Red Rag

He’s right… Not InstaPundit, the other bloke.

Professor Bunyip has the lowdown on the publishing history of a book I recently bought for a friend.

The right wing’s attacks on the ABC are making a big deal of Max Uechtritz’s (entirely accurate) comment to a media conference that “We now know for certain that only three things in life are certain — death, taxes and the fact the military are lying bastards.”

Take Tim Blair’s remark:

It was a mere throwaway line, Max insists, but the Bunyip’s powerful foreclaws have dug up the non-throwaway context in which Max’s remark was made.

So it wasn’t just a throwaway line. Uechtritz is a lying bastard.

Or is he? Today’s column in the Australian suggests that Blair has changed his tune:

It was a throwaway line, Uechtritz now insists, and, to be fair, it probably was. Alston, who this week published a dossier of the ABC’s bias during the war, is making too much of the implications he thinks are revealed by Uechtritz’s tough-guy remark.

What gives?

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter. Anyone who thinks the military never lie, stretch, distort or otherwise abuse the truth is an idiot.

UPDATE: Uechtritz’s response to the whole debate is excellent. His conclusion:

As US Secretary of State Colin Powell has pointed out: “The most effective means of ensuring the government’s accountability to the people is an aggressive, free, challenging, untrusting press.”

It is the media’s role to question what the military and their political masters say, to look at both sides, to seek the truth. At times that will inevitably make people from both sides a little uncomfortable.

It’s called democracy.

What’s this in today’s Australian?

In these times of blatant ABC bias and anti-Americanism, at least those decent young chaps at Triple J radio are doing the “right” thing to explain our Government’s attitude to Uncle Sam.

Just yesterday Carmen Spade was heard to say: “Coming up next, some Machine Gun Fellatio.” Our foreign policy in a nutshell, I’d say.

Adam Spencer
Newtown, NSW

Could that be the same Adam Spencer who hosts the Breakfast Show? Oh well, nothing like a bit of free publicity…

Alan managed to get another of his letters printed, too. Don’t you have a life?

When a Queensland doctoral candidate, Rollan McCleary, proposes that Jesus was gay, the reaction is not difficult to predict. Ken Parish scoffs, “Your higher ed tax dollars at work”; Alan Anderson is similarly disposed; Tony exclaims, “Jesus Christ!”; and Angela Bell reckons he studied in Queensland to avoid Jensen and Pell.

(Personally I think Brisbane ABC listeners were much more entertaining than the bloggers: “Why do people have to dismantle everything? Look what they did to Noddy!”; “Tell Rollan the moon is in Saturn, which tells me he is a pratt!”; Give me some 50,000 dollars and I too will prove that Mohammad was a robot and that Buddha was an alien, based on a weather dance and voodoo.”; “It explains why we say ahhh men!”)

What disappoints me is that so many people dismiss the suggestion out of hand — and I’m not talking about the flipside of ABC’s audience, such as Rodney’s “Jesus was not gay! He was God and God detests homosexuality.” Let’s not pretend he’s the first person to make this claim. In Chicago, a Methodist minister named Theodore Jennings Jr has just written a book called The Man Jesus Loved: Homoerotic Narratives From the New Testament:

Some theologians have argued for decades about the sexuality of Christ and a new book penned by a noted Methodist theologian says not only was Jesus gay, but he had a boyfriend, too.

… He writes that the “the disciple Jesus loved” who is mentioned in the Gospel of John was Jesus’ boyfriend. He also claims the centurion’s servant who was healed by Jesus actually was the centurion’s boyfriend and that Jesus did not denounce their relationship.

Even the astrology doesn’t necessarily preclude the study from being worthwhile — the Bible is filled with astrological references (such as the star in the east), and a knowledge of the astrological beliefs of the scriptures’ authors can help to extract useful knowledge from the text.

That’s not to say that I agree with the “gay Jesus” theory. Its interpretations of the biblical texts are challenged by other scholars. Robert A.J. Gagnon, for example, takes issue with Jennings’ reading of the Last Supper:

Gagnon says Jennings misunderstands ancient culture. Banquet guests would recline while eating, so the man ‘’lying close to the breast'’ was simply located next to Jesus, with no homoerotic implication.

I’ve heard that idea before (somebody was criticising a certain famous painting of the event), so Gagnon may be right.

Similarly, Jenny Stokes questions the etymological basis of McCleary’s work:

In Greek, the original language of the New Testament, there are four words for love — agape (spiritual, unconditional love), eros (erotic love), philia (love between friends) and storge (familial love.)

Stokes pointed out that all of the references to “the disciple whom Jesus loved” use the word “agape.”

On the other hand, Stokes also suggests that McCleary’s work is necessarily flawed because he is gay, so she has an obvious homophobic motivation to dismiss him.

At the end of the day, the kerfuffle is about the money, and I think it was probably worthwhile. Although it might not interest some people and it might sit uncomfortably with others, this is valuable research into a topic we don’t know nearly enough about: the historical Jesus.

Even if all of McCleary’s theories are disproved, we will have filled a gap in our collective knowledge — and that’s precisely the point.

Ken Parish: “I favour the horizontal filing system. It may look like a disordered mess, but there’s nothing I can’t find in a minute or less.” Me too.

The Australian has done a follow-up on allegations that Philip Ruddock gave a man a visa in exchange for a donation to the Liberal Party. I asked whether the man had donated to the Liberal Party, and the answer now is no… but.

According to the man who ran the fundraiser, “Mr Hbeich is a poor man with five children and no money. He doesn’t make donations.” If I was a poor man with five children and facing deportation, I might think it’s worth scraping together a few thousand dollars to stay in the country, even if it meant selling my car. Still, if we accept Karim Kisrwani’s word, we come to the next question — did anybody donate money on Mr Hbeich’s behalf?

Philip Ruddock’s response hasn’t cleared anything up, either. He said, “Having checked my recollection and the other minister’s recollection, neither of us have any knowledge of donations being made at that particular function.”

The other minister is Ross Cameron. I find it very hard to believe that he doesn’t remember a donation, given this piece of information:

Karim Kisrwani, the Harris Park travel agent who Labor alleges arranged the donation, yesterday said the dinner at Romeo’s restaurant raised $22,000 for Mr Cameron…

Somebody gives you $22 000 and you don’t remember it? Yeah, right.

Somebody needs to do some more digging.

UPDATE: I just got an email that indicates more digging is indeed being done. This issue will be around for a while, I suspect.

UPDATE: The Sydney Morning Herald has a little bit more information on the relationship between Ruddock, Kisrwani, Hbeich and the South Lebanese Army:

A close business associate of Mr Ruddock’s in the Lebanese community, Karim Kisrwani, an organiser of the fund-raiser, told the Herald the bishop had “asked me to write a letter to the minister” about Mr Hbeiche’s case.

… Questions have been raised about Mr Ruddock’s protection visa decisions before. His granting of protection visas to Lebanese, and his links to the Lebanese community, have sparked controversy.

Visas have been granted to people associated with the South Lebanese Army, which has been linked to torture of prisoners.

Bishop Darwish said last night Mr Hbeiche was a former member of the South Lebanese Army.

In October 2001 it emerged that Mr Ruddock intervened with immigration officials’ decisions to grant a visa to the Iraqi father of a NSW Liberal candidate.

Curiouser and curiouser…

I urge every blogger to support Amnesty International’s campaign to free Le Chi Quang:

Le Chi Quang is a 32-year-old law graduate who was arrested on 21 February 2002 at an Internet cafe in Ha Noi. An advocate of political reform, his arrest followed the publication on the Internet of a document he had written about the Vietnam/China border agreements. Until his trial he was detained at a prison camp where he was not allowed to see his family. …

On 8 November 2002 Le Chi Quang was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment. He is known to suffer from health problems and it is believed that he is not receiving the medical treatment he needs.

As bloggers, we regularly post political opinions to the internet. This is a freedom that we take for granted — others can not.

Please, e-defendLe Chi Quang.

Richard Alston’s dossier on alleged bias at the ABC is going to bring us an entertaining ride. Especially when you couple it with Ross Cameron’s subsequent comments. Lindsay Tanner thinks it adds up to a privatisation plot:

Yesterday Senator Alston said the ABC would be defunded if Parliament thinks it has lost the plot. Today influential Liberal MP, Ross Cameron, said on ABC radio that the ABC should be privatised or turned it into a subscriber service.

The agenda is clear. Not content with turning Medicare and Higher Education on their heads, John Howard now plans to end public funding of the ABC. John Howard is systematically destroying all of Australia’s key national institutions whilst he wallows in the luxuries of overseas hotels and Plasma TVs.

I don’t know about that, but I do think the dossier is a bit lacking. Even Uncle at ABC Watch thinks it’s looking a bit hard for bias on occasion:

… the cartoon is open to another interpretation. I’d be happy to see it as a comment on the childish immaturity of the aging peaceniks who wanted Iraq to be a quagmire.

That was my immediate reaction, too.

I had planned to go through the whole dossier and investigate each point, but I stopped after five because the whole thing appears to be a complete beat-up. At worst, it shows some sloppy journalism. Anyway, I’ve posted my responses below.

(also, you can add “the inability to close an <i> tag” to the list of the Minister for Information Technology’s website screw-ups)
Read the rest of this entry…

Finally, the US has admitted that Iraq may have posed no threat at all:

US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has acknowledged that Iraq may have destroyed all its chemical munitions and weapons of mass destruction before the US-led invasion of the country in March.

Which means Iraq would have done a far better job than America:

The Pentagon has finally discovered evidence of weapons of mass destruction - buried in a US Army base 80 kms from Washington DC.

Investigators at Fort Detrick in Maryland have unearthed more than 2,000 tons of hazardous waste including 100 vials of anthrax and other dangerous bacteria.

They are believed to be left over from a US germ warfare program that was ended in 1969.

The discovery comes as US forces in Iraq are struggling to find any firm evidence of Saddam Hussein’s suspected weapons of mass destruction that were the justification for toppling his regime.

The Pentagon said it had no record of the biological agents dumped at the US site, which is being excavated as part of a $US15 million ($A22.94 million) clean-up of the area.

What a sad irony.

Johnny’s living large. I love this line, though: “The fee did not include breakfast.”

Don’t take my word for it, listen to a Liberal supporter — Scott Wickstein thinks Philip Ruddock should be sacked, and notes a growing list of reasons why.

We may soon need to add another one:

The ALP has demanded to know whether the Immigration Minister used his discretion to grant permanent residency to a man who donated $3,000 to the Liberal Party.

The question sparked a fiery exchange in the Federal Parliament today.

Labor’s Laurie Ferguson told Parliament the man’s application for permanent residency had been rejected four times before, including twice by the Immigration Minister himself.

… Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock told Parliament the visa was granted for valid reasons and the function referred to was not a fundraiser.

Hansard is not yet available, but that answer seems a bit slippery. It doesn’t matter whether the dinner was a fundraiser, if the man made a $3000 donation to the Liberals. I don’t care where he handed you the cheque, Ruddock, it’s whether the cheque exists that counts.

Clarke and Dawe were spot-on with their impersonation of Ruddock. Let’s hope he doesn’t get away with it this time.

UPDATE [4:09pm]: After initially insisting that he “I don’t remember every case that’s been raised with me”, Ruddock’s memory has returned:

Mr Ruddock later said he did intervene in Mr Hbeich’s case.

“It is a matter in which I had been approached by the honourable member for Parramatta, Mr Ross Cameron, in fact I was approached by him before the function it is alleged that I attended,” he said.

Mr Ruddock said he attended the function with other members of parliament and another federal minister.

“I might say, having checked my recollection and the other minister’s recollection, neither of us have any knowledge of donations being made at that particular function,” he said.

“Let me make the further point … that I received no further approach by Mr Ross Cameron after the function.”

While this response is somewhat better than his initial “I have no idea”, one very important question remains.

Has Mr Hbeich ever donated to the Liberal party? If the answer is no, then the problem is solved. However, the fact that Ruddock hasn’t denied the man made a donation suggests that the answer is yes. In that case, the relationship between Cameron, Ruddock and Hbeich must be thoroughly trawled. It doesn’t look good.

I have an idea — let’s take that unspent billion dollars sitting in Defence’s bank accounts, and invest it in health and education…

Say what? “US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has acknowledged that Iraq may have destroyed all its chemical munitions and weapons of mass destruction before the US-led invasion of the country in March.” So… we didn’t really need the US-led invasion of the country in March, after all. I wonder when people will admit they were wrong…?

Courtesy Gianna, Mentalspace anagrams: A CAMEL SPENT, A CLAM PEN SET, MANACLE PETS, ANAL PC MEETS, ACE PALM NETS, MENACE SPLAT, ENCLASP MEAT, LACE ME PANTS, ACNE PALS MET, MALES NAP ETC…