Joe Hildebrand Opinion: If Anti-immigration protesters are our saviours we are in big trouble
Weekend protesters were a rag-tag group of people who ranged from confused, to crazy, to borderline criminal. If they’re our white knights, we are in even more trouble than we thought, writes Joe Hildebrand.
If the people who turned up for Sunday’s March for Australia are the saviours of Western civilisation, it’s in even more trouble than they think.
This was no mass movement, no reflection of mainstream Australia. This was a rag-tag group of people who ranged from the confused to the crazy to the borderline criminal.
One of the attendees in Adelaide was carrying an adulatory poster of fugitive alleged cop killer Dezi Freeman with the words “FREE MAN” emblazoned in capitals underneath.
Even I didn’t see that one coming.
More predictable was the attendance of the National Socialist Network, whose leader Thomas Sewell actually self-identifies as a neo-Nazi – although there is also a clue in the name.
The official organisers even knew he and his goons were joining the protest and welcomed them.
Organiser “Bec Freedom”, who uses a fake name, even openly stated this on the March for Australia’s official Facebook page.
“I’ve had a lot of questions asked regarding a ‘press release’ put out by Thomas Sewell this morning,” she wrote.
“As I have said from day one, the National Socialist Network will not be stopped or banned from attending the March For Australia events. Anyone who shares similar opinions on the reason for these events is welcome to attend, so long as they are not causing any trouble or being violent.”
This is the same Bec Freedom who was caught on audio in a social media chat saying: “We need violence, I’m sorry, but we need f**king violence,” she is heard to say.
“We’ve done peaceful, peaceful hasn’t done s**t.”
Hilariously, Freedom claimed she was taken “out of context” when challenged by 2GB’s Ben Fordham.
Either way, she quickly got her wish with a brawl breaking out within an hour of the march starting in Melbourne, where left-wing extremists were openly planning to confront their mirror-image morons.
As for the “similar opinions” nominated by Freedom for attendance, these are of course simply anti-immigration opinions, so I’m pretty sure the neo-Nazis qualify for that.
But it’s not really anti-immigration, the organisers claim, and some are naive enough to believe them.
An office manager from Sydney, who I won’t name, said she was concerned Australia was “following the UK and Europe” down a path of unsustainable migration levels.
“My mum was an immigrant, my ex-husband was an immigrant … we just want quality people to come into Australia,” she said.
Quality people? Sounds fair enough. This is the most benign face of yesterday’s march and it is a sad thing that such faces will inevitably end up being photographed next to the vile extremists using this as a Trojan horse for a much darker agenda.
So what sort of quality migrants are we talking about?
One exemplary cohort might be Australia’s Indian community, who are famously hardworking, mercantile and community spirited and the only violence they are ever associated with is the violence committed against them. Trust me, I did a six-part documentary on it.
Yet it was this community in particular that was singled out by some of the sick propaganda being circulated by marchers, leading many Indian Australians scared to go to work or open their shops yesterday.
So if hardworking and peaceful migrants from the world’s largest democracy and a fellow Commonwealth country aren’t welcome that’s not just anti mass-migration, it’s just anti-immigrant full stop.
Immigrants do the work that often Aussie-born youths won’t do.
An Indian small businessman I spoke to recently lamented that he couldn’t find enough locals willing to work weekends in his restaurant.
Judging by the look of some who turned out yesterday, I’m not sure they’re wowing employers across the country either.
As I said, many of those who turned out are no doubt there with good intentions or legitimate concerns. Maybe even most of them. But those in the vanguard driving it are not.
They are extremists, conspiracy theorists and – as noted – actual neo-Nazis.
There is no point calling them racists because the activist left has deprived that word of all meaning. And we do need to be able to talk about immigration and Western values without that word being flung around to shut down debate.
So here’s what I was doing yesterday: I was reading Volume II of Edward Gibbon’s six-volume Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
You’d think anyone genuinely concerned with the collapse of Western civilisation would be reading up on the last time it actually happened but those who are screaming the loudest about the West’s demise aren’t doing that.
Instead they’re hastening it along.
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