Victoria’s equal opportunity police were just not getting enough complaints to work with. So this foolish Labor Government this week unleashed them to go invent some more, passing even more oppressive Equal Opportunity laws:

Deputy Premier and Attorney-General Rob Hulls welcomed the passage of the new reforms, saying they ensured Victorians benefited from equal opportunity laws fit for the 21st century …

He said the new laws would help stamp out entrenched and systemic discrimination against minority groups by giving the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission the ability to investigate persistent and systemic discrimination without first requiring a complaint to be made.

Let me show you what kind of divisive thing you may now get, using as an example a case from the commission’s own files:

(The Equal Opportunity Commission) hired May Helou, head of the Islamic Council of Victoria’s women’s support group. Her job, the EOC said, was to ensure “Arabic and Muslim communities are aware of their rights under anti-discrimination laws” and give “support to people wishing to make a complaint”.

The hounds had been set loose … In March 2002, Helou told Muslim converts at the ICV headquarters of a seminar on jihad to be run by Catch the Fire and asked them to go.

Said one later, she didn’t want the meeting to be held “without any Muslims present”. So when (pastors) Nalliah and Scot got up to speak at their seminar about jihad, they had in front of them 250 born-again Christians – and three people they did not know were Muslims.

And back at the EOC, Helou waited for the three to call with their complaint. …

The pastors were at long last tried at VCAT before Justice Michael Higgins … and some curious things soon became clear.

First, even one of the converts had to admit that Scot, who’d been born in Pakistan and got degrees there in theology and applied mathematics, actually understood the Koran far better than did the people complaining he’d misquoted it.

Second, as I wrote at the time, many of the complaints accused Scot of no more than quoting the Koran accurately …

The verdict was also odd. The pastors were found guilty of vilifying Muslims even though the judge identified only one thing Scot had said that was factually wrong: he’d given the wrong birthrate for Muslims here. And, the judge, added, he’d failed to quote a verse that showed Allah was merciful.

Higgins said the real problem with the seminar was that it was not “balanced”…

The Labor and Green politicians who voted for this legislative bullying are grossly impertinent and irresponsible. The consequences, when they come, must not be dismissed as unforseen or even unintended. Everyone should know they’ve been predicted from the start.

 

This article first appeared on Andrew Bolt’s blog, http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/ , and is reprinted in Life News by permission of the author. Andrew’s columns appear in Melbourne’s Herald Sun, Sydney’s Daily Telegraph and Adelaide’s Advertiser.