Piers Akerman: Methinks the fools protest too much

MILLIONS of Australians came together on Thursday and celebrated their nation. But it was the angry rabble who made all the headlines, Piers Akerman writes.

MILLIONS of Australians came together on Thursday and celebrated their nation.

A handful protested but, if you were unfortunate enough to listen to your ABC, the angry rabble made all the headlines.

Those whingers — brought together by the constantly ­offended operatives at GetUp! — are the latest incarnation of Communism’s useful idiots in the subversive war against the West.

Under yet another shrill banner, Fighting In Resistance Equally, representatives of the deep-Left Greens, Socialist ­Alliance, the reactionary ­National Tertiary Education Union NSW, the MUA, the Refugee Action Coalition and a few others made fools of themselves with their attempts to provoke police and disrupt an otherwise joyous day.

On GetUp!’s website, the call to arms was promoted with the message: “We’re the most imprisoned group of people in the world.”

That demonstrates how totally out-of-touch these people are.

GetUp!’s activist chairman is Sarah Maddison. When she is not busily promoting ­increased militancy she is ­associate professor of politics in the School of Social and ­Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne, which last year held a symposium ­titled Justice Through Conflict that featured the 72-year-old black US radical Angela Davis.

The Invasion Day Rally turns violent in Broadway as protesters clash with police last week. Picture: Justin Lloyd

Davis was prosecuted for conspiracy involving the 1970 armed takeover of a Marin County, California, courtroom, in which four people were killed. She was acquitted in a federal trial.

She ran on the Communist Party USA ticket for vice- president during the 1980s with a singular lack of success.

Nonetheless, she fired up Ms Maddison, sending her into fits of revolutionary zeal, not to mention Twitter overdrive.

Quoting the aged Black Panther associate, Maddison fired off the following mal mots “freedom is not something that can be given. It is ­always won, it is always taken. Angela Davis”.

“We need movements that are prepared to resist the inevitable seductions of assimilation.” Davis, again.

“If freedom is anything at all it is a constant, collective yearning for new worlds.” More Davis. And “we simply cannot incorporate black ­people into a racist society and think it is justice”.

No, and we better stop all those welfare cheques, affirmative action programs, and grants which are available only to Aboriginal and Torres Strait members of our society since there can’t be any justice in doling out such discriminatory handouts, can there?

Good grief, it starts to look like apartheid. Other speakers listed ­included Shen Narayanasamy, the human rights campaign co-director of, you guessed it, GetUp!

According to the program for the academic talkfest, “this panel of speakers who work with, alongside and outside the law to achieve justice through social and legal action collectively consider the possibility of structural change”.

There you have it, GetUp! — examining ways to work outside the law.

Another speaker listed was a representative from the ­People’s Socialist government of Victoria, Jacki Turfrey.

Ms Turfrey was to discuss “Aboriginal people’s long-held quests for justice in Victoria and the resolve of the current government to support ongoing self determination, a permanent representative body for Aboriginal people, and a meaningful Treaty”.

Australia Day protesters also gathered in Melbourne. Picture: Chris Hopkins/Getty Images

All hogwash but just the sort of humbug that has the inner-urban elites squealing in ­ecstasy.

GetUp!’s deputy chair is Carla McGrath. She is unable to shake the ­effects of colonisation, dispossession, bloodshed and oppression and the Northern Territory intervention, according to her internet posts. In her limited world, there is far more that divides us than unites us.

Only if GetUp! keeps proselytising and sucking in silly students and even sillier members of the broader community who feel a desperate need to express their guilt for imagined crimes they didn’t commit.

In a sweeping interview with New Yorker writer David Remnick published on November 28 after his party lost the US election, Barack Obama, who tapped into the guilt of Americans and derived much of his political power from being the first black US president, explained his view of his heritage.

“I’m half Scotch-Irish, man!” he told the reporter. “When folks like Jim Webb write about Scotch-Irish stock in West Virginia and Kansas and so on, those are my people! They don’t know it always, but they are.”

Former senator Jim Webb, who is married to a Vietnamese immigrant, is the author of a book titled Born Fighting: How The Scots-Irish Shaped America, which noted his ancestors fought in every major American war. A 2014 TV documentary, also entitled Born Fighting, was adapted from Webb’s book and is narrated by him. He is descended from Scots-Irish immigrants from Ulster who emigrated in the mid-18th century to the British North American colonies.

Obama lays claim to the same heritage.

It is obvious that the majority of those who identify as Aboriginal in Australia today could also lay claim to Anglo heritage.

If those few who so vehemently hate the Western system that delivers them so much today, and despise those of other cultures who brought civilisation to this continent, realised they are, as Obama says he is, one of the same ­people, perhaps they would feel better about themselves and leave GetUp! with nothing to protest about.