Reclaim Australia Melbourne 4/4/2015

An article by one who was there, a woman who I know to be sensible and knowledgeable. 

A few years ago the Australian Defence League, a group inspired by the English Defence League but with nowhere near the numbers, held a demonstration in Melbourne against encroaching Islamisation in our country. It was attended by well under a hundred people, most not members of the ADL but disparate little groups who had heard about the event and were frustrated by the difficulty in getting the word out about what was happening, so felt they had nothing to lose by joining in.

I went to Federation Square where the event was held, and saw those few people, some with signs but plainly not well organised, standing around rather nervously. Then I noticed a group apart from this one, a large group of people who were almost all young, facing us. “Oh, goody,” I thought, “Lots of young people! That’s what we need!” I went over to talk to them, but my words were met with hostility. I then saw an older man, one of those 68ers who has never given up the Socialist dream, approach with a megaphone, into which he barked to the group, “Don’t speak to the enemy!” and he pushed me out of the way.

So I was “the enemy” and this group was decidedly NOT in support of our cause. To cut a long story short, eventually that group encircled us and attacked us physically, incited by megaphone-man, until it was all the attending police could do to stop them ripping us apart. I was very shaken by this experience.

Now, years later, all three groups are bigger and more organised. 

On the fourth of April, Easter Saturday, Reclaim Australia, an organisation of a few years’ standing, arranged demonstrations in Australia which attracted so much support from within and outside their own members that they were held in sixteen locations around the country. The young thugs who had attacked us previously had now grown in confidence and numbers. The police presence was correspondingly large, no doubt as authorities were mindful of increasing levels of division in Australia due to the issues of immigration and “asylum seekers” and the debate (such as it is) about the demands, infiltration and status of our growing Muslim population.

During the period between the ADL and the Reclaim events, there had been few similarly-themed demonstrations in Melbourne – only one in support of Iraqi Christians and one in support of Israel – but innumerable “pro-Palestinian”, “free the refugees” and “anti-racism” demonstrations and marches, and evidently the people involved were confident about their ability to dominate the public space and misbehave with impunity, as the police tended to advise any counter-demonstrators, no matter how quiet, to leave – for their own safety, of course.

Therefore, our opponents – those who flatter themselves with their exquisite moral superiority, the “Red Guards” of modern-day Australia – decided to again show up with their own “No Room For Racism” demonstration, and for weeks they had planned their strategy, with posters claiming the Reclaim people were racists who “hated Muslims and Aborigines” and with a determination to shut the demonstration down.

So by the time I arrived at the scene, on time, it was already too late. 

A few Reclaim people who had arrived early were surrounded at a distance by police who had their backs to them, and, with linked arms and smirking, triumphant faces, the young Leftist thugs encircled the ring of police, allowing nobody to get past them but shouting extra loudly their “anti-racist” slogans if any of us approached, and pushing and shoving if anyone dared to try and get past them. The police did nothing, which confused those who could not get past.  What instructions had the police received, to thwart what was a democratic right and to appear to be back-up for the .group which was there expressly to spoil the demonstration?

The people outside the ring of police and Leftists were a mixture of Reclaim people who were locked out of the demonstration, and their opponents. 

This situation, along with all the taunting by the obstructionists, made the Reclaim people feel betrayed and angry, but their anger was far outweighed by the self-righteous fury of the “anti-racists”. These divinely judgemental persons were inspired to give short – very short – lectures about the taking of Aboriginal land by white people, white people who were held to be the unique repository of evil. White people having taken Aboriginal land meant that white people had no right to demand anything at all, let alone “reclaim” Australia. And while the white obstructionists expressed lofty contempt, the people of – ah, “colour” – among them were apparently filled with special pride.

Danny Nalliah of the Rise Up Australia Party, the only speaker who actually got to speak, happily describes himself as “black”, having emigrated from Sri Lanka. The Reclaim Australia people were NOT racists, he said later, but unfortunately not to the mainstream press, which preferred to show the highly unpopular (and white) Pauline Hanson on their news segments about the rally.

I had an interesting discussion with an SBS reporter, who was a Southern Sudanese. I presumed he would understand non-Muslim opposition to any imposition of sharia law. Not so. During the course of our conversation, I was told that Muslims and Christians “share the same god”, that Sudanese Muslims and Christians got along famously and that all the trouble in the Sudan was created by the British, who enslaved the people and created division with their policy of “divide and rule”. And that John Newton (a slave trader who repented, stopped trading in slaves and wrote “Amazing Grace”) never repented at all but remained a slave trader. (I learned later that this fellow had lived in Khartoum for years, which presumably accounted for his dhimmi way of thinking…I know how Muslims in Khartoum talk about their history.)

The “anti-racists” started to push against us provocatively, and things became nasty. Close by, they grabbed an Australian flag and set it alight, and I heard that some of them spat on Reclaim people. A woman of 70 was injured when attacks landed people on the ground. It seemed the “anti-racists” might encircle us, and remembering last time, I wriggled free. By this time the police had done some pushing themselves, and divided the mixed group into two smaller mixed groups, and eventually the crowds dissipated.

Apparently there had been up to a thousand people who were unable to hear the speakers, and some of the speakers themselves could not get past the police. 

The “anti-racists” trumpeted their success in preventing the “racist” rally to the Press and to each other on social media. To them it was yet another day of triumph.

Not all of the “anti-racists” were thuggish and uncommunicative. 

Having escaped the melee, I caught up with friends and we engaged a couple of idealistic young kids in conversation for nearly half an hour about Islam, a topic about which they clearly knew nothing

I hope they left with some degree of enhanced curiosity to find out more about the religion they have been so keen to defend even as it continuously inspires countless atrocities, atrocities that the media, the government and their teachers – and their manipulative new friends, the Socialist Alliance and Socialist Alternative, who never tire of fomenting outrage among our young people – have taught them to dissociate from Islam.  

The outcomes of the thwarted demonstration in Melbourne were predictable due to precedents in the Western world.

The Reclaim people were disappointed and determined to hold further events. They were dismayed by the police emphasis on “keeping the peace” which amounted to an implicit decision to not “uphold the law” which would have entailed taking steps to prevent the “anti-racists” from forming their barricades. People had in many cases travelled long distances to hear speakers and publicly assert their opposition to sharia creep and in particular to the imposition of halal certification on nearly all Australian food products; a permit had been granted for the Reclaim rally but the second group, amazingly, had been also granted a permit. Why was this deliberately disruptive group given what clearly amounted to preferential treatment by the police?

The Socialist Alternative/Alliance/ “anti-racists” then crowed far and wide about the success of both their obstructionist tactics and their strategy of repeatedly – before, during and afterwards – damning the Reclaim people with accusations of “racism” against Muslims, and of extending this “racism” to Aborigines

The media took up the general thrust of the claims of the “anti-racists”. The charge of racism, unique of all the sins of the Western world in its degree of repugnance, was bandied about here, there and everywhere. Here is a particularly distasteful, self-righteous example, from a self-proclaimed “diehard romantic”: Julie Szego in The Age 

Muslims whined and moaned.

 Remember, Islam is a religion promoting acceptance, tolerance and diversity, just as Australia itself does, and Muslims find common ground with Aborigines regarding the intolerance and discrimination they suffer. (And by the way, in this video of lamentation you can learn the correct, Islamic way to say “halal”!) 

Their claims of victimhood were backed up by pundits such as Professor of Political Science, Greg Healy, who talked about Australia’s multicultural “heritage” (“experiment” might be a more honest word) and judged the rallies to indeed be “racist and anti-Muslim”. Academics, unlike flag-draped patriots, are not “ignorant”; not at all…

So all in all, everyone benefited from the rallies: the bragging Socialists, the pious journalists, the pontificating professors, the attention-seeking, self-pitying Muslims. Everyone but the Reclaim Australia people, that is. The “don’t paint Muslims with the same brush” brigade did a good job of demonising patriotic Australians as “white” (horrors!), as “racists”, and as “bigots”, and even got away with a thoroughly trumped-up charge of “hatred” of Aborigines.

 Antonia Newton, April 9 2015.