Give us a break, the fake sheik’s not worth the effort
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You’ve heard of tabloid media going after thick sheiks. Now some are even using fake sheiks. At about 2pm yesterday my office received a message to call someone from Radio 2GB, home to such leading lights of quality journalism as Alan Jones. I called back and spoke to a female who worked with Jason Morrison. She wondered if I knew much about a certain Sheik Haron who had apparently been charged by Federal Police after sending abusive letters to the families of Australian soldiers killed in action in Afghanistan. She wanted to know if I’d be prepared to speak to Morrison on his afternoon Drive Show. I agreed. Silly me. Morrison seemed less interested in Haron and more interested in why a group of people he described as “Moozlems” didn’t step forward to condemn the man. He wanted to know why he was having so much difficulty getting “Moozlems” to condemn this man on his program (I did remind him that many don’t listen to 2GB). Still he pressed the point about the alleged Muslim conspiracy of silence over Haron. I said Haron hadn’t been given a huge amount of airplay or coverage (and I wasn’t just talking about the allegedly left-wing trendy “multi-culty”, the Fairfax press and ABC either). Maybe your average Aussie who ticked the Muslim box on his or her census form didn’t see the need to comment on some sheik who, by all accounts (including those of Richard Kerbaj in The Australian in January last year), was little more than a fake. Even Jeremy Jones, of the Australia-Israel Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC), was quoted in one Jewish blog as saying that Haron “works alone and has no support”. And yet somehow fake-sheik Haron was an issue that one journalist described to Kevin Rudd at a press conference yesterday as “the question that’s dominating talkback radio today”. Rudd ended his response to the journalist’s question with: “You know, when you pick up the front page of the Tele today, I think people, I think their stomachs turn.” The journalist asked Rudd whether he would consider changing Australia’s citizenship laws to allow “someone like that” (like what? Fake-sheik? Iranian? Crazy dude in a turban? Migrant?) to have their citizenship stripped of them and be deported. Rudd was non-committal. It’s one thing for media outlets to use the rants of a thick sheik to cook up a divisive broth of dog whistles. But why use the imbecilic correspondence of a fake sheik to cast aspersions on 360,000 people, most of whom (including their religious leaders) have never heard of him? After my interview with Morrison, I telephoned his researcher and asked whether the show had any trouble finding a Muslim to talk on the show. She confirmed that she hadn’t called an Islamic council, an imam, a board of imams or the Community Relations Commission. She did say that Morrison may have tried calling other people about the matter. He may have. But I somehow doubt it. |
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9 Comments
You’re better not even to engage with the dribbling morons on talkback radio. All you do is help them manufacture outrage for a brain dead, ignorant and paranoid superannuated audience looking for any excuse to fulminate about why all these non-blond non-freckled people are running around in their midst. I’m most disappointed, yet again, in Rudd. After the Ozcar beat-up and dozens of other prefabricated outrages in the Terror, why does he bother even responding?
Like Mr Denmore, I guess the only response I have is, why go on the show? As you say Irfan, 2GB is home to Alan Jones….nuff said. Leave them to their banal obsession with terrorists and refugees - the discussion they engage you in won’t be rational and you’ll wind up confused as to why they asked you on in the first place!
If you don’t go on the show, you don’t win. If you go on, you don’t win.
I guess I wanted to experience for myself the processes used by this kind of media. It was an experience.
Where’s your condemnation, Yusuf? This depicable act should be condemned by all.
Where’s yours, Bakerboy? Should we interpret your silence as evidence that you are a follower of Sheik Haron? Are you a member of the Taliban?
Irfan I personally think that the muslim community has some real issues to deal with but I whole heartedly agree with your smackdown of Bakerboy.
It is just ridiculous that members of a religious group are expected to publicly condemn every nutter who professes to belong to their religion every single time one of the nutters does something crazy.
You don’t see every catholic asked to condemn the actions of the IRA each time they do something crazy. Nor every protestant being asked to condemn the actions of the British government and it’s proxies in Northern Island when they do something indefensible to the Northern Irish.
(Edit)
My mistake - i thought that BB was condemming the despicable Jason Morrison.
Dr Harvey M Tarvydas
Jossy has wisdom.
Wisdom of man’s nature will help you deal with the Morrisons rather than the right response where as you’ve realized there is no useful response.
In ancient times, before the articulation of the science of psychology, human psychology was just as real and informative to the wise.
‘Original sin’ was a very wise concept of human nature, today underutilised by religion in a world which thinks of man as beautiful with the occasionally one sinking to some squalid undesirable state away from the beautiful norm, when it in fact that ancient wisdom delivers man as born with that squalid state waiting to grow up but by hard work and a most serious commitment (by our village - H Clinton) we can grow into a more desirable mental and intellectual state guided by law, morals, values, fears and rewards.
By taking so much for granted about our condition intellectually we fail to develop really valuable and worthwhile insight to the Morrisons and so expand their existence by continued inappropriate responses.
It seems noone is particularly interested in Haron Monis’s message – whatever that might be. As usual with the Australian media there’s been a lot of huff and puff over this man’s actions and no real meaty reporting about what it is he is saying. Commentators are so eager to judge both Monis, and to a lesser extent ‘the Muslim community’ for not condemning him, that (apart from at least some attempt at objective reporting) I would like to see the media presenting a little more background on Monis and shedding at least some light on his point. Channel Nine’s atrociously bad coverage of Monis’s court day theatre could have been a scene from Team America: World Police. The ‘news reporter’ whose role might more appropriately have been described as ‘patronising hate-mongerer’ might as well have been a puppet with visible strings. He was doing the very thing he would have us accuse Monis of – waving his arms about childishly in order to gain attention and instigate an emotional response from his audience. I suspect that Monis has a more virtuous objective – peace – if ever we were allowed to hear it.