Zwingli’s Heirs Face New Tyranny

Ulrich Zwingli (1484-1531) the great Protestant reformer of the sixteenth century would have been impressed with the determination shown by his countryman this year.

Controversy arose with the refusal of two male students to shake hands with their female teachers, a Swiss custom.

When school authorities initially allowed two Syrian brothers to refuse to shake hands it sparked off a national uproar and an educational department ruling that they had to comply with Swiss custom or face fines of 5000 francs.

Further an application by that family to become Swiss nationals was put on hold.

It was a salutary lesson to the country’s 350,000 Muslims (in a population of eight million) that the Swiss were not there to fit in with them but they had an obligation to observe Swiss traditions and rules.

The Swiss instinctively realised this was more than a squabble over a cultural custom and tradition of politeness. At stake was whether the Swiss would be masters in their own house or whether alien traditions of Islam would prevail.

The Swiss argument stated that the public interest of Switzerland was in equality between the sexes and the maintenance of a courteous tradition between teacher and students.

Islamic organisations rarely accept with grace rulings that go against them and the ruling was described by them as ‘totalitarian’ in forbidding their commitments to Allah.

Given the deplorable and murderous treatment of religious minorities in Islamic Middle Eastern hell-holes the accusations of totalitarianism impresses very few westerners.

Indeed, the Swiss followed up the handshake ruling by refusing to grant citizenship rights to two Muslim girls, (12 and 14), who refused to comply with the school curriculum to swim with the boys.

“Whoever does not fulfil these conditions violates the law and therefore cannot be naturalised,” Stefan Wehrle, the president of the naturalisation committee said, in late June.

Meanwhile, in another case, a Muslim father of two girls was fined 4000 francs for the same reason.

Thus, the Swiss attitude is that failure to interact within the community is reason enough to deny Swiss citizenship. So just as Zwingli possessed a profound patriotic sentiment, that once cause him to inveigh heavily against the hiring out of soldiers to fight as mercenaries, the Swiss today, are determined not to have foreign ‘mercenaries’ fighting from within against them.

They are unconcerned about being called ‘xenophobes,’ or any other tripe words used by Islamophiles and leftist dogmatists, because Switzerland consistently applies the integration rules to everyone. Candidates for citizenship must prove they have assimilated into their local communities and respect local customs and traditions.

Initial decisions on such applications come from local towns, or villages, and if deemed suitable flow on to canton (state) and federal authorities for processing.

In 2014, an American, Irving Dunn, who had lived in Switzerland for almost 40 years, was rejected for citizenship because he could not name any Swiss friends or neighbouring villages.

Dunn did not deny the charge he was mainly after personal advantages that the Swiss citizenship offered him.

In contrast, Muslims regard it as their personal right to create, rather than integrate, new laws and conditions that do not fit in with their interpretation of the laws of the Koran and Hadith.

There is no rendering to Caesar whatsoever. Islam has consistently shown a propensity to initially insist on the creation of parallel laws, in any state where Muslims emigrate until they become numerically superior, then comes total domination.

The attempt, in 2011, by an immigrant Muslim group to have the white cross removed from the Swiss flag, representing the country’s Christian roots, was a particularly arrogant example, and one resisted by Switzerland.

The Swiss know just how influential the Reformation was in their own country and further abroad.

The Reformation profoundly affected politics, law, science and education. It democratised the Christian faith and allowed for individual conscience and our liberties today are a direct influence of the work and battles of the great reformers, like Zwingli. Reformation is conspicuously absent from Islam, an apostasy still rooted in the medieval past.

In November 2009 the Swiss held a referendum-and their influence on Section 128 of the Australian Constitution should be acknowledged here - in which citizens approved a ban on construction of minarets, a feature of Islamic architecture where the call to pray goes out.

This was not an attack on religion, as alleged by overheated Western dhimmis who ironically oppose school chaplains, prayer and indeed all things Christian, but rather an attempt to maintain national cohesiveness.

The initiative sponsored by the conservative Swiss People’s Party (SVP) said the minaret symbolised the growing self confidence and intolerance of the Muslim community.

The SVP described the minaret as an example of a ‘religious-political claim to dominance’ and one that threatened ‘the constitutional rights of others.’

A European Court twice concurred by dismissing Muslim protests against the ban.

It is hard to object to that when the increasingly fascist leader of Turkey, Erdogan, has bragged, “the mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful are our soldiers.” He didn’t stop there either, telling Muslim immigrants that “assimilation is a crime against humanity.”

Erdogan’s comments should not be an amber light to the West but rather a red one and should be heeded well by policy makers.

Erdogan remains the antithesis of everything the great Turkish leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (1881-1938) once stood for and the phony coup of recent times simply demonstrates the connivance and plotting of the current, despicable Turkish incumbent.

 Elsewhere Western voters are calling out for leadership and for the entry only of immigrants prepared to integrate fully.

Malcolm Turnbull’s response was to invite a hate preacher to visit Kirribilli House, for a post-Ramadan dinner, just before the 2016 election. This ‘first’ by an Australian PM was one of the reasons for the dramatic reduction of his numbers to the barest one seat majority at the ensuing poll.

In pandering to the most aggressive religion on the planet, and one of the smallest in Australia, Turnbull was simply seen as the new Neville Chamberlain.

When the Islamic apostle of hate was exposed by the media, Australia’s most politically correct chameleon then said it was “totally unacceptable” and blamed his office for not vetting the guest list!

Clearly Turnbull is no adherent to the Harry Truman School of where the buck stops and, unlike Zwingli, the Australian PM will never fall, defending the faith, customs and tradition of this nation.

History/Politics

South Africa’s Gallipoli

As Australians remembered the centenary of the darkest day in our history, 20 July 1916, when the fledgling nation sustained 5533, at Fromelles, there was also time to reflect on another dreadful toll taken on our South African Allies.

South Africa’s six days of torment ended on the day Australia’s began at a place called Delville Wood by name but rightly called Devil’s Wood or Nightmare Wood by character.

Like scenes from Dante’s Inferno that charnel house in France was where brave young South African soldiers, fought suffered and, in most cases, perished.

It was to the Springboks what Gallipoli was to the Aussie Diggers. It was South Africa’s baptism of fire.

On July 20 at the WA War Memorial in beautiful Kings Park, Perth the South Africans were remembered in ceremony of recognition long overdue to Australia’s comrades-in-arms.  The State Governor led those laying wreaths in remembrance of the fallen and a strong contingent of SA Border War veterans honoured their compatriots of an earlier era.

In six dreadful days of fighting, commencing on July 15, a century ago, some 3155 South Africans entered the gates of Hell, being ordered to take the wood at all costs against a German force of over 7000.

When relieved at 6pm on July 20, only 143 left the wood, including three officers. The following day as the remnant of the brigade reassembled the casualty figures made for grim reading: only 750 men and five officers were at the assembly, some 80 per cent having been impacted on. Of the 123 officers, 104 were killed, wounded or missing.

Outnumbered and attacked on three sides the South Africans were,  however, not out fought in what British historian, Basil Lidell Hart, described as the “bloodiest battle hell of 1916.”

The artillery shelling had destroyed the forest and the South Africans were under horrendous fire throughout with the wood reduced to a splintered wasteland apart from one tree that still survives to this day. For every second there seven shells reined in on the Springboks. For every one South African wounded four were killed.

The importance of Delville Wood for South Africa has changed over the years.

Initially, it was important because it produced a situation where the two white tribes, Afrikaners and English fought side by side, although the Dutch-Afrikaans speakers only represented 10-15 percent of the Union army they were the majority of the white race (60-40%).

The race question in that era pertained to the two white tribes, not the blacks, and there were potent historical reasons for bitterness between the two.

The destruction of two independent Boer Republics, Orange Free State and the South African Republic (Transvaal) had led to great bitterness, during the South African War of 1899-1902. British concentration camps had resulted in the death of some 28,000 of Boer women and children, in Lord Kitchener’s utter failure, as British Commander- in-Chief, to ensure  proper duty of care.

Boer resentment was shown at the start of World War 1 when two former Boer generals, Louis Botha and Jan Smuts, as PM and Deputy PM of the Union (1910-19), had to put down a rebellion by Afrikaner elements who wanted no part of that conflict.

As historian Bill Nasson noted Delville Wood was, in a fashion, an emulation of the unrelenting resistance of the bittereinders or die hards who refused to capitulate in the earlier Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902).

The great Boer general, Christiaan de Wet, had ‘found his empire bittereinder  equivalent in the pugnacity of Private Andrew Hoatson.’ The Natal private had remained at his Lewis gun post while the rest of his platoon perished.

For Botha, Smuts, and men like Deneys Reitz (a former Boer Commando), Delville Wood commemorated the beginnings of a national fighting spirit rather than just factional tribal loyalties but Nationalist pro-republicans  still remained scathing of the British Generals incompetence and callousness.

Smuts, as PM (1919-24), favoured South African soil for a commemoration of Delville Wood but eventually a remembrance place on the Somme, was chosen. Thus, like Galipolli for Australians, the foreign soil where blood was spilled became the shrine of remembrance for both fledgling nations.

The first Nationalist Prime Minister, was Barry Hertzog who succeeded Smuts after defeating him in the 1924 election. Some of his supporters urged him to refuse to participate in the opening of the Delville Wood Monument, in France (1926).

However, Hertzog determined he would attend, declaring that there was no room for division in honouring South Africa’s fallen, although he could hardly be called an appeaser to Empire sentiment.

The outbreak of the Second World War saw Smuts as Prime Minister for the second time due to divisions in the government about being involved in another global conflict. Smuts was eventually defeated, again, in 1948.

As in the Great War there had been an element of Afrikanerdom that was strongly pro-German and  Nasson notes, following the return of the National Party, (and the start of a rule that would last until 1994), Delville Wood ‘swiftly became converted to serve other visions of a national past.’

Linkage was made with the Voortrekkers of the 1830s and battles that established Christian civilization in the hinterland. Thus,the first post war PM, Daniel Malan, stopped at Delville Wood in the early in the 1950s to pay tribute to the future of democracy. Three decades earlier, as minor Interior Ministry official, he had been reprimanded for spurning a request for assistance from the Delville Wood Memorial Committee.

In moving from a tribute to Empire loyalists, (the Anglo-Afrikaners), the Nationalist attempt to incorporate the monument into a larger stage ran into problems caused by apartheid policies at home.

State president PW Botha paid a low-key visit to Delville Wood, in November 1986, as South Africa, became increasingly denigrated and isolated by a West that was no longer interested in honouring any contribution made by South Africa.

However, under the National Party’s long tenure in office, South Africans had seen action in Korea and later the Border War in Angola, the latter preventing 55,000 Cubans from marching to Windhoek SWA (now Namibia). But it was never enough for some. As Bill Nasson wrote, ‘Instead of acknowledging the loyalty of a nation which identified fully with the West and had sacrificed in wars for its causes, in pushing South Africa out in the cold, Western conduct had become shameful and dishonourable.’

Western liberals increasingly and unfairly saw everything through the prism of their own anti-apartheid cause célèbre.

On July 12 this year, the current RSA President, Jacob Zuma, visited Delville Wood to honour, in particular, the 260 fallen of the non-combatant SA Native Labour Corps.

Some 25,000 black South Africans served in that role and they are now fully honoured at the Delville Wood museum with no division between them and their white countrymen.

That, at least, was an irony of Delville Wood that attracted no criticism.

Politics

THE FISH AND CHIP SHOP LADY RETURNS

In an interview with Pauline Hanson, journalist Andrew Bolt revealed his children had been threatened by Islamists and two of his colleagues had also had to change addresses because of threats.

Where most people simply heard anguished concern from a father worried about his children, others, with more feverish brows, heard a dog whistle.

According to some overheated Facebook writer, Bolt’s concern for his children typified his performance as a ‘disgusting lowlife slag’ and an ‘elitist fascist’ who is now ‘bleating after 20 years of attacking low and middle class earners.’

This sums up the Left today, zero compassion, complete intolerance plus excess abuse for anyone with whom they disagree.

Bill Shorten has fostered this climate of hate with his low, abusive performance towards the moderate conservative senator, Cory Bernardi (Liberal SA). As the latter was walking past a press conference the Labor leader was giving in Parliament House, Bernardi was accused loudly of being a ‘homophobe’ simply because of his consistent support for traditional marriage. Perhaps Shorten is a homophile.

Meanwhile Hanson’s temerity to rise, phoenix like, from the ashes after a distant two year stint in the Australian House of Representatives (1996-98) has caused the usual facile derision from certain members of the lame-stream media.

They just don’t get it. Hanson is back in favour precisely because she is perceived as the little Aussie battler who is prepared to raise community concerns, on Islam, that a gutless media recoils from.

When the media attack Hanson large sections regard it as an attack on them. They know minority rights have replaced equal rights.

On July 7 some media nonentity, from the SMH, saw fit to write an article breathlessly informing the nation that Pauline had been (allegedly) caught drinking milk that was Halal. Oh really? Well, stop the press, wheel out the tumbril and let us be done with her!

The reality is that fatuous comments like that simply give more grist to the Hanson mill. As the Senator-elect has stated before Halal items should be clearly, not surreptitiously, marked on food items so that people should have the right to boycott such products in the super market. Indeeed, and that is a debate just waiting to be brought on by the feisty politician.

Elsewhere in cloud cuckoo land, students are being denied access to a computer lab in Queensland University of Technology because of their race. This was reserved for Aboriginal students and those turned away were further complained about them under the Racial Discrimination Act with the university complainant making a claim for almost $250,000 on the grounds of causing her ‘offence, embarrassment, humiliation and psychiatric injury’. One wonders how the students feel?

 Also to suggest that students wishing to access a study place somehow made that area ‘culturally unsafe’ belongs in the theatre of the absurd.

The Australian Human Rights Commission is a complete misnomer because it stands for pandering to minority rights over equal rights and would appear to have earned the same disrespect, among the general populace, as Roland Freisler’s Court did in another place and another time.

Under the odious section 18c of the Racial Discrimination Act people who may give offence to a group can be dealt with, upon complaint, before some latter day star chamber. Indeed Andrew Bolt was a victim of this pernicious clause in 2011, when marked to play the role of a latter day Thomas a’ Beckett.

Tony Abbott ‘squibbed’ his opportunity to ‘rid of us of this troublesome clause’  (apologies to Henry II for paraphrasing), and  the present, temporary, prime ministerial incumbent, Malcolm Turnbull, also has no intention of taking any ‘courageous decisions,’ on this front.

The arrogance of the Race Commissioner, Tim Soutphommasane, to invite Pauline Hanson to ‘meet with him to discuss her views,’ should be treated with the contempt it deserves. The nation has just had an election and a sizeable number of voters have given her endorsement.

Therefore, she does not need to go, cap-in-hand, to an overpaid bureaucrat, being paid in excess of $300,000 per annum, to gain his imprimatur.

Instead, he may well find himself being asked to attend her office to ‘please explain’ his offensive stretch in linking Brexit, Donald Trump and herself as manifestions of racism and xenophobia. She may also ask him about his deafening silence when left wing extremists denigrate people with conservative viewpoints; and further why, as journalist Jennifer Oriel notes, ‘there is the codification of racial inequality in discrimination law and affirmative action.’ As Oriel further said, ‘the codified bigotry of the Racial Discrimination Act and censorship of dissent under 18c offends the principal of equality and fairness that made the modern West.’ (The Australian 11 July, 2016 p.12)

Indeed, universal human rights have now been substituted for minority rights –except of course in South Africa where clearly, to coin a phrase, white lives do not matter, as the constant cultural and physical attacks on Afrikaners amply illustrate.

This is why people like Hanson and Bolt deserve attention and respect. They stand up. Pauline is not always the most elegant wordsmith; Andrew, fine writer that he is, is also a little clumsy in front of the camera but both have good instincts and the courage to take the constant blows rained on them by their more manic and maniac detractors.

For those who have constantly heaped odium and verbally battered the former fish shop proprietor understand that she also knows a thing or two about batter and may well be ready to use that experience again. Watch her grow in the job.

Footnote: Former Labor Prime Minister,Gough Whitlam (1916-2014) would have turned 100 today (11 July). Whitlam, like NSW Labor Premier Jack Lang (1932) was sacked and both died at 98.

Racing

OLD FIRM DELIVER FOR REG

Steven Parnham is always worth listening to and observing.

There is an innate decency to the eldest of three jockey sons of Carolyn and Neville Parnham and it was on display yesterday after he had triumphed in the Group 3 Strickland Stakes (2000m).

There was a quiet sense of achievement by the jockey after he landed the Fred Kersley trained galloper, Ihtsahymn, by one length  from Dubai Escapade and Zarantz, after coming from last on the turn.

Parnham’s reflective nature was understandable because he had just ended an 819 day drought for the quality grey Group I winner of the 2013 Kingston Town Classic.

Not only that but Parnham, as he said, in his post race presentation speech, was also considering Ihtsahymn’s owner, Reg Webb, recovering in hospital from heart surgery.

Webb would have loved the way Parnham was content to bowl along at the rear before bringing his charge home down the outside with a stirring finish that brushed aside the opposition like a charging member of the Lighthorse at Beersheba.

It was shades of the grey’s three year old season when he scored in such quality events as the WA Guineas, Kingston Town Classic and CB Cox Stakes all in the space of a month.

Then after winning the Melvista Stakes (late March 2014) the grey’s form fell away and an equally unsuccessful Victorian campaign followed.

Form can be an ephemeral thing in all sports, including racehorses and jockeys, and Parnham never oversells the quality moments because he too remembers the lows, such as race falls, that batter not only the body but also rider confidence.

But it was clear speaking with Parnham and noting his typical thoughtful and modest reactions he was savouring the return to form of a million dollar plus grey earner and the fact he had won for an ailing owner with whom he has had a long association. The summer carnival beckons and rich plums may again be on the cards. Fred Kersley dares to think grand things again too.

Parnham’s association with owner and trainer is clearly shown in the statistics. He has ridden Ihtsahymn in all eight wins (from 32 starts) for $1, 110,150 in prize money and has a similar impressive record aboard Webb’s favourite grey, Ask Me Nicely (now retired).

Of the eight races that galloper won in WA , (he also won two in the East before coming here), Parnham scored on the first six of them. ( Shaun O’Donnell was aboard for Ask Me Nicely’s inaugural victory in the WA Cup (3200m) and later the Boulder Cup).

So in a day of great racing, and a record breaking achievements by champion rider William Pike, the return to form of the ‘old firm,’ including the quiet decency of Steven Parnham, was also a highlight to savour.