Headlines Monday 26th January 2009

Australia Day and Chinese New Year.
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Congratulations to Timothy Ly and Maria Tran on their deserved Australia Day awards. They are more Aussie than I .. I was born O/s. :grin:

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Australia: It's God's country
Alan Jones
A couple of years ago I shared with you a uniquely Australian joke that had been sent to me by one of my listeners, Keith.

It's about Australia Day.

And on a day where there is so much negativism around and so many people talk negatively, such that it drives me, for one, nuts.

And when a whole lot of genuinely achieving Australians seem to be forgotten, this story puts pride in our hearts, while also hopefully putting a smile on our faces.

It's about an American who decided to write a book about famous churches around the world, so he bought a plane ticket and took a trip to Orlando, thinking he would start by working his way across the USA from south to north.

On his first day, he was inside a church taking photos when he noticed a golden telephone mounted on the wall with a sign that read "$10,000 a call".

The American, being intrigued, asked a priest who was strolling by, what the telephone was used for.

The priest replied that it was a direct line to heaven and that for $10,000 you could talk to God.

The American thanked the priest and went along his way.

Well, the next stop was Atlanta.

There at a very large cathedral he saw the same golden telephone with the same sign under it.

He wondered if this was the same kind of telephone he saw in Orlando and he asked a nearby nun what its purpose was.

She told him it was a direct line to heaven and that for $10,000 he could talk to God.

"Okay, thank you" said the American.

He then travelled to Indianapolis, Washington DC, Philadelphia, Boston, New York.

In every church he saw the same golden telephone with the same $10,000 per call sign under it.

The American, upon leaving Vermont, decided to travel to Australia to see if Australians had the same golden telephone.

But this time the sign under it read "40 cents a call".

The American was surprised, so he asked a priest about the sign.

"Father, I've travelled all over America and I've seen the same golden telephone in many churches, but in the US the price was $10,000 a call".

The priest smiled and answered, "You're in Australia now, son. It's a local call".
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Crying over Australia
Andrew Bolt
The Age opinion page celebrates Australia Day with two articles.

One argues:

That a monarch still rules us is embarrassing for a modern nation.

The other:

Australia’s public version of itself is nothing like reality - and it ignores our first people.

Actually, most Australians seem remarkably unembarrassed by the monarch, which may explain why 55 per cent of us voted to retain her in 1999. And far from ignoring our “first people” - a racist term, incidentally - we have had yet another Aboriginal (the eighth) chosen yesterday as Australian of the Year, while another Aboriginal was named Western Australia’s Young Australian of the Year.

It seems that some people of our writing class simply find it fashionable to take offence at their country, at a self-hating time best captured by this letter today in the Age’s letter page:

I feel deep sorrow and anger when I stroll along the urbanised banks of the Yarra, or drive along the Great Ocean Road, smeared with tarmac and spattered with houses muscling in on sacred land with ignorance, satisfaction and pride. What an unimaginable loss for the first owners of this land…

On Australia Day, which celebrates the landing of the First Fleet in Botany Bay, I will be mourning the beginning of a genocide, the wiping out of culture, and the destruction of nature. - But what must the first Australians have done to cause such a terrible thing by the invaders? - ed.
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Snow now in the desert
Andrew Bolt
Snow falls on the United Arab Republic:

Snow covered the Jebel Jais area for only the second time in recorded history yesterday. So rare was the event that one lifelong resident said the local dialect had no word for it.

Not proof of global cooling, of course, but image what conclusions the media would draw from a failure of snow to fall somewhere for only the second time in recorded history.
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Myths made and rewarded
Andrew Bolt
Mick Dodson is named Australian of the Year by a government-stacked committee, apparently for his ability to make things seem as they are not.

For instance, Dodson, co-chair of Reconciliation Australia, is hailed as a man of reconciliation, yet he immediately pluges into another fight:

WITHIN minutes of accepting the Australian of the Year award yesterday, the indigenous leader Mick Dodson told the Rudd Government it needed to move the date of Australia Day because January 26 represented a “day of mourning” for many of his people… The Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, immediately ruled out changing Australia Day’s date, which he called “an inclusive day, celebrating the identity and achievements of all Australians”.

Another Dodson talent is make himself seem a living symbol of the invaded, and not the invader:

“To many indigenous Australians, in fact most indigenous Australians, (Australia Day) really reflects the day in which our world came crashing down,” Professor Dodson said outside Parliament House yesterday.

“Our” world? In fact, Dodson’s father was of Irish-Australian background.

Then there’s this:
The first Aboriginal admitted as a lawyer in Victoria, from 1988-1990, he was also counsel assisting the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.

Dodson’s commission was an exercise based on a myth - a myth it reinforced - that Aboriginal prisoners were more likely to die in jail than were white ones. In fact, as the inquiry’s criminology unit complained:

The hostility (of commission staff) towards the work of the Criminology Unit reached a climax only a few months after the work started, when it became clear that the research showed that Aboriginal persons in either police or prison custody were no more likely to die than were non-Aboriginal people. This general finding was interpreted by some significant elements of the staff as undermining the very foundations of the Royal Commission. To even hint that such a conclusion was possible was seen as disloyal, misguided and obviously wrong.

And Dodson has also had a hand in spreading another myth that made our history seem shamefully other than what it was:

Professor Dodson ... was one of the authors of the controversial 1997 Bringing Them Home report on the Stolen Generations.

But as we know, no one, including Dodson himself, can name even 10 children stolen just because they were Aboriginal and not because they seemed to need help.

But there is one important thing that Dodson does not make seem other than it is. At least he himself does not claim to be stolen:

Born to an Aboriginal mother and an Irish-Australian father in Katherine, Northern Territory, and orphaned at 10, he escaped the affront of what he later helped dub the “stolen generations” when he and his older brother, Pat, were granted an education by the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart at Monivae College in far away Hamilton, western Victoria.

Oddly enough, though, being sent away for an education is precisely what led Peter Gunner to claim he was stolen in the first “stolen generations” test case to be heard in the Federal Court.
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How Gaza was spun
Andrew Bolt
Report after report during the fighting in Gaza stressed how Israel was carelessly killing civilians - and so many of them.

But reports by largely Left-leaning journalists from an area controlled by a terrorist group that could make life very nasty for them and their contacts cannot lightly be trusted. Both of the key claims against Israel turn out to be suspect.

First, Fairfax’s Jason Koutsoukis finds that Hamas, at least, knows well that Israeli troops restrain themselves in a fight - and tried to exploit that restraint in ways that put the lives of innocent Palestinians at risk:

Mohammed Shriteh, 30, is an ambulance driver registered with and trained by the Palestinian Red Crescent Society.... Mr Shriteh said the more immediate threat was from Hamas, who would lure the ambulances into the heart of a battle to transport fighters to safety.

In fact, Hamas reportedly used one hospital as a hideout and headquarters:

Senior Hamas officials ... are believed to be in the basements of the Shifa Hospital complex in Gaza City, which was refurbished during Israel’s occupation of the Gaza Strip… During a cabinet meeting a week ago, Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin said senior Hamas officials found refuge in the hospital basement because they know Israel would not target it, due to the patients in the upper floors.

This is the same hospital where Mads Gilbert, the Marxist Norwegian doctor who backs terrorist attacks against the US, worked for several days and gave countless interviews accusing Israel of war crimes against largely innocent Palestinians. Oh, and performed in one highly questionable medical intervention for the cameras.

And what of all those innocents that Israel slaughtered? True, hundreds did, tragically, die, as Hamas fought from behind their human shields, but once again it seems the truth was spun:

Italian journalist Lorenzo Cremonesi, who works with the Corriere della serra newspaper, reported Thursday that Hamas had vastly overstated the number of civilian deaths in Gaza. While Hamas claims that 1,330 residents of Gaza were killed in the operation and approximately 5,000 wounded, the real number of casualties was far lower, Cremonesi says.

Cremonesi’s report was based on his own findings after touring hospitals in Gaza and talking to families of those killed or wounded.... Cremonesi estimated that between 500 to 600 people were killed in the fighting. Most were young men between the ages of 17 and 23 who were members of Hamas, he said.

Many hospitals had several empty beds, he reported… The Italian report also confirmed Israeli allegations that Hamas had used civilians as human shields and used ambulances and United Nations buildings in the fighting.

And, typically, the only clear case we have so far of innocent Palestinians being deliberately gunned down during Israel’s invasion has received almost no coverage and zero outrage from the the UN and the rest of the “pro-Palestinian” bureaucracy:
The Palestinian Authority’s Minister of Social Welfare Affairs, Mahmoud Habbash, ...confirmed that Hamas had been torturing and executing Fatah members in the Gaza Strip during and after Operation Cast Lead. Nineteen Palestinians were murdered in cold blood by Hamas, Habbash said, while more than 60 others were shot in the legs.

Ihab Ghissin, spokesman for the Hamas-run Interior Ministry in Gaza, confirmed that his men had arrested scores of “collaborators” with Israel during and after the war.... Musa Abu Marzouk, a top Hamas official in Syria, confirmed that his movement had executed “collaborators” during the war.
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AUSTRALIA DAY 2009
Tim Blair
(Private Greg Sher, deployed to Afghanistan with 1st Commando Regiment, served with the Special Operations Task Group. He was killed in a Taliban rocket attack on 4th January, 2009. Greg’s brother Steven wrote this piece.)

AUSTRALIA Day, and its annual attempts to define what it means to be Australian, formerly saw us subject to clichés about barbecues, beer, beaches and bronzed bodies.

We now live in a different time.

For the family and friends of all eight Australian soldiers killed in Afghanistan, perpetually linked by tragic loss and unlimited pride, Australia Day is an opportunity to consider anew who we are, and why we embark on what we do.

Our generously giving society is replete with those prepared to serve for the welfare of the broader Australian community. We are blessed with the many thousands of charity workers and unpaid volunteers who donate their time to care for those who cannot look after themselves. We are blessed with the SES workers who sacrifice unpaid days attending to natural disasters. We are blessed with the ambulance crews, fire-fighters and policemen who encounter the worst conceivable situations in order to ensure the public’s welfare. This is often done at risk to their own lives.

And so it is with the officers and enlisted personnel of the Australian Defence Force (ADF).
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HAMAS STILL BEING HAMAS
Tim Blair
The SMH’s Jason Koutsoukis reports from Gaza:
Palestinian civilians living in Gaza during the three-week war with Israel have spoken of the challenge of being caught between Hamas and Israeli soldiers as the radical Islamic movement that controls the Gaza strip attempted to hijack ambulances …

[An ambulance driver] says Hamas made several attempts to hijack the al-Quds Hospital’s fleet of ambulances during the war.

“You hear when they are coming. People ring to tell you. So we had to get in all the ambulances and make the illusion of an emergency and only come back when they had gone.”
Let’s hope the SMH used a false name for that driver (and others named in the article) because Hamas is currently in systematic revenge mode. No, wait; surely they’re currently rebuilding shattered schools and so on, to improve the lives of Gaza residents:
It was Friday, the Muslim day of rest, but Gaza’s border with Egypt was a hive of activity. Men scraped sandy soil out of holes that had served as tunnels for smuggling, and were one of the main targets of Israel’s war in Gaza.
Gotta have priorities.
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NO WATER FOR YOU
Tim Blair
Battle is joined between humans and prominent Australians, according to the Age:
Prominent Australians have thrown their support behind a controversial new book which argues that population growth is the biggest threat to environmental sustainability in this country.

In a provocative attack on water conservation schemes, such as Melbourne’s Target 155, the book Overloading Australia urges Australians to ignore water conservation, forcing politicians to rethink population and immigration policy.
Tim Flannery’s dam-drying predictions have failed to materialise, so the strategy now is to drain our water stocks. These people are remarkable.
Focusing on perhaps the most taboo aspect of environmental debate, authors Mark O’Connor and William Lines have argued that pro-immigration and “baby bonus” policies are at odds with plans to reduce carbon emissions and secure water supplies.
Interestingly, O’Connor is a wedding celebrant. How he combines that with his opposition to population growth is anyone’s guess.
“The task of simultaneously increasing population and achieving sustainability is impossible,” the book argues.
That line must go down a treat during wedding ceremonies.
Predicting Australian cities will suffer more congestion, pollution, loss of biodiversity and diminished services, the authors argue there is no point conserving water “until we get restraint in population”.
Our population and our water supply (storage levels in Sydney are currently above 61 per cent) seem to be getting along just fine, notwithstanding the occasional case of water-hysteria homicide.
O’Connor said his background was largely in poetry …
Don’t tell me what the poets are doing. Don’t tell me that they’re talking tough.
… yet despite his lack of conventional expertise in demography and population studies, his book has struck a chord with prominent Australians and increasingly echoes the views of leading environmentalists.
We already know. Strangely, these people are yet to begin offing themselves. By the way, where are all the chord-struck “prominent Australians”? The article lists only one:
Former New South Wales premier Bob Carr has agreed to launch the book next week, and has lauded O’Connor’s previous books about the perils of unchecked population growth.
Carr is a much-diminished figure these days. Not so diminished that he’s dead, though, which will distress those who wish our population reduced.
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Indian police kill 'Pakistan militants'
Indian police shot and killed two suspected Pakistani militants near the capital New Delhi on Sunday, as thousands of troops were deployed on the eve of a national holiday to prevent extremist attacks.
Brij Lal, a senior police officer in Uttar Pradesh state, told reporters an anti-terrorist team chased a car carrying two men towards the capital before intercepting it in the suburb of Noida, 20km from the city.
He said passports recovered from the vehicle indicated the two dead men were Pakistani, and police were investigating if they had links to Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), the Pakistan-based militant group India blames for the Mumbai attacks.
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'Change the date', says new Australian of the Year
New Australian of the Year Mick Dodson says the date of Australia Day needs to be changed because January 26 "isolates" indigenous people.
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Hamas offers Israel year-long truce
Hamas officials in Cairo have proposed a year-long truce with Israel and an opening of the crossings into the Gaza Strip, in the latest round of diplomatic meetings to build on a fragile ceasefire.
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Police take cars from teen street-racers
Two teenage P-plate drivers have had their cars confiscated after they were allegedly caught street racing at Bombo on the NSW south coast.
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BBC stands firm in charity appeal row
THE BBC is under fire for refusing to show a charity appeal seeking funds for people in Gaza because it could "compromise impartiality".
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It's about keeping youth safe, says China
CHINA has moved to portray its crackdown on internet content as a campaign to protect youth and nothing to do with stifling dissent.