Posted by
Dawnsblood on Tuesday, October 03, 2006 8:16:24 PM
PM John Howard just isn't gonna
take it:
In a speech delivered last night for the 50th anniversary of
the conservative magazine Quadrant, Mr Howard said the left had a
history of denigrating the nation and was now doing the same with the
war in Iraq, describing Islamic terrorism as the new tyranny.
He
said Australian universities were still breeding leftists and described
pro-communists of decades past as “ideological barrackers for regimes
of oppression opposed to Australia and its interests”, Fairfax reports
today.
Further from the transcript:
In the '60s and '70s, it largely gave way to a new Left
counterculture, where again Quadrant served as a beacon of free and
sceptical thought against fashionable leftist views on social, foreign
policy and economic issues. In the eyes of the new Left, the Cold War
became a struggle defined by moral equivalence, where the Soviet bloc
and the American-led West were equally to blame, each possessing their
own dominating ideologies. It became the height of intellectual
sophistication to believe that people in the West were no less
oppressed than people under the yoke of communist dictatorship.
In time, the world would luckily see the emergence of three
remarkable individuals whose moral clarity punctured such nonsense:
Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II. All of us here
tonight owe a particular debt of gratitude to these three towering
figures of the late 20th century.
(Snip)
To those who want to portray the West as anti-Muslim, I would say
that it was not the Arab League who went to war in the '90s on behalf
of Muslim minorities in the Balkans. It was the governments of the US,
the UK and their NATO allies. Let me also remind people who talk as if
Iraq was some island of pro-Islamic tranquillity before 2003 that the
person who probably killed more Muslims in history is Saddam Hussein.
There are people who legitimately opposed the original action to
oust Saddam, but it remains an inconvenient truth that if countries
such as the US, the UK and Australia simply abandon the people of Iraq,
this would be a victory for the forces of terror and extremism.
This man gives one helluva speech!