Tags
Australian politics, Christians, Cory Bernardi, Eric Abbetz, George Christensen, Julie Bishop, Refugees, Syria, Tony Abbott
Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott
Well, a few days ago I saw a report that Slovakia, with its far right government, were going to take in a couple of hundred Syrian refugees. But they would only accept Christians. At the time I thought, what sort of warped, bigoted sense of humanity allows them to think that’s somehow OK? Today I got my answer… I heard Tony Abbott’s colleagues, Eric Abetz, George Christensen and Cory Bernardi say that Christians are the most persecuted people in the world and so Australia would take in 12,000 Syrian Christian refugees. I think these comments reveal the dark entrenched prejudice that exists within the Liberal Party against those who are not pious Christians like themselves. To deflect the obvious howls of derision that this announcement would surely deserve, Foreign Minister Julie Bishop added the fig leaf, saying we’d take in a few other ‘persecuted minorities’, such as Yazidis and Druze as well.
Every ethnic and religious group in Syria is persecuted by another group; no group is safe in that bombed out ruin of a country. So what Abetz and co are effectively saying is that they’d offer non-Muslim Syrians a lifeboat and basically let the rest drown.
So, even when Tony Abbott thinks he’s revealing his compassionate side by doing something good for humanity (apart from exporting the dirty little black rock, that is), he still somehow manages to turn it to his radical right wing Christian ideological agenda and cover his gesture in a big steaming turd.
Zak From Downunder 