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Cricket & Iraq – Exposing
Politically-Correct Australian Racism

By Gideon Polya

06 January, 2006
Countercurrents.org

Apart from record temperatures, huge bushfires and the death of a media mogul, major stories in Australian media in the current holiday season have been beach-side racist race riots, racial taunting of the South African cricketers touring Australia and Japanese whaling in the Southern Ocean. The latter stories expose White Australian racism in different ways, namely: the racism of thousands of white thugs beating up Asians and Muslims at Sydney beaches; the racism of some loutish cricket fans at the major venues of Perth, Melbourne and Sydney; and the national upset over the Japanese killing of 1,000 whales each year – while Australian mainstream media resolutely refuse to report the UNICEF (2006) estimates of 0.5 MILLION under-5 infant deaths each year in Coalition-occupied Iraq and Afghanistan in gross contravention of the Geneva Conventions.

At the First Test in Perth, South African cricketers were continually abused by white racists using epithets such as "kaffir" and "kaffir boetie"; Police did nothing because they did not know what these words meant or implied (they are, respectively, abusive terms for “indigenous Africans” and “whites friendly with indigenous Africans”).

At the Second Test in Melbourne just after Christmas, authorities were warned but the same racist abuse was hurled at South African cricketers.

Now the Third Test in Sydney has been interrupted because of racist, white thugs racially abusing South African cricketers (see: http://www.theage.com.au/news/cricket/racial-abuse-interrupts-test-match/2006/01/04/1136050497196.html).

Australia has a "public face" of political correctness and non-racism and woe betide any public figure who indulges in explicit racism - indeed in at least one jurisdiction (Victoria) religious or racial bigotry is illegal. Indeed, “political correctness” is precisely why there has been front page coverage of such cricket fan racism.

Nevertheless, there is huge racism in Australia as revealed by the following items: pre-9/11 hysteria over Asian Muslim refugees (thousands of refugee adults and children have been incarcerated without charge or trial in desert concentration camps); post-9/11 burning down of a Brisbane mosque, general Islamophobia, hysterical war mongering and criminal complicity in the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan; and, most recently, the ugly anti-Muslim beach-side riots by thousands of racist white thugs.

Scratch the surface in Australia you will encounter the most extraordinary, confidential "implicit" racism and bigotry from "ordinary people", people who may well have good non-European or Muslim-origin friends and who wouldn't dream of explicitly supporting or indulging in racist abuse or racial discrimination. Even so-called “moderate” Muslims, terrified of being labelled “un-Australian”, have got into the act, publicly linking their more orthodox confreres with terrorist criminals and simultaneously IGNORING horrendous Coalition crimes against utterly innocent Muslim children and mothers.

Racism has always been there in White Australia which has had an appalling history of mass murder, dispossession and discrimination against non-Europeans: genocide of the Australian aborigines through violence and disease (between 1788 and 1900 the indigenous population dropped from about 1 million to 0.1 million); 19th century genocide of Pacific Islanders through violence, disease and slavery (about 1 million died); continuing participation in 2 centuries of horrendous, racist Anglo-American wars throughout the world (e.g. 1.0 million excess Korean deaths in the Korean War and 13.1 million excess Indo-Chinese deaths during the Indo-China War) ; the White Australia Policy (1901-1973); support for Apartheid; and removal of tens of thousands of aboriginal children from their mothers (this ostensibly ceasing in about 1970).

In the last decade or so, White Australia has repeatedly endorsed: the Gulf and Sanctions War against Iraq (1.8 million excess deaths); imprisonment without charge of thousands of adult and child Asian Muslim refugees); a "politically correct", "dog-whistling" (i.e. surreptitious), racist, mainstream political agenda; criminal invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan (post-invasion excess deaths and under-5 infant deaths now totalling 1.7 million and 2.1 million, respectively, in gross contravention of the Geneva Conventions); intrinsically racist and anti-Muslim Anti-Terror Laws that violate major international human rights conventions; and a "New" White Australia Policy that (like the "old" White Australia Policy) secretly discriminates against non-Europeans by "executive interpretation" of "departmental regulations".

However PROOF of the uncompromising depth and extent of entrenched “politically correct racism” in White Australia is provided by the following appalling example. The same mainstream media that righteously condemn racist cricket match abuse (“Sydney’s shame”) and decry the Japanese slaughter of 1,000 whales each year, simply WILL NOT REPORT horrendous, Australia-complicit Coalition mass murder and mass infanticide in US-Occupied Iraq and Afghanistan.

According to the latest UNICEF report (January 2006), in 2004 the under-5 infant mortality was 122,000 in Occupied Iraq, 359,000 in Occupied Afghanistan and 1,000 in the occupying country Australia (noting that in 2004 the populations of these countries were 28.1 million, 28.6 million and 19.9 million, respectively)(see: http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/index.html).

About 1,300 under-5 year old infants will have died in Occupied Iraq and Afghanistan on Christmas Day alone, 0.5 million will die in the coming year and 1.7 million have died post-invasion due to non-provision by the US-led Coalition of life-preserving requisites demanded by the Geneva Conventions (see: http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/92.htm).

A detailed, formal complaint has been sent to the International Criminal Court charging the Coalition with war crimes in Occupied Iraq and Afghanistan (see Countercurrents, 21 December 2005) (http://www.countercurrents.org/us-polya211205.htm).

However the cowardly, unethical, holocaust-denying and racist mainstream mass media of racist White Australia will simply NOT REPORT these Australia-complicit Coalition war crimes. Indeed Anglo-American mainstream media in general will simply NOT report horrendous Coalition war crimes against civilians (leading one to ask: should Asian or Muslim overseas students study in Australia or other Coalition countries complicit in the deliberate, continuing mass murder of Asian and Muslim infants?)

Decent people must see past the smiling face of White Australian “spin” and comprehend the awful reality of entrenched “politically correct racism”, war criminality and holocaust-denial in White Australia.


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