Andrew Bolt: Let’s call out the real sexists in Eddie McGuire ‘drowning’ scandal, Emirates

EDDIE McGuire has taken a kicking for apparently being a sexist but we perhaps should be looking at a Collingwood sponsor instead, writes Andrew Bolt.

Eddie McGuire after taking part in the Big Freeze Ice Slide challenge MND fundraising event. Picture: AAP/Tracey Nearmy

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IF EDDIE McGuire’s critics really want to savage a sexist, why pick on the Collingwood president? Why aren’t they going for Emirates, his club’s big sponsor?

Andrew Bolt says Emirates are to blame for sexism.

See, McGuire may be a bully, but he’s in no way a woman hater who dismisses violence against women.

No, the outrage machine — the likes of Rosie Batty, the huffpuffing Age and the mummy bloggers — are making far too much of McGuire’s joke that he’d pay $50,000 at a charity dunk to hold poison-pen football writer Caroline Wilson under water.

It was nasty and cheap, yes, but I completely accept McGuire’s argument that he saw Wilson not as a woman but simply a journalist, a formidable equal in football punditry who gives as good as she gets.

In fact, it strikes me that those turning Wilson into a symbol of female victimhood rather than a gladiator are the real sexists here.

Oops. But there I go, nearly making the same mistake as McGuire’s persecutors of missing the real sexists here.

Emirates is one of Collingwood’s four chief sponsors and has also been the marquee sponsor of the Melbourne Cup.

Emirates is fully owned by the government of Dubai, which has extraordinary laws against not just gays but women who are the victim of rape.

For instance, it jails gays for having sex and even has the death penalty for sodomy on its books. Three years ago, a Belgian man was sentenced to a year in prison for having had a gay relationship with a Filipino.

Even more extraordinary is that Dubai jails women who have been raped, on the grounds that they had sex outside marriage — forbidden under sharia law.

Under that law, Dubai has jailed not just raped maids of no consequence to Western journalists, but also Western women — even an Australian, Alicia Gali.

Gali reported being raped by co-workers at the Meridien Al Aqah resort but was herself jailed for eight months for having sex outside marriage.

Three years ago a Norwegian woman who complained to Dubai police of being raped was sentenced to 16 months in jail.

Isn’t that rank sexism and blaming of rape victims — not to mention homophobia — far more serious than any McGuire “joke”?

So why has the outrage brigade attacked the Collingwood president and not the Collingwood sponsor? Why is Emirates off limits?