Rita Panahi: Deranged, drongo activists damaging their own cause

AS the standard of public discourse in Australia plumbs new depths, here’s a handy hint for harebrained activists: behaving like deranged drongos and resorting to violence will not increase support for your cause, writes Rita Panahi.

THE standard of public discourse in Australia continues to plumb new depths as extremists from both sides find new ways to disgrace themselves.

Here’s a handy hint for harebrained activists everywhere: behaving like deranged drongos screaming obscenities in the face of your opponents, or worse, spitting like feral animals and resorting to acts of violence, will not increase public support for your cause.

Indeed, you do enormous damage to whatever barrow you’re pushing when you engage in aggressive tactics to intimidate your ideological opponents.

On Wednesday night, Iranian-born Labor senator Sam Dastyari was racially abused in a Melbourne pub by three far-Right dolts who called him a “monkey” and a “terrorist”.

Two nights later in Sydney, far-Left protesters attacked Liberal councillor Christine Forster and her partner as she tried to enter a fundraising event for her brother, former prime minister Tony Abbott.

A clearly shaken Forster was spat on, screamed at, and so roughly manhandled by refugee activists that her jacket was almost torn in two. In the end, it took more than 30 police officers to help Forster enter the function.

Others attending were also abused, jostled, and some even pelted with fruit by about 200 protesters, one holding a “Death to (Immigration Minister Peter) Dutton” sign.

Christine Forster is caught up in a crowd of protesters outside the fundraising event. Picture: AAP

Forster said: “They were going absolutely berserk. To call it jostling is an absolute understatement. They were screaming in our faces, spitting and snarling. It took about 30 or 40 police to break it up and was extremely dangerous ... we were just interested in staying on our feet, and it’s incredibly lucky that we didn’t fall to the ground. And I hope no one else was hurt.”

Next day, Forster posted something that should be obvious: “Assaulting passers-by is not a protest, it’s just plain disgraceful behaviour.”

But while the ugly verbal attack on Dastyari was categorically condemned by conservatives, the same cannot be said for the physical attack on Forster.

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There was no shortage of supposedly compassionate people willing to excuse violence against women and “victim blame” Forster for being a Liberal and Abbott’s sister. Predictably, the sisterhood was silent on the abuse. Many of the loudest feminists failed to condemn contemptible behaviour perpetrated by those on their side.

After the bigoted attack on Dastyari, the entire country was condemned as racist by Fairfax with the headline “Wake up Australia: the Sam Dastyari incident proves you’re racist.”

Funnily enough, there were no headlines claiming Australia is full of extreme Leftist thugs after Abbott was physically attacked in Tasmania in September. In fact, that incident, now the subject of criminal proceedings, was dismissed, minimised and mocked by many on the Left, including in the media.

Universal condemnation was also lacking earlier this year when the threat of violence saw Andrew Bolt’s Melbourne book launch cancelled, and when he was set upon by two cowardly Leftists in Carlton in June.

Dastyari copped racist taunts in a video posted by the far right group “Patriot Blue”. Picture: Facebook

You know no one is safe when Somalia-born female genital mutilation victim and women’s rights campaigner Ayaan Hirsi Ali is smeared by a dishonest campaign to silence her. Ali’s 2017 Australian tour was cancelled.

It’s typical for the media to overblow behaviour of Right-wing idiots to push the “Australia is racist” narrative while Left-wing acts of bastardry are rarely held up as examples of a wider malaise.

At the weekend, Dastyari called on his supporters to be consistent in their response: “The many amazing people on the Left of politics who rightly called out the attack on @TimWattsMP and I at a bar on Wednesday should also call out the attacks on @resourcefultype (Forster) and others at Abbott event. The enemy is intolerance and extremism,” he posted.

Forster is a progressive Liberal who has advocated for same-sex marriage. But that isn’t enough for the social justice warriors who see her membership of the Liberal Party as sufficient justification for personal and physical attacks.

One particularly unhinged member of the Canberra press gallery tweeted: “Australian government is about to let PNG soldiers kill and bash unarmed refugees and Twitter is upset that a woman’s jacket got torn.”

It’s little wonder we are losing the ability to debate when the favoured tactic of the totalitarian Left is to intimidate their ideological opponents into silence.

Among the worst offenders are refugee activists who shamelessly lie and fabricate stories while claiming the moral high ground and labelling anyone who dares dispute their narrative a racist, a Nazi or a bigot.

They are already so far removed from the Australian mainstream that only the Greens support their reckless stance on border protection.

It’s about time the Greens were called to account for their lunacy. We were all rightly disgusted when Dastyari was called a terrorist by a far-Right idiot, but somehow Greens MP Adam Bandt can get away with calling Immigration Minister Peter Dutton a terrorist.

The violent protest on Friday night was attended by Greens senator Lee Rhiannon. If a conservative politician were part of a protest in which women were physically attacked, there’d be calls for a resignation. But the Greens are held to a much lower standard.

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