En Passant

We have a responsibility to see that Wilders’ racist and extreme right wing views do not pass unchallenged. Public protests make it clear that anti-racists will have our views heard. We ask all anti-racists to support and attend protests wherever he is organised to appear. He is speaking at the Roma Function Centre, 167 Northumberland St, Liverpool at 7 pm tonight (Friday 22 February). The protest against this racist is there from 6 pm to 8 pm.

Visiting far right politician Geert Wilders has been met with lively protests at his first speaking engagement in Australia writes Louise O’Shea in Socialist Alternative. Over 100 people gathered in a far outer suburb of Melbourne to picket his meeting and protest his message of hate. Protesting has helped relegate Wilders to the speaking tour wilderness, so let there be more of it. It is a victory for Muslims and anti-racists everywhere.

There has been almost no discussion of the context for these protests – decades of U.S. imperialist intervention in the Muslim region. In reality, the film has become a symbol of the contempt with which the U.S. government holds the people of the Middle East and North Africa.

The orgy of reaction in response to the protest confirms once again the systemic racism of Australian society.

I am looking forward to riot police raiding Alan Jones’ office, beating the shit out of him and charging him with incitement to violence for his comments about putting the Prime Minister in a chaff bag and dumping her at sea. Oh, he’s white isn’t he and not a Muslim. And he’s powerful. All the things the Muslim demonstrators aren’t. Maybe, just maybe, that explains the difference in treatment?

As well as unleashing more Islamophobia and racism across the country, the police attack on Muslim demonstrators in Sydney will be used as cover for the further brutalisation by the O’Farrell Government of lives across New South Wales.

We need to build a political movement that fights against racism and the other forms of oppression, including religious repression, which flows from capitalism itself. That means building a fight against the economic exploitation at the heart of the system and joining with all those who resist capitalism in its many manifestations, economic, political and social.

The Refugee Action Committee has called a demonstration in support of refugees and against the Pacific Solution for Saturday 25 August at 12.30pm, Garema Place in Canberra. Be there to support asylum seekers and to oppose locking them up in mental illness factories indefinitely offshore.

We chanted on the rally that we want marriage equality now. Not the second class citizenship that is civil unions but full marriage equality. Speaker after speaker argued for it. Over to you to deliver, ACT Greens, not in some distant future but this week.

We need more and bigger demonstrations for Aboriginal sovereignty and land rights to make the point that they are central to addressing Aboriginal genocide and dispossession. It is time for a treaty.

It is time for a real fight back to shake the systemic racism of Australian capitalism to its core.

‘If you don’t fight you lose.’

To end the criminal refugee policies of our one percent we must build bigger and bigger demonstrations to force Labor to treat asylum seekers humanely and end the death trip it forces them into.