ON THE CRUELTY OF JULIAN BURNSIDE

Julian Burnside fancies himself as a "human rights" lawyer. Apparently that licences him to be utterly vicious and deceptive. He now tweets a picture of Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton as a Nazi, and says "take this seriously". He also misquotes and totally misrepresents him. 

Julian Burnside slanders and smears

Julian Burnside fancies himself as a "human rights" lawyer. Apparently that licences him to be utterly vicious and deceptive. He now tweets a picture of Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton as a Nazi, and says "take this seriously".  

He also misquotes and totally misrepresents him.

Dutton never said "your rights don’t matter, you’re dead to me." He has never suggested any such thing.

This is what Dutton in fact said:

 Some of the crazy lefties at the ABC, and on The Guardian, HuffingtonPost, can express concern and draw mean cartoons about me and all the rest of it. They don’t realise how completely dead they are to me.

Not even a breath of a suggestion that Dutton thought that us and our rights were dead to him. For a QC like Burnside to so wilfully misquote and misrepresent is astonishing for a lawyer and for a "human rights" activist claiming to be especially moral. Burnside destroys his own integrity here.

And what of Burnside likening Dutton to a Nazi - to the kind of person who'd slaughter Jews and gypsies? This is utterly vile. It is monstrously unfair to Dutton and an insult to Jews who suffered so much and know what a real Nazi is like. 

Unfortunately, Burnside's cruelty and savagery - excused by his monstrous self-regard - has been on display before:

Once you might have thought a "human rights" lawyer just wanted people to be nicer to each other. But then comes Julian Burnside, the best-known of them, urging children to spit on Immigration Minister Scott Morrison.

Tweeted Burnside: "I hope little children stop him in the street and spit on his shoes."

I note Burnside refuses to set the children an example. He neither urges them to act in a civil way, nor takes the lead in spitting on a government minister.

He lacks conviction or lacks guts, urging children to do what he dares not.

And this foul defamation:

HUMAN rights lawyer Julian Burnside has apologised to Tony Abbott after branding him a "Paedos in speedos" on Twitter. The prominent QC said the tweet, which was seen by users of the social media service as a reference to pedophilia, was a mistake for which he unreservedly apologised.

Then there's his invincible ignorance on fashionable subjects such as global warming:

  Burnside, a prominent “civil libertarian”, demanded more such useless action with this invincibly ignorant argument on the ABC on Monday: “Our children and grandchildren will struggle to breathe if we don’t act sensibly and look at what the scientists are telling us.”

Unbelievable. After two decades of debate on global warming, Burnside still apparently thinks we’re talking about soot rather than carbon dioxide, which is just an invisible gas exactly like the stuff he breathes out.

There's his penchant for retweeting abuse like this:

They may seem grotesque to some of us, but they're just doing what comes naturally to them. Australians voted these people into power. If you don' like them, mobilize votes against them. .... we can still fight back | Scott Ludlam https://t.co/ahzdJA9hHl

— Prof. Peter Doherty (@ProfPCDoherty) March 16, 2018

And he retweeted this smear:

BREAKING: Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton has identified elderly ex-Nazis to be an oppressed and persecuted minority in Argentina. He says "These fine upstanding Aryans would make excellent hard-working productive Australians. We should give them priority treatment"#auspol

— John Wren (@JohnWren1950) March 16, 2018

The smugness you could cut with a knife.  

Roger Franklin has more.

Julian Burnside

Bertrand Russell may well have said this of a Burnside:

Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power.

CS Lewis ditto:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.