Piers Akerman: Muslim AFLW star’s ‘pride’ controversy dismissed by woke hypocrites
While Israel Folau was hammered for his Christian views on homosexuality, Muslim AFL star Haneen Zreika has been given a free pass, Piers Akerman writes.
Opinion
Don't miss out on the headlines from Opinion. Followed categories will be added to My News.
The AFL women have shone a great spotlight on the hypocrisy and double standards of rugby union’s oh-so-woke approach to inclusivity.
On Friday night, Greater Western Sydney forward Haneen Zreika chose to sit out a game rather than dishonour her Muslim faith and wear a so-called Pride jumper.
Zreika discussed her views with her teammates and the club and won their support for her stance.
No slamming of her faith by commentators like the Nine media’s loudmouth Peter FitzSimons who has long voiced his total disdain for anyone with religious beliefs and particularly Christians, like former Wallabies star Israel Folau who lost his livelihood when the ARU tossed him aside and destroyed his livelihood and career in 2019.
“People believe all kinds religious nuttery – almost by definition,” he wrote in The Sydney Morning Herald yesterday. So, hundreds of millions of people of faith are nutters, the head of the Australian Republican Movement believes. He might explain that to Aboriginal Australians, more than 70 per cent of whom identify with a Christian denomination.
Zreika and Folau are of one mind in agreeing that their religious beliefs don’t accord with the virtue-signalling embrace of homosexuality and other relatively recent millennial obsessions.
Folau was hammered by the ABC and its fellow media travellers, GetUp!, Crikey and The Guardian when he tweeted views paraphrasing St Paul’s letter to the Corinthians regarding the condemnation of homosexuality in the early Christian church.
They were pretty ferocious, hellfire and eternal damnation, more than a whiff of brimstone.
Zreika follows the Koran and is regarded as role model in her community. A political career seems likely to feature in her future.
No Christian nation around the world endorses St Paul’s archaic view of homosexuality but there are millions of Muslims in countries from Iran, across the Middle East to our neighbour Indonesia, who not only endorse the Koranic view of homosexuality but are not averse to murdering those who are accused of the practise.
Indeed, the luvvy idiots who supported the absurd action of some anti-Semitic activists in their BDS boycott of the Sydney Festival because it accepted support from the Israeli government to stage a breathtaking performance by an Israeli dance company were backed by the terrorist Islamist Hamas organisation which is renowned for its slaughter of homosexuals in areas it controls under the Palestine Authority.
The anti-Christian flavour of the homosexual lobby was personified by the stance taken by vexatious litigator and homosexual activist Gary Burns who filed a complaint against Folau with the NSW Anti-Discrimination Board in December, 2019.
“Mark my words, Mr Folau is about to cop a dose of third-degree Burns,” Burns said in a statement.
Unfortunately for Burns, his claim was rejected by the President of the Anti-Discrimination Board in April, 2020, and his subsequent appeal against this decision to the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal was also dismissed in November, 2020.
NSW Anti-Discrimination Board president Annabelle Bennett said Burns’ complaint was “vexatious” and “a flagrant abuse of process such that no further actions should be taken”.
Tribunal chief Anne Britton found he was only doing it to get some funds to pay a $82,000 legal bill run up in another legal fight.
She said the “egregious nature of Burns’ conduct” amounted to an abuse of process. He had sent “intemperate” emails to Folau’s legal team as well as disrespectful, intemperate and threatening emails to members of the Anti-Discrimination Board.
Israel Folau and others – including Bernard Gaynor, another victim of many Burns’ complaints – had the law on their side and didn’t rely on the shrill wokeness of the gay supporters for their victory.
Last week West Coast was criticised for being the only AFLW team not to wear a Pride jumper. Its general manager of community and game development Richard O’Connell said the club was conscious of not rushing the process for designing a pride jumper and was focusing this season on releasing its AFLW Indigenous jumper.
However the club’s AFLW coach Michael Prior then came under fire for refusing to comment on the issue, saying: “I talk about footy, not what we’re wearing. I think we’ve done the pride stuff to death, to be honest.”
He later apologised to anyone “who was offended by the report”.
Why he should have apologised is beyond me. People across the country are tired of double standards and hypocrisy.
Inclusive means exactly that. Being civil and not disrespectful should be the norm.
Too late: Dutton’s ‘winning argument’ was never tested
Any policy that hasn’t been inoculated with exposure to all possible threats will simply have zero immunity during an election campaign – and that is what happened to Peter Dutton and the Coalition, writes Joe Hildebrand.
Nothing shakes up a friendship group like a divorce
The loneliness after divorce can be piercing. The first year of Saturday nights on your own is hard. Friends can make or break recovery: they either gather you up, or leave you for dead, writes Angela Mollard.