Emergency: Pauline Hanson's interview with "Tommy Robinson" is deadly dangerous

Australians must watch the news coming out of the UK where terror threats and violent attacks on Muslims are becoming a daily news feature. We must not let the Gina Machine take us there.

I do not know that Gina Rinehart and the face of her grab for power over Australia, Pauline Hanson, understand that their project is being harnessed to make Australia as Islamophobic as bloodied Britain.

There has been a stream of news stories out of Britain over the last week of young men planning terrorist attacks, an arrest of 12 far right men, and a rash of violent attacks including murders of Muslims.

Decades of work by the Islamophobia Network has done unspeakable damage to “social cohesion” in the UK. Australia has not been directly integrated into that Network until recently. We must be aware of the awful danger of allowing the One Nation/Advance Islamophobia activity to run unchecked.

The Islamophobia Industry can probably date its birth to Bibi Netanyahu’s Jonathan Institute conference in Washington DC in 1984 where he began the project of turning some Middle Eastern people’s reactions to Western borders imposed on the region for Western oil theft, with all its ramifications in the propping up of tyrants, intelligence activity and military interventions, into a unique phenomenon of “Islamic terrorism.” The transition from territorial empires to economic empires was brutal for the people of the region but resistance had to be coded as a diseased function in the culture.

That became the neocon project, a powerful aspect of the Islamophobia Industry, for limiting the impact of decolonialisation, for anticommunism, for oil, for geopolitical power battles and for Israel.

Katherine Stewart, in her books Power Worshippers and Money, Lies and God, writes about the conscious targeting of Britain (and Europe) as power centres worth the time of American “Christian” activists. In her case, it is theocrats. It is probably a similar dynamic that has kept the Australian population’s beliefs seeming largely insignificant to the transatlantic Islamophobia Network until recently. Of course both Tony Abbott and Alexander Downer took the vile and criminal Australian asylum seeker policy platform to Britain and beyond, so the Byline Times’ framing of my article is justified in the long picture. A Muslim commentator suggested to me that Australia’s Islamophobia had become unacceptable in public after the Christchurch terrorist attack on Mosques, and that our Islamophobia had been much less amplified since then. The years since 7/10 have seen the old license retaken by the experienced “Western Civilisationist” crusaders in Australia.

Rupert Murdoch’s platforms had been our main connection to the official outlets of the Islamophobia Network since 9/11 at least. Daniel Pipes of the toxic Middle East Forum has been platformed in The Australian regularly since then.

The Advance conference this year signalled a linking in of Australia to the official Islamophobia Network. One speaker came from an official, grotesque US body. Another represented Steve Bannon’s project to unify the West in an extreme Right ethnostate struggle. Steve Bannon is associated with the US Council for National Policy: the Christian coercives’ 50 year project to make the US both “free market” and governed by their fringe definition of God’s will.

The various aspects of what I have termed the Gina Machine are signalling their intent to become crusaders against Australia’s Muslim population.

James Ashby, Hanson’s long term sidekick, signalled his intent to go to war on Muslim immigration (and Net Zero) in January. One Nation’s funding and direction by Gina Rinehart has been made obvious.

The Liberal Party’s politicians and its president Tony Abbott have all flagged their intent to single out Muslim immigration as a threat to Australia. Rinehart has been a major donor to the Liberal Party.

The IPA and the CIS, as the two most prominent Atlas junktanks, are firmly part of the war for “Christian” “Civilisation” as inherent to Australia. See the CIS’s Culture, Prosperity and Civil Society program’s content for its obsession with Israel and “antisemitism” (meaning anti-genocidal speech that says Jewish and Muslim lives and dignity are of equal worth). Gina Rinehart is the only known recent donor of the IPA.

Advance, the astroturf body funded heavily by Rinehart’s Hancock, was cofounded by the fake peak body the Australian Jewish Association’s David Adler. Jillian Segal’s husband is an Advance donor. The IPA’s Gideon Rozner moved from that Atlas partner to the committee of the AJA in February 2023. It is not just the AJA’s (and EJAC) affiliations that might be steering Advance’s agenda. Co-founder Maurice Newman has written against Muslims in The Australian and The Spectator. Tony Abbott has been an “advisor” to the body since founding.

Columnist Gemma Tognini recently contributed a vile column to The Australian blurring the line between Muslim identity and a purportedly unprovoked history of terrorism.

Gina Rinehart has recently invested in a substantial portion of Channel 7. The Stokes family (supporters of BRS) have a continuing role on the board. I do not know Kerry Stokes’s son’s ideology, but ask the question. The ABC has revealed that 7’s Spotlight set up the interview with “Robinson.” This Double Down News video shows “Tommy Robinson’s” integration into the Islamophobia Network since at least 2009. [Edit to add this paragraph.]

The grassroots? activists supporting One Nation, being funnelled to the mainstream by people such as Karl Stefanovic, are Islamophobic.

Australian Christian theocrats boasted “Tommy Robinson”’s rogue “bishop” at their recent conference. They anointed One Nation as their path to imposing coercive Christianity on Australian governments.

Australia stands to lose much if we allow ourselves to be propagandised to believe the “counter jihad” lies of the Islamophobia Network. It is urgent that we work out how to isolate their toxic messaging rather than allowing the bigotry to spread.

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A long explanation of Australia’s emerging connections to the Islamophobia Network here. Read Alt Reich. Read The Islamophobia Industry. Read Peter Oborne’s longer history of Islamophobic propaganda.