The pot calling the kettle Green

Just when you think you’ve plumbed the depths of progressive hypocrisy, along comes Sarah Hanson-Young to lower the limbo bar of intellectual disingenuousness. The South Australian Greens Senator constitutes one of those political gifts that just keeps on giving.

Senator Hanson-Young wrote this week in The Age how “stunned” she was to see Tony Abbott attending that now-infamous anti-carbon tax rally at Parliament House. In her view, those over-the-top placards and slogans at that event constituted a proverbial smoking gun proving Abbott’s “political extremism”.

I make no brief for Pauline Hanson or any of the other fringe opportunists who hitched their wagon to the Canberra anti-carbon tax protest. But Senator Hanson-Young’s outrage is reminiscent of that scene in Casablanca where the deliciously corrupt Vichy Captain Renault orders the closure of Rick’s Café Américain.

Instructed by his Nazi overlords to shut down the Café, Renault declares that he’s “shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here!” And of course, at that very moment the Captain’s own winnings are delivered by the maître d.

If we apply Sarah Hanson-Young’s ‘guilt-by-association’ yardstick to her own political party, it becomes tarred by a toxic taint of its very own. After all, the Greens show no hesitation about collaborating with radical Leftist groups that explicitly call for armed insurrection to destroy Australian democracy.

Where was Sara Hanson-Young’s umbrage when Greens Senator Kerry Nettle shared the stage with representatives of the Socialist Alternative and Resistance Socialist Youth Organisation during anti-war street demonstrations of 2003? Where was her high dudgeon when her party colleagues spoke at protest rallies that featured placards featuring George Bush sporting a Hitler moustache and equating John Howard to an ape?

Nowhere, of course. In fact, I’d be “stunned” if Sarah Hanson-Young herself didn’t rub shoulders with more than a few Trots at some of those same anti-war demonstrations.

Of course, these screwball Marxist movements have no more chance of implementing their agenda than does the equally loopy Australian League of Rights. And that’s a very good thing. But it’s also beside the point.

Rather than mitigating the Greens’ ethical inconsistency, the insanity that plagues the polar opposites of our political spectrum actually worsens Bob Brown’s moral speciousness. The radical left and radical right are obnoxious in equal measure. There should be no excuse for politically selective double standards that provide tacit support to one form of wacky extremism while howling to the heavens about other forms of radical nuttery.

And it gets worse. There’s something pathetic about Marxist wannabe revolutionaries who talk the talk, but don’t have the testicular fortitude to walk the walk. But the Greens have also bestowed their explicit political stamp of approval on organisations that actually kill people.

It’s become routine in recent years to see Leftwing activists making common cause with jihadi Muslim advocates of genocide towards the Jewish state. In fact, during the 2006 war in Lebanon, Senator Nettle morphed into a full-fledged press agent for Hezbollah.

Never mind that Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah was quoted by Beirut’s Daily Star saying: “if they (the Jews) all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.” And never mind that the 2006 conflict was triggered by a Hezbollah raid across a clearly demarcated international border into Israeli territory. In the world according to the Australian Greens, Israel’s response was really an act of unprovoked Zionist aggression that had been “deliberately misrepresented as a defensive action”.

This bizarre ‘Red-Green’ coalition between the Left and jihadi Islam makes for the strangest of political bedfellows. One might logically assume that disputes over gender equality and sexual orientation would preclude collaboration between ultra-progressive Lefties and ultra-conservative Muslims. But logic is not in play here.

Hard Leftists and jihadi Islamists share a belief that the free market system must be destroyed in order to clear the way for the construction of their various utopias. And it turns out that a shared hatred of Israel and the United States provides more than enough common ground to unite even radical feminists and burka-clad Muslim fundamentalists.

And so we observe secular progressive gay rights activists marching arm-in-arm with Sharia law advocates to defend a Hamas regime in Gaza that made homosexuality a capital crime. We witness Leftwing film director Oliver Stone defending Iran’s brutally repressive theocracy with one breath, while assailing “Jewish domination of the media” with the next.

British novelist Martin Amis described this Leftwing affinity for Islamic radicalism in biting terms:

People of liberal sympathies, stupefied by relativism, have become the apologists for a creedal wave that is racist, misogynist, homophobic, imperialist, and genocidal. To put it another way, they are up the arse of those that want them dead.

So there’s a fair bit of pot-calling-the-kettle-black in Senator Hanson-Young’s professions of indignation over Abbott’s appearance at the no-carbon tax rally. If she really wants to start casting those sorts of aspersions by association, she has her work cut out for her much closer to home.


Ted Lapkin worked as a ministerial advisor to the federal Coalition and as communications director to a senior member of the Republican leadership in the US Congress.