, Inc., was born.[9]
It is inconceivable that these Catholic laymen were not responding to the bishops’ Pastoral Plan. Much went into avoiding public disclosure of the role of the Catholic Church in the creation of the Moral Majority. Maxine Negri, in “A Well-Planned Conspiracy,” exposed involvement of the Catholic hierarchy in the Moral Majority.[10] Then, the June 21, 1982, issue of U.S. News and World Report noted:
At the heart of Moral Majority is a direct-mail operation…. Membership claims … put the number of Moral Majority’s active supporters at roughly 4 million Roman Catholics, Protestant fundamentalists, and orthodox Jews. The organization says its “hardcore contributors,” numbered at more than 400,000, include a cadre of 80,000 priests, ministers, and rabbis organized into fifty autonomous chapters.
This claim of autonomy should not be taken seriously. What is described here is exactly the organization described in the Pastoral Plan of Action down to the details.
None of us who has ever worked extensively with fundamentalist churches or lived among fundamentalists ever took the claim that the Moral Majority was a fundamentalist organization seriously. One characteristic common among fundamentalists is a keen sense of individualism, and individualists are often fundamentalists because of this trait. There is self-selection. They strongly resist the “herding” that characterizes other major denominations such as the Catholic Church. It is very difficult to organize two or three local fundamentalist churches to carry out even a local short-term civic activity. Organizing much beyond this is inconceivable. In contrast, the Catholic Church, with its keen sense of organization acquired over a two-thousand-year history, found the “organization” of the fundamentalists a relatively simple task by providing with few exceptions the entire organization infrastructure, including the organization of the fifty autonomous state chapters and the organizations in the 435 congressional districts.
The far more experienced and autocratic Catholic Church found the fundamentalists easy prey. They created “leader” Jerry Falwell and they sought out for other visible positions others who also had an insatiable lust for power. These fundamentalists toe the line of the Catholic Church to maintain their newly acquired visibility and their sense of power. And, of course, the purse strings of the Moral Majority are controlled by those who collect the money—represented by Richard Viguerie. As the old adage goes, “he who controls the purse strings, controls the organization.”
The Family-Planning Movement
There is little doubt that virtually all opposition to the family-planning movement is Roman Catholic. The anti-family-planning movement’s main source of energy, organization, and direction clearly has been the Roman Catholic Church. Most people outside the family-planning field are not aware that this anti-family-planning movement continues to score major victories, such as preventing the U.S. sale of Depo-Provera, the birth-control injectable given every three months, a method which all available data indicate is safer than birth control pills. Depo-Provera is used by tens of millions of women around the world and is now approved by over one hundred countries, including most European countries, WHO, and other prestigious groups. Other victories include successfully laying roadblocks that prevent tens of thousands of women from receiving sterilization operations when they want them, roadblocks which result in thousands of unwanted births yearly. Far more important are the successes of the Church in minimizing U.S. assistance to family-planning efforts in developing countries.
Many of these victories for the Church come under the heading “Administrative Areas” in the bishops’ Pastoral Plan of Action. Two recent examples of Catholic Church activity are the mandatory notification of parents of teens who seek contraceptives at federally funded clinics and the banning of federal funds for family-planning clinics which provide abortion.
The ERA Movement
The Equal Rights Amendment died June 30, 1982. I am certain that its failure was the result of the success of the Catholic hierarchy’s bold efforts to defeat it. As with the anti-abortion movement, the main source of energy, organization, and direction of the anti-ERA movement is the Roman Catholic Church.
In June 1978, I received a Planned Parenthood Washington Memo which contained an article entitled “U.S. Bishops Block Pro-ERA Statement.” In part, it read:
The Roman Catholic hierarchy, in early May, refused to permit issuance of a subcommittee’s statement supporting the Equal Rights Amendment, indicating that the fight against legal abortion takes precedence as its preeminent concern.
The pro-ERA statement was supported by the bishops’ six-member Ad Hoc Committee on Women in the Church and Society, which took pains to separate support for ERA from any connotation of accepting abortion. Furthermore, they sought only to issue the statement in their own behalf and had reportedly consulted with the Family Life section of the bishops’ Department of Education, which apparently approved their conclusions “that the ERA will not threaten the stability of marriage in family life.”
According to a report of the National Catholic News Service, acceptance of the statement had been urged by ninety-four employees of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops and the U.S. Catholic Conference, but advance disclosures about the issue also generated heavy mail from the “right to life” groups opposing the ERA. The NCCB’s forty-eight-member administrative board, which sets policy for the 345 U.S. Roman Catholic bishops, rejected the pro-ERA document during an early May meeting in Chicago, contending that it could hurt anti-abortion efforts.
It is now apparent that this move by the bishops was a brilliant ploy. The Church not only evaded taking a positive stand on an important social justice issue which threatens its power but it has worked diligently to defeat the ERA by using the very same political action organization used to combat abortion!
In my home state of North Carolina, one of the last hopes of the ERA movement, we saw statewide polls in May 1982 show that two-thirds of our citizens favored the amendment, and, in June 1982, we saw two-thirds of our lawmakers vote to defeat it. Clearly, a vast superior organization killed the ERA in North Carolina, a finely honed and skillful operation, one two thousand years in the making—the same one continuing to fight legalized abortions in our fair state.
Actions Taken by the Church
What actions has the hierarchy taken to counter the abortion, family-planning, and ERA movements?
In 1980, Jean-Guy Vaillancourt, a Canadian Roman Catholic professor of sociology at the University of Montreal, published a book entitled Papal Power: A Study of Vatican Control Over Lay Catholic Elites.[11] This is a study of the techniques intensively used by the Vatican in many countries to control Catholic laypersons in Italy over the past one hundred years. In 1875, the Vatican created a system of local parish committees of at least five members each, called Catholic Actions. These committees were created to organize laypersons to assist the Vatican in seizing control of local, state, and national political machinery. Over the years, the Church gained considerable experience in organizing these committees and in ensuring obedience and a very high degree of responsiveness to the chain of command by the committees. These committees and their more recent counterpart, civic committees, are highly effective in mobilizing Vatican efforts. Vaillancourt places the role of the committees in proper perspective by discussing
a famous open letter presented to the Pope in 1968 by dissatisfied Catholics from France and elsewhere. The letter severely criticized the Vatican’s excessive attachment to wealth and power, stressing the idea that Church authorities are too repressive and manipulative:
“The whole Church apparatus is organized for control: the Roman Curia controls the bishops, the bishops the clergy, the clergy controls the laity … and the lay Christians control (what an illusion!) mankind. Hence a multiplication of secretaries, commissions, structures, etc., with their programs and rules…. Underhand influences have suffocated the openness which had manifested itself at the lay conference in Rome, a congress which had very little communication with the bishops who were then meeting in a synod.”
After this attack on the abuses of social and legal power by church authorities, the letter goes on to describe three of the favorite techniques of control used by the Vatican: secrecy (there are secret files even against bishops), spying and informing, and repression (used even against some of the most respected theologians).
Secrecy can be classified as either a legal or a social method of control, depending on whether it is used as an administrative-legal procedure or as a simple social defense mechanism. Spying and informing would clearly be instances of social power, since they entail the use of social processes. Finally, repression, as discussed in the open letter, refers to a mixture of legal, coercive, and even remunerative power. Concretely, it includes the habitual recourse by Church officials to excommunications, censures, condemnations, demotions, and the removal or firing of offenders from their ecclesiastical jobs.
In researching Papal Power, Vaillancourt studied Vatican control over lay Catholic elites for years, spending a large part of his time at the Vatican. To effect this control, Vaillancourt has found that the Vatican exercises eight kinds of power—all of which have been used and have proved effective in opposing social issues in the United States.
ECOLOGICAL POWER, based on the physical control of material environmental conditions. An example of this is the use of territory, buildings, or real estate to control people through the domination of their environment.
REMUNERATIVE POWER, based on material or nonmaterial rewards or compensations. An example of this is the way the Pius XII Foundation uses its funds to support some lay activities and not others.
COERCIVE POWER, based on physical or psychic violence. Examples of this are burning at the stake, torture, imprisonment, banishment, blackmail, removal from office, denouncement.
SOCIAL POWER, based on the use of structural-organizational or psycho-sociological mechanisms such as Catholic Action congresses, peer-group pressures, rumors, co-optation, social ostracism, socialization, use of mass media, nepotism, and selective recruitment. An example of social power is “conditioning.” …
LEGAL POWER, juridically founded, or simply based on bureaucratic and administrative norms, procedures, and maneuvers. An example of this is the rule of secrecy which affects, under the pain of “grievous sin,” the affairs of the Secretariate of the Pope and the Council for the Public Affairs of the Church in their relations with Vatican diplomats and other high-ranking prelates. Another example is censorship, through the nihil obstat and imprimatur.
TRADITIONAL POWER, based on the use of traditional symbols, rituals, ideas, and sentiments. The cementing of loyalty through a mass of torch-lit procession during a congress would be an example of this kind of power. Appeals to practices (for example, speaking Latin) and documents popular or prevalent in previous times are also instances of the use of traditional power.
EXPERT POWER, based on professional, technical, or scientific or purely rational arguments. An example of this is the recourse to commissions of experts in theology or the social sciences to bolster one’s position. Pius XII’s speeches to numerous groups on a multitude of topics was also an effort to control through expert power.
CHARISMATIC POWER, based on exemplary or ethical prophecy. Examples of this are calls for social justice and equality (used extensively in recent years) or the giving away of some of the Church’s possessions for certain causes (for example, a ring in a Brazilian slum). In a less prophetic vein, the replacement of personal charisma of office and the routinization of charisma are other examples of the use of this kind of power.
The Vatican with one hundred years of experience in controlling nations through these lay Catholic organizations, has chosen to export this highly developed mechanism for control of lay Catholics and democratic processes to the United States. In 1975, the Church launched its Pastoral Plan of Action. The “committees” discussed in this plan are the same “committees” discussed by Vaillancourt that are used to control lay Catholics and to serve as political machinery. These “committees” which make up anti-abortion organizations are openly being used by the Vatican to manipulate the American democratic process. This includes the Moral Majority organization, as unsuspecting Protestants lend their support. For those who have figured out that they are being used, the lust for power or attention given them is enough to keep them in the fold.
The Pastoral Plan of Action was supposedly initiated by the Vatican because “the will of God and the law of reason” demanded an unrelenting fight against abortion. However, by 1978, it became apparent that the Vatican had simply seized upon a golden opportunity to mobilize Catholic America into a political party using its “right-to-life committees”—including the Moral Majority. Some observers began to recognize that these very same “committees” were being used to fight the other “enemies” of the Catholic Church: the ERA, family planning, the environmental movement, illegal immigration control, and support for the Global 2000 Report. I am now convinced that abortion was simply an excuse to politically mobilize the American Catholic Church and create, de facto, an American Catholic Political Party. The same techniques and tactics developed and used by the Church one hundred years ago to manipulate local, state, and national governments on other continents are exactly the same techniques and tactics seen in America today!
In 1977, victory for the ERA movement seemed almost certain. Few Americans realize the fantastic amount of organization and mobilization of human resources, funds, and commitment it took on the part of the Vatican to turn apparent victory for the ERA into defeat. Phyllis Schlafly, a Catholic, and the “organization” she headed, got more help from the Vatican and the American bishops than most Americans can possibly imagine. Judge Dooling found the anti-abortionists’ claim that they were a grass-roots movement to be spurious; the belief that the anti-ERA forces are also a grass-roots movement is ridiculous.
As serious observers study the opposition to the family-planning movement, the environmental movement, illegal immigration control, and the Global 2000 Report, they recognize just how sophisticated the opposition is—the amount of energy, organization, and direction each has—and that the opposition is all the same people, the same committees.
Conclusion
This is not an abstract theory. Such organization has been effective in Italy and other countries and was described by Vaillancourt before it got underway in earnest in the United States. Until those of us who are concerned about these social justice issues are willing to confront the Catholic hierarchy, there will be no significant advances in these areas of social justice. So long as the Church can act “undercover,” it will continue to be effective in thwarting significant advances. Our willingness to permit the Church to act in secrecy in America vastly enhances its power. It is absolutely essential that our silence be shattered. If not, then no matter which of these causes is “our cause” it’s a lost cause. Just as important, the strength of a threatening Vatican-controlled political party in America will continue to grow. American Catholics who are seriously concerned about social justice must take the pope and the Vatican at their word when they say that they do not intend to change their course. Catholics must be aware that the pope and the Vatican are choosing their social justice issues very selectively. In the 1970s, Cardinal Leo Suenens proposed that the position of pope and the Vatican, as we know it, be eliminated and that four “mini-pope” positions be created; this is consistent with Catholic teachings. He insisted that this is feasible. Perhaps it is time for socially responsible American Catholics to break the American Church away from the control of the Vatican. Otherwise, they as individuals stand to be accused of the same hypocrisy practiced by their Church hierarchy.
[8] D. J. Dooling, decision in McRae vs. HEW, New York: U.S. District Court. See, Appendix 1 for a more complete extract from Judge Dooling’s decision.
[9] P. D. Young, “Richard A. Viguerie: The New Right’s Secret Power Broker,” Penthouse (December 1982), p. 146.
[11] Jean-Guy Vaillancourt, Papal Power: A Study of Vatican Control Over Lay Catholic Elites (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).
Dr. Stephen Mumford is the founder and President of the North Carolina-based Center for Research on Population and Security. He has his doctorate in Public Health. His principal research interest has been the relationship between world population growth and national and global security. He has been called to provide expert testimony before the U.S. Congress on the implications of world population growth.
Dr. Mumford has decades of international experience in fertility research where he is widely published, and has addressed conferences worldwide on new contraceptive technologies and the stresses to the security of families, societies and nations that are created by continued uncontrolled population growth. Using church policy documents and writings of the Vatican elite, he has introduced research showing the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church as the principal power behind efforts to block the availability of contraceptive services worldwide.
Professor Milton Siegel, who for 24 years was the Assistant Director-General of the World Health Organization, speaks to Dr. Mumford in 1992 to reveal that although there was a consensus that overpopulation was a grave public health threat and would be a major cause of preventable death not too far in the future, the Vatican successfully fought off the incorporation of family planning and birth control into official WHO policy. This video is available for public viewing for the first time. Read the full transcript of the interview here.
Tony Abbott and Brandis both secretly met with paedophile protector George Pell. Why?
Federal Attorney-General Senator George Brandis QC secretly met with known paedophile protector and alleged paedophile Cardinal George Pell in May this year. It was only reported on Monday (20/7/15) because Brandis has spent the last 3 months trying to conceal it.
It is almost identical to Tony Abbott lying in an interview in 2004 on the ABC’s 7.30 Report about a secret meeting he had with George Pell before the 2004 Federal Election.
It causes major headaches for a lot of people including Prime Minister Tony Abbott who is also a long-time friend of Cardinal Pell. I find it impossible to believe that George Brandis would have met with Cardinal Pell without Tony Abbott’s knowledge and approval. Be that as it may, Prime Minister Abbott certainly knows about the meeting now and has said nothing which also suggests he has known for a long time.
The problem will not be going away as many sexual abuse victims are very upset about it and George Pell is due to give evidence at the Royal Commission again sometime before Christmas. It is guaranteed that Pell will be asked about the May meeting with Brandis when he is next at the Royal Commission and that will raise further questions for Brandis and Tony Abbott.
Channel Ten Report on Monday 20/7/15
(Click anywhere on the above video to watch)
Channel 10 have a slightly longer report on their website where at the beginning they talk about Pell being accused of protecting paedophiles and at the end about Brandis’ office “only disclosing the lunch after persistent enquiries from Channel 10″. (Click here to watch)
George Brandis knew he should not be meeting with George Pell
It is not like George Brandis did not know Pell was a witness at the Royal Commission. Pell already gave evidence in March and August last year and was put on notice in May this year that he would be required for further evidence later this year.
Also, when the Royal Commission makes recommendations to the government Brandis will be having a substantial say in what recommendations they will implement. As a QC Brandis is fully aware that he should never have met with George Pell for legal reasons such as perceived bias.
Tony Abbott’s friendship with George Pell and the Liberal Party connection
In September 2013 I wrote the below in an article :
“Tony Abbott and George Pell have a history of working together in politics. Before the 2004 election Tony Abbott gave an infamous interview on the ABC’s Lateline where he was caught lying and deceiving in relation to a meeting with George Pell. A couple of days after the meeting George Pell was a signatory to a letter criticising the Labor Party.” (Click here to read more) Below is the video showing Tony Abbott lying.
(Click anywhere on the above video to watch) (For the longer transcript version click here)
Given Tony Abbott has previous history of telling a lie trying to conceal a meeting with George Pell did he tell George Brandis to try and conceal his meeting with Pell?
Questions that need to be answered regarding the George Brandis / Cardinal George Pell meeting
What does Abbott know about the meeting? What did Brandis say to Pell at the meeting? Did Brandis say to Pell that there is no need for Pell to worry as any negative recommendations by the Royal Commission against Pell and the Church will be swept under the carpet? Did Brandis pass on any messages to Pell from Tony Abbott at the lunch or pass on any message to Tony Abbott from Pell after the lunch?
Give credit where it is due
It must be noted that in September 2014 at the request of the Royal Commission the Federal Government led by Prime Minister Tony Abbott extended the Royal Commission for 2 years until 2017. (Click here to read more)
Alleged paedophile George Pell and his support for paedophile priests
This article is not about George Pell and his recent actions are well-known so I won’t go too in-depth but his background is highly relevant to the article so I will cover a few parts. George Pell supported serial paedophile Gerard Ridsdale even when he was facing criminal charges as the above photo shows.
I wrote an article in March last year regarding Pell’s evidence at the Royal Commission which starts off:
“Cardinal George Pell, who was investigated in 2002 for sexually assaulting a 12 year-old-boy in 1961, gave evidence yesterday (24/3/14) at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. It is a bit rich to call what came out of George’s mouth “evidence” given almost every second word would have to classified as perjury.” (Click her to read more)
(Click anywhere on the above video to watch)
Another article I wrote in September 2013 which has a lot of background information is titled “Tony Abbott and his friend Cardinal George Pell. Perceived bias for the Royal Commission into child sex abuse“ (Click here to read)
Is George Brandis a paedophile?
As we now know paedophilia goes to the highest levels of government in England so when members of parliament act as strange and in the circumstances that Brandis has I think it fair to ask the question about them.
One thing that is certain is that Brandis having lunch with Cardinal George Pell has given some credibility to a person who will go down in history as one of the biggest paedophile protectors the world has ever seen. And why Brandis has done that is something he needs to explain to the public.
Brandis is divorced with 2 children and his own sexuality is the subject of rumour or at least that is what the Sydney Morning Herald said in an article in 2013.
“Those who know him well insist occasional gossip about Brandis’s sexuality is baseless.” And “Don Markwell says he and Brandis have discussed sex only once in more than 40 years of friendship.” (Click here to read more)
I would like to know what those rumours are and whether or not a dodgy meeting with Pell is relevant.
The only rumour that I know of is that George Brandis is gay and was caught in bed with another man at university. If that is true who cares and he wouldn’t be the first gay person to get married and have children. But maybe the other rumours are a lot more than that.
Why George Brandis met with Cardinal Pell and why he tried to cover it up is unknown so all we can do is speculate to try to get to the truth and so we should as it is disgusting and needs to be exposed.
There will be suspicion about anyone who meets with George Pell. Even worse if they are the Federal Attorney-General
Everyone knows that the Catholic Church are protecting paedophiles on a huge scale. Now and in the past. I wouldn’t go anywhere near George Pell in a million years unless it was to try to expose his criminal conduct further.
George Brandis as put the credibility of the $500 million tax payer funded Royal Commission in jeopardy.
Time for action
Tony Abbott and Brandis need to come clean now. The longer they wait the worse it will become. The above story is dynamite waiting to go off and it will sometime in the not too distant future I expect.
If this was a court case afoot the first question people would ask is: Has George Brandis and/or Tony Abbott interfered in the administration of justice. The Royal Commission isn’t a court case but it is the next best thing and people will be wondering for a long time if Brandis and/or Abbott have interfered with it. At least until they say what happened at the meeting with Brandis and Pell.
Phobia, or irrational fear, is an unfortunate hallmark of social and political discourse throughout the world, often exploited for gain by those who have a responsibility to do exactly the opposite. Rampant homophobia is used to stoke fears that gay people were sexual deviants out to destroy our way of life. Now rampant Islamophobia advances a fear of Muslims as terrorists who are out to destroy our way of life. And the government is driving a lot of it.
Dr. Stephen Mumford is the founder and President of the North Carolina-based 
