Murder in the Name of Feminism’ would have been my title! The actual (and wiser) one was…
Violence is being normalised in the name of anti-violence
It must have seemed like a good idea at the time. Australia’s ABC has a debate programme called Q&A, which last week decided to have an all feminist panel and moderator. It went badly wrong, to the extent that the programme has now been pulled from all of ABC’s platforms and is the subject of an investigation.
Among the panelists, who were all incredibly ‘woke’, was Egyptian-American journalist Mona Eltahawy. She was asked a question about when aggression and violence might be justified and her answer was one of the most breathtakingly shocking I have ever heard.
“How many rapists must we kill? Not the state, because I disagree with the death penalty and I want to get rid of incarceration. I want women themselves…As a woman, I’m asking: How many rapists must we kill until men stop raping us?”
The host Fran Kelly joked “them’s fighting words” and the panel went on to discuss murdering men, without any pushback or challenge.
The rest of the show was not much better. For example, Aboriginal screenwriter Nayuka Gorrie said that violence was ok in the context of the oppression of Aboriginal people. She declared: “I wonder what kind of tipping point in Australia is going to be, when people start burning stuff – I look forward to it.”
This programme is indicative of the spiral that much of Western society is headed into and there are several lessons to learn from it:
1) Violence is being normalised in the name of anti-violence
To be honest, I used to associate violence with right-wing skinhead thugs. The left-wing position, in the West at least, seemed much more pacifist and anti-violence. But the days of “all we are saying is give peace a chance” have long gone. Today it is groups like Antifa and some elements of Climate Extinction who are offering violence and destruction of property as the solution.
If you want to see hatred, go to an anti-hate rally! The notion of people spewing out hatred in the name of love and tolerance is as Orwellian as you can get. And all of it is done without a trace of self-awareness.
Many are complaining about the cesspit that social media has become. Not Mona Eltawahay. She boasted about using social media to attack people and tell them where to go. ABC justified the programme by stating that the views were “intended to be challenging”. The problem is that they did not permit these “challenging views” advocating murder and violence to be challenged.
In a statement they declared: “The ABC acknowledges that the program was provocative in regard to the language used and some of the views presented.” And yet one suspects that the ABC would not permit other “provocative” views to be aired.
2) Irrationality is predominant
That’s why Mona could state her politically correct opinion that she was against the death penalty while at the same time arguing for women to be able to act as judge, jury and executioner in implementing their own death penalty. Rapists are to be murdered without any due process of law. They want the State involved in everything – except justice! There was nothing rational about what Mona said – and no one seemed to care. They heard the buzzwords and the stories, and that was enough.
Can you imagine the fuss if it was a man who was advocating murder against women?! The police, media and politicians would have been all over it. But apparently this type of language and the concepts behind it are to be taken seriously.
3) Ideology is driving people mad
Mona sagely told us that “words like civility, unity, respectability and decorum” were invented by “white men who invented them for white men, not women, or people of colour or gender diverse”.
I’m not surprised that someone used this bizarre theory. When I was at university many moons ago, I once had a flour bomb thrown at me by a feminist yelling “the nuclear bomb is a phallic symbol – the ultimate sign of male aggression”! Back in those days, aggression and violence were not considered a desirable quality.
But what really shocked me was the way that the other panellists, host and audience just left unchallenged this mangling of both the English language and reasonable morality.
The Christian Alternative
Let’s start with a basic rule of Christian morality – the 6th commandment – ‘you shall not murder’. Then let’s bring in the Christian ideas of justice and morality in the State. Rapists are to be punished – but by due process and law – not by revenge killings. But Christianity goes way beyond that. We are told to love our enemies, to forgive and to avoid seeking personal revenge. Because we believe God is just we know that there will come a day when all evils are justly judged. We also know that in this world seeking vengeance only creates more evil. Violence breeds violence.
The bottom line is that we have a choice, one that ABC, in its commitment to diversity, did not permit its viewers to see. On the one hand we can choose the hatred, bitterness, irrationality and violence of extremists like Mona Eltahaway. Or we can follow the way of Christ – the way of love, forgiveness and peace. Our society is coming to that crossroad…
That is a very worrying video.
Look at it this way: it’s certainly instructive to know that this sort of thinking is out there, and maybe one wouldn’t have heard about it if that panel had been balanced with conflicting opinions. Mona might not have felt free to express her view — if she agreed to take part at all — and she and others who think that way would be driven underground.
But when it comes to Christian morality, let’s remember that under that code, there wouldn’t be rape to begin with, because, like loving your enemies and praying for those who abuse you, refusing to be driven by your sexual desire is also part of denying the flesh. She should be embracing Jesus and pointing others to Him, rather than advocating, as you suggest, extra-judicial trial, judgment and execution.
Setting aside for a moment the very cogent societal point you’ve made here, I’ll just share the thing I couldn’t stop thinking throughout the article: The answer to her question, “How many rapists must we kill until men stop raping us,” is that you could stoop to violence and kill them all, but it would never eradicate rape (or any other sinful act).
I’m studying Genesis 1-11 with my ladies right now, and in that text, God answered her question. In the story of the Flood, God killed every rapist, every murderer, every adulterer, every thief, every power-hungry libertine of every sort on the earth. In this story, He killed them ALL. Murder came back. Adultery came back. Theft came back. Debauchery and debasement of every kind…came back. Killing the offender does not kill the offense, and it does not kill the human capacity to commit the same evil again in the future.
Humanity is broken. The world is a broken, corrupted place groaning for its Creator. Human beings have proverbially consumed knowledge of both good and evil, and our nature was bent away from God before we were conceived. Violence is merely one symptom of that. Responding to violence with more violence is another symptom. Selfishness, all of the “isms” we suffer from and inflict upon others, and all of the evil in the world that we see…are symptoms of this brokenness. It is very simple. It isn’t easy and it isn’t neat, but it is very simple.
Not only was this woman’s question sinful and a reflection of the society in which we now find ourselves, but it also betrays a stunning lack of this simple understanding. You could kill them all–every rapist on earth today–and the world will simply produce more of them. Until the Creator returns and makes it right again, we will never eradicate poverty, violence, inequality, disease, famine, and on and on.
That this woman does not understand that is the problem. She needs Jesus.
Rape is not now, never was, and will never be about sex or gender. Rape is about power. People who feel frustrated by their lack of power will always grasp for ways to regain control and claim some brand of power over those who make them feel powerless. People who are addicted to being powerful will always grasp for ways to exert that power to control other people. Rape is one of those methods of power-grabbing and control. It will never leave. It will never be gone.
The death penalty has been handed out for millennia by every society for a variety of crimes, and none of those crimes are extinct. Murder still happens. Theft still happens. Adultery still happens. Rape…still happens.
So her question isn’t the problem. The lack of sight her question betrays is the problem. All these centuries on, and humanity still cannot see it. It is not just the current flow of social conversation or the latest iteration of weaponized, politicized feminism. It is a problem of understanding. The problem this woman wishes to address is only a symptom, and she does not have eyes to see it.
The disease is that we turned away from God, and the solution is not vengeance, but the circumcision of heart that is only found in turning back to Him.
“To be honest, I used to associate violence with right-wing skinhead thugs. The left-wing position, in the West at least, seemed much more pacifist and anti-violence.”
Yes, I guess I’d be classified as a somewhat conservative Christian pacifist.
The Left seems to have become authoritarian first (with the rise of political correctness and, in the church culture, the rise of Liberal Authoritarian leaders like Archbishop Peter Carnley in Perth, and Archbishop Aspinall, Bishop Jonathan Holland and Dean Jeannette Jamieson in Brisbane as examples – compare that to the decentralused approach of conservative dioceses like Sydney and Tassie).
Now, as you note, we are seeing increased advocacy of violence with Antifa seemingly as bad as the Nazis they oppose. I guess it has always been there though from Stalin and other Communists to Trade Union thugs, to other militant Leftists like Black Panthers, extreme fringes of the environmental movement, etc.
The advocacy of racial violence by the Aboriginal woman is the most troubling part to me.
For context on Aboriginal/white Australian debates, this Wikipedia article is actually quite a good introduction for international readers:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_wars
The ABC has been increasingly bias fir a long time: every morning the Just In news page features at least one pro-feminist/anti-male or transgender or pro-gay or anti-Christian story with no counterbalance opposing view. I’ll be glad if this backlash leads to a good hard look at it and things change but I am not hopeful at this stage as the culture seems entrenched. SBS
(also partially taxpayer-funded) is just as bad, unfortunately, nowadays.
I posted this video by the right-wing polemicist Andrew Bolt about the Q&A article on Quantum 67 but, for anyone interested in the topic who did not see it, here it is again:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NgGMEHRVN00
I don’t normally like Bolt but he is spot-on here. Note he is a Rupert Murdoch mouthpiece though so he has a hidden agenda in undermining a rival network. The ABC have certainly given him a lot of ammunition in this case though. His criticism is absolutely justified here and shows how low the ABC has sunk and its potentially dangerous role in stirring up racial and gender-based hatred.
To be fair to the ABC, though, they do do a good job in certain circumstances. For instances, they recently ran a series of articles exposing horrific alleged war crimes against civilians by the Australian military in Afghanistan. We might not have heard about these incidents without the ABC journalists’ investigative work.
This is the kind of work the ABC does when it is at its best, exposing violence instead of inciting it(!)
A litany of Australian war crime allegations:
https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2019-10-16/australian-special-forces-shot-unarmed-afghans-claim-reports/11598370?pfmredir=sm
https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2017-07-10/elite-australian-soldiers-accused-of-covering-up-killing-of-boy/8466612
https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2017-07-11/killings-of-unarmed-afghans-by-australian-special-forces/8466642
https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2017-07-11/defence-inquiry-investigating-killing-of-taliban-detainee-in-hut/8616602
https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2017-07-11/unarmed-men,-children-among-casualties-of-elite-forces/8424944
https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2017-07-11/afghan-files-shed-light-on-notorious-severed-hands-case/8496654
https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2019-08-06/investigators-travel-to-aghanistan-over-alleged-war-crimes/11383212
https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-20/afp-travels-to-afghanistan-to-investigate-alleged-war-crimes/11527426?pfmredir=sm
This was Americans in Iraq but Australians were involved here too:
https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2005-11-16/us-confirms-white-phosphorus-use-in-fallujah/742226?pfmredir=sm
If only the ABC would condemn identity politics-based leftist violence as well as these horrific alleged crimes by the military.
ABC also reporting now on the RAAF’s historical violation of Geneva protocol by stockpiling mustard gas in WW2:
https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2019-12-09/war-diary-appears-to-confirm-poison-gas-stash/11776148
The ABC truly is the best and worst of broadcasters. Exposing our military’s murkiness and also by providing much needed services to rural Australians with shows like Landline, yet also revelling in identity politics and showing hostility to all but the most liberal fringes of Christianity.
By the way, speaking of violence from the Left and Aboriginal militancy, in the 1980s, various Leftists, including the Tasmanian Aboriginal activist Michael Mansell, sought help from the Gaddafi regime:
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/left-wingers-change-their-tune-on-gaddafis-regime/news-story/964024ce34efa378c6a4450dbae93a76
http://www.abc.net.au/tv/messagestick/stories/s1104740.htm
Sorry, the second link was broken. Here is an archived copy:
https://web.archive.org/web/20110621222414/http://www.abc.net.au/tv/messagestick/stories/s1104740.htm
Also:
“It was revealed that in Libya, Mr Mansell attempted to have his Tasmanian organisation join Muammar al-Gaddafi’s Mathaba group, which at the time was a Libyan-funded network of 87 militias and insurgency groups worldwide, including the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), which was supplied with arms by Libya.”
Source: https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090826135146AAjCsMF
Whoops – it looks like one of my comments disappeared but I was talking about previous Leftist violence and Aboriginal militantism, including the Tasmanian Aboriginal activist Michael Mansell’s notorious attempt to seek aid from Gaddafi in the 1980s:
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/left-wingers-change-their-tune-on-gaddafis-regime/news-story/964024ce34efa378c6a4450dbae93a76
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/subscribe/news/1/?sourceCode=TAWEB_MRE170_a&dest=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theaustralian.com.au%2Fnational-affairs%2Fleft-wingers-change-their-tune-on-gaddafis-regime%2Fnews-story%2F964024ce34efa378c6a4450dbae93a76&memtype=anonymous&mode=premium&nk=59d20298705ca47205a9e2334d65de40-1573624646
The Australian military officer-turned-senator, Jim Molan, led the assault on Fallujah:
https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2018-02-06/greens-attack-new-liberal-senator-jim-molan-over-iraq-record/9401416?pfmredir=sm
Yes, the ABC has done a wonderful job exposing these war crimes.
The ANZACs / Australian Army have always been hooligans. They were little better than hooligans in World War One and committed outright war crimes, such as massacring Japanese prisoners, in World War Two. Evidence:
https://theconversation.com/anzacs-behaving-badly-scott-mcintyre-and-contested-history-40955
Fallujah aside, the RAAF war crimes have included the incendiary bombing of Dresden and the blasphemously-named ‘Operation Gomorrah’ (the destruction of Hamburg) in Workd War Two. Not very nice people, to put it very mildly.
Back on topic, I am still seething about the last week’s Q & A though. Surely the media watchdog can take some action; either demand the program is suspended or fine the ABC?
As for that Aboriginal panellist, wouldn’t her call for racial violence contravene the Racial Vilification Act? She is blatantly attempting to incite violence against White Australians. Can someone sue her for her inflammatory, hate-filled and frankly immature comments? She also bore false witness against White Australians in her statements, though this seems to have become de rigeur for *some* sections of the Aboriginal community in recent decades with their misleading claims about the so-called ‘stolen generation’ unfortunately.
I agree with the other comments about ABC (and SBS)/ bias in general in favour of feminism and other identity politics causes. As you note, this blatant bias undoes all the genuine good the ABC has done in reporting on war crimes, clergy child abuse and other scandals down the years that would otherwise have remained hidden and hands a huge amount if ammunition to the broadcaster’s opponents.
The crucial aspect of that Q & A is simply that the Left, as represented by these ugly, White – hating, men – abhorring malevolents, does not wish for Equality.
Revenge, retribution and the subjugation are the essential desiderata.