The last thing we need is US-style hate politics
THOSE who blame Donald Trump for attempted bombings in the United States should clean up their own rhetoric first, writes Miranda Devine.
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EVEN before anyone was arrested for sending homemade pipe bombs to Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and other high-profile US Democrats, an angry Green parrot from Down Under tried to drag us into the ugliness.
Greens leader Richard Di Natale decided to make political mileage out of the American bomb drama last week by attacking Donald Trump and smearing Coalition politicians.
“When you’ve got the president of the United States who uses the sort of inflammatory language he does, who essentially preaches violence, this is a man who’s giving licence to people on the fringes of society,” he told Sky News.
“Australia is not immune. We’ve got politicians who are out there race-baiting, talking about African gangs and people afraid to go out at night.”
Just for argument’s sake, let’s accept his argument.
Under Di Natale’s logic, that brings us to the conclusion that his own party gave licence to people “on the fringes of society” to use violence against the Australian Christian Lobby.
The Greens conducted a relentless smear campaign against the ACL in the months leading up to the 2016 bombing of its Canberra headquarters by suicidal gay activist Jaden Duong, who detonated a rented van packed with gas cylinders in the carpark, gutting the ground floor of the building, and causing $100,000 of damage.
Asked by police why he chose that location Duong, replied: “Because I dislike the Australian Christian Lobby” over its “position on sexuality” and “religions are failed”.
The Greens had been attacking the ACL for over a year.
Greens MP Adam Bandt and former Greens Senator Robert Simms were regularly on their feet in Parliament in the months before the bombing, calling ACL a “hate group” and its managing director Lyle Shelton a “bigot”. Former Greens leader Christine Milne had claimed the ACL’s “whole focus is to attack the gay community”, Victorian Greens MP Colleen Hartland had accused it of having a “hatred of gays”.
After the bombing, Shelton’s home address was placed on the internet by a prominent rainbow activist.
During the subsequent same-sex marriage postal survey last year, the ACL received threats and white powder in the mail. Suspicious packages addressed to the ACL forced the evacuation of staff at the Canberra mail centre.
In the Greens-governed ACT, the ACL bombing was treated like nothing. Police initially told reporters it was just a “car fire” and declared the next morning that it was not “politically, religiously or ideologically motivated”. That was shown to be nonsense when the plans of the troubled alleged bomber were revealed in court, along with his internet searches for information on same-sex marriage and instructions for how to make plastic explosives and a pressure-cooker bomb.
When Shelton pleaded for police protection after what effectively had been a terrorist attack, Greens MP Bandt sneered that he was “seeking political mileage”.
Hypocrisy, is the colour green.
In reality, it is as absurd to blame Di Natale for the ACL bombing as it is to blame Trump for last week’s pipe bombs. But oblivious to the double standards, Di Natale thought it smart to echo Democrats who blamed Trump for the pipe bombs but did not blame themselves when Bernie Sanders fan James Hodgkinson, a registered Democrat, opened fire on Republican politicians and nearly killed congressman Steve Scalise.
Just as the ACL bombing was downplayed, the Scalise shooting quickly dropped out of the news cycle while Trump-haters continued their abuse unabated.
From Madonna fantasising about “blowing up the White House” to Robert De Niro saying “ I want to punch [Trump] him in the face”, to assassination fantasies published by the New York Times, the rhetoric grew increasingly violent.
Yet instead of calling for calm, the Democrats’ biggest moralisers condoned the hatred: “You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for,” Hillary Clinton recently declared.
And then they had the hide to blame Trump for creating “an environment of hatred”.
The last thing we need is Di Natale importing this kind of hyper-partisanship into Australia.
He is not appealing for a new gentler discourse but ramping up the discord in a bid for attention.
When he labels Liberal frontbencher Peter Dutton an “out-and-out racist,” or leads smear campaigns against Christian organisations, he is the one degrading civil society.
If you can’t have a disagreement without portraying your opponent as evil, you shouldn’t be in politics.