ABC Q&A Feminist Panel Advocates Political Violence
The ABC’s Q&A program is, at its best, hard to consume for people living in reality. The panel is always 60%-plus left-wing, which includes the host for the episode.
To summarise how every show works, pre-approved audience questions are loaded with leftist dogma and all the panelists agree on what the right solutions are to all the world’s ills. Then they despair that the rest of the ignorant world can’t agree with them and implement their ideas.
Q&A was a program that already shattered any illusion the ABC didn’t have a left-wing bias. But last night’s Q&A Broadside festival special, featuring an all-feminist panel hosted by Fran Kelly in Melbourne, crossed the line. It advocated political violence unchallenged, with one panellist even suggesting a male genocide may be
The Broadside festival relieves taxpayer-funds from both the federal and Victorian state governments, taking place in Melbourne’s Town Hall at loyal ratepayers’ expensive, which is a whole other problematic matter in itself.
The announcement of festival speaker Mona Eltahawy as a panellist was preemptively condemned by freelance Australian journalist Corrine Barraclough. You only had to look at the contents of Eltahawy’s latest book The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls to predict what she was going to say.
What are these seven sins that women and girls need, to defy, disobey and disrupt the patriarchy? Anger, attention, profanity, ambition, power, violence, and lust. Eltahawy believes in using “justifiable violence” against men in order to dismantle the “patriarchy”. She concludes being civil, respectful and polite is “ineffective”.
Eltahawy got the opportunity to advocate for violence when audience member Murray Saunder asked his pre-approved question to the panel: ‘When trying to affect significant change, when are aggression and violence a better option than assertiveness, strong arguments and modelling the behaviour you expect of others?’
Eltahawy replied: ‘I’m going to answer it with another question. How long must we wait for men and boys to stop murdering us, to
Host Fran Kelly’s response, to this incitement to gendered violence on national television, was: ‘So, Mona, them’s fighting words. Spectator Australia is already saying Mona is promoting violence. That’s what you’re doing?’
Eltahawy replied, ‘Well, what I’m doing is I’m saying that violence has been owned by the state. That violence has been given by the state to its police. ‘That violence has been allowed to continue, unchecked mostly, by men, especially privileged men. So, exactly how long do I have to wait to be safe? And when I say “to be safe”, there’s a hierarchy of safety too. Obviously people of colour, disabled people, etc.’
Given that we have seen, in Melbourne this past week, violent Marxist protests outside the International Mining and Resources Conference, with the left and the media refusing to condemn such political violence, it is reckless of Australia’s national broadcaster to air the views of someone inciting even further political violence and even mass killings.
Victoria Police officers have also found themselves under attack for their efforts in controlling these protestors to ensure they did not block the entrance to the conference. One officer was labelled a racist for doing an ‘okay’ hand gesture.
Eltahawy also attacked the police for being racist, with no evidence, and was unchallenged by Kelly: ‘when we talk about the police, the police themselves are sometimes domestic abusers. Who in the United States – I’m sure it’s the same in Australia – who in the United States would call the police if there’s a domestic violence incident and would hope to survive? It would be white people’.
The other female panellists, Ashton Applewhite, Hana Assafiri, Nayuka Gorrie, and Jess Hill, did not challenge Eltaway’s violent views. The rest of the discussion was not much better, despite these women being given the biggest platform in the nation to air their views, they still believed they were all oppressed.
Eltahaway’s parting words were the icing on this hour of insanity cake: ‘As you get older, learn from people like us so that this can be a better world. Be queerer. Be more bisexual. Be less cis-gendered in the way that you move through the world. Just fuck it all up and be free!’
ABC left-wing bias is nothing new and cannot be changed unless we defund/abolish the organisation. But last night’s show was beyond the pale; I’m a free-speech absolutist, but you cannot advocate the slaughter of millions due to a genetic characteristic of being born male.
At the very least, there should be an Australian Communications and Media Authority investigation. The ABC should conduct an internal inquiry into how the program made it to air, as it did after it allowed Islamic terrorist sympathiser Zaky Mallah on the show in 2015.
The alleged conservative Morrison Government should certainly make known its disgust at the program, and keep this in mind come budget time. Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton should also have to answer about why he allowed a person in Mona Eltahawy, who has written a book advocating violence, to be granted a visa into Australia.
