Andrew Bolt: Lockdown race-baiters the true menace

So-called progressives are urging immigrants not to trust “racist” soldiers — but they are the true bigots and a health menace.

Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi, like many on the Left, loves blaming “far-right conspiracy theories” for spreading a dangerous “Covid-scepticism”.

But Faruqi, like the ABC and Labor, is now spreading an even more dangerous Left-wing conspiracy theory – that it’s “plain bastardry” by a racist government to send soldiers to supposedly pick on immigrants in Sydney’s lockdown.

These race-baiters are inflaming paranoia over the NSW government’s decision to ask 300 soldiers to help fight the Sydney outbreak, even though Victoria’s woke Labor government also used soldiers last year – and for much the same reasons.

It, too, saw the virus spreading fastest in suburbs with lots of immigrants, many of whom had poor English, needed to work, and had such strong family networks that some insisted on visiting relatives even during a lockdown.

In Sydney, for instance, up to three quarters of the new infections a week ago were in Fairfield, where more than 75 per cent of residents don’t usually speak English at home.

Both the Victorian and NSW governments have battled to get health messages out to such communities, and their police and health officials were overwhelmed.

Australian Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi. Picture: AAP Image/Lukas Coch

So they called in soldiers to help, by, for instance, physically checking that people stayed home during a lockdown or when they were supposed to be isolated.

The job of these soldiers has been obvious – to save people from dying, not least in these immigrant communities. But our race-baiters never miss a chance to smear this country by seeing racism where none exists.

To Faruqi, this “militarisation of public health” was just “creating fear and threatening people” in “some of the most over-policed communities in the country” and had “nothing to do with public health”.

It was “just plain bastardry”, that reminded her of “growing up mostly under a militarised political regime in Pakistan”.

To Professor Tim Soutphommasane, our ever-suspicious former race commissioner, this “troubling development” was just “another policy failure that tears at Sydney’s social fabric” because “it signals the people of southwest and western Sydney are being punished and can’t be trusted”.

But most poisonous was the publicly funded ABC, which stacked its Q&A program last Thursday with haters telling immigrants to fear and distrust the soldiers sent to save them.

A group of police and soldiers patrolling Melbourne during last year’s lockdown. Picture: William West/AFP

Host Virginia Trioli, invited a question from a Ron Ao, who lives in Fairfield or, as the ABC informed us, “Darug Country”: “There is so much police right now in Fairfield … it feels like we’re being treated like criminals! When is the government going to … get the police out – and now the army out – and allow us to get back to work?”

Cue the haters on this typically loaded ABC panel.

Literacy activist Michael Mohammed Ahmad, speaking from lockdown in front of a poster of Nation of Islam extremist Malcolm X, claimed this “overpolicing” had a “racist agenda”, repeating: “It’s very, very difficult for me and other members of our community not to think that the agenda in overpolicing our community is built on racist and classist motivations”.

Singer and Aboriginal race activist Deborah Cheetham agreed “overpolicing is what is exactly happening here” and “these people are being targeted” as immigrants: “Racism is embedded in the very nature of Australia”.

Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore protested that Fairfield now sounded like “a type of war zone”.

In Fairfield, more than 75 per cent of residents don’t usually speak English at home. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Flavio Brancaleone

And federal Labor frontbencher Chris Bowen, whose electorate includes Fairfield, could not resist joining this hysterical pack-attack and adding to the paranoia: “Military on the street, if not very sensitively and carefully handled, would add to that tension.”

A responsible politician would instead say: Our military is an honourable institution. Our soldiers have been called on to help save lives, as they’ve done in so many emergencies. Trust them, and help them to fight this outbreak. This isn’t a racist plot. We’re all Australians together.

Instead, Bowen joined this vomit of anti-Australianism on the ABC, leaving it to one lone panellist, Liberal Senator Andrew Bragg, to appeal to reason and deny the NSW Government called in the army just because it was racist: “In terms of the allegations of racism, I mean, the Premier of the state is a daughter of refugees. She didn’t speak English until she was five.”

How could so many so-called “progressives” be so base and blind that they denounce the help of our soldiers as racist, and urge immigrants not to trust the very people trying to save them from this virus?

Shame on them all. They are the racists they describe, and the health menace they claim to denounce.