Muslim sterotyping Down Under " Terrorist Man" costume "......"It's disrespectful to so many - Muslims.."

Baulkham Hills store bans 'disrespectful' terrorist costume

DAVID CATT 

HILLS SHIRE TIMES 

APRIL 26, 2013 10:07AM

RED Riding Hood, Spider Girl, Lil Bee... and Terrorist Man?

A Baulkham Hills discount store has moved quickly to remove from sale a highly offensive novelty costume depicting a stereotypical Arab man, complete with turban, beard, white robes and army camouflage vest and holding a large assault rifle.

The packaging identifies the costume as "Terrorist Man''.

A Hills Shire Times reader contacted the paper earlier today, complaining about the costume on sale for $32.99 at Red Dollar at Stockland Mall Baulkham Hill.

                           

It was hanging right alongside children's and adults novelty costumes including nurses, superheroes, animals and policemen.

"It's disrespectful to so many - Muslims, victims of terrorism and the general community - and is a terrible example to children,'' the reader said.

The costume comes in sizes small (8-10), medium (12-14) and large (16-18).

When confronted, the store's manager removed the five costumes from sale and apologised, saying she understood the complaint ``given what's happening at the moment''.

It is unclear whether the same costume is for sale in other stores around the Hills and Sydney.

                          

Does this depiction of a Muslim above,resemble the pictures of Islam's finest shown below?  Of course not say the Islamist's and their Multicultural Harmony Day apologists.

Left click image to enlarge

The Heiner Affair just wont go away

Heiner Affair inquiry getting down to business


Piers Akerman 
Daily Telegraph
Wednesday, April 24, 2013 (12:06am)

It would seem that Prime Minister Julia Gillard is not the only Labor figure to reach for the “naïve” defence when the hard questions are asked.

Yesterday, Dean Wells, a former Labor Attorney General in the Goss government, told the Queensland Child Protection Inquiry which is looking into the Heiner Affair that the Cabinet decided to shred internal documents because they were inexperienced and wanted to protect employees from defamation.

He said the 1990 order to destroy documents from an investigation into a youth-detention centre was the Cabinet’s baptism of fire as the first “damned if we do, damned if we don’t” decision.

He is the third Cabinet minister to be summonsed to the inquiry - the first under newly expanded terms of reference - that is investigating the long-running Heiner Affair disgrace.

“We had been out of office for 32 years,” Wells said.

“We did not know what was normal and within the area of the Cabinet’s concern.

“What we did know that a minister had a problem that an inquiry that had been established by her predecessor had been pulled up.”

The Heiner Affair centres on the destruction of documents from retired magistrate Noel Heiner’s investigation into allegations of mismanagement at the John Oxley Youth Centre.

It later emerged a girl, 14, was raped at the centre in 1988 and claims grew of a coverup of sexual abuse allegations.

The girl, now a woman, at the heart of this matter, still wants justice.

She was awarded approximately $140,000 in a hush-hush ex gratia payment or possibly compensation in June, 2010, by the Bligh Labor government.

Commissioner Tim Carmody asked why the government would offer to indemnify a man, then destroy the documents which might be produced in a court in a case against that same man.

“That suggests no one thought about those two colliding facts,’’ he said.

Wells said the government believed it wrong to keep documents which he believed contained untested allegations of misconduct which did not involve criminal behavior.

But Carmody said the Cabinet knew it was dong something quite “risky” which required serious thought.

“It was such a serious decision it was deferred twice,’’ he said.

Yet the Cabinet did not appear to apply careful consideration before green-lighting the shredding.

“It (the consideration given) seems to have been less than might have been expected,’’ Carmody said.

“The questions that seems to have been obvious don’t seem to have been asked.’’

Carmody suggested the documents contained not so much allegations of child sexual abuse but accusations related to industrial strife inside the John Oxley centre.

But he also suggested there were two competing sides in the equation - one side wanted to keep the material and one side wanted it destroyed.

He suggested the Labor Cabinet had taken one side, and allowed the destruction of the documents.

The inquiry continues and the commissioner is due to decide on the criminality of the shredding of the documents on May 6.

In as much as a number of the most senior judges from across the nation have in the past decided that the shredding of documents foreshadowed to be needed as evidence was prima facie a crime, Carmody’s decision will be eagerly waited.

The Heiner Affair has never been properly investigated despite 11 reviews and it has cast a shadow over the Goss Cabinet and a number of senior public servants including the former prime minister Kevin Rudd, who was Premier Wayne Goss’s chief of staff and later director-general of his Cabinet office.

It may be that the Newman government will finally see justice done in this long-running scandal. 

Gallipoli ANZAC Hero Private John Simpson Kirkpatrick and his Donkey

Simpson and his donkey are Gallipoli heroes, despite new efforts to trash the legend

Candace Sutton
April 23, 2013 3:53PM

Angry men want to diminish Simpson's legacy 
But those who recommended him were no slouches
Simpson's CO's granddaughter explains 

THEY'RE at it again: angry men are attacking the legend of Gallipoli war hero, Simpson, of donkey fame.
Only this time, it’s more serious. The latest round of salvos seems determined to consign the nation's favourite Anzac hero to the dust bin.

Private John Simpson Kirkpatrick's story is well known. He was the stretcher bearer who ferried wounded Australian soldiers to safety at Gallipoli on the back of a donkey for 24 days, until he was shot through the chest by the Turks on May 19, 1915.
Simpson and his donkey are immortalised in statues at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra and Melbourne's Shrine of Remembrance, and his story is told in children's books and school history classes.

In the years since World War I, he has come to embody the Anzac legacy's greatest traits of mateship and selfless sacrifice.

As many have eulogised, Simpson has had his critics, who have attacked his right to such a high place in the hearts of Australians.
A succession of commentators has tried to make their names debunking his legend and dispelling the "myth" that Private Simpson was anything special.

Historians and journalists have pontificated at length, lecturing us poor Australians our simplistic "need" to hold up Simpson's example and mythologise our young nation's role in the first world war.

Books have been written bagging poor Simmo and anyone who has dared to believe his tale of heroism.
But this year, the poor man has attracted new levels of scorn and claims of fabrication.

In the lead-up to Anzac Day 2013, no doubt annoyed that Simpson would again enjoy his annual outing of national hero worship, the anti-Simmo squad have let it rip, calling his story "fraudulent" and "a lie". Why all the anger?
Two articles in the last week have Simpson's claim to legend in tatters.

Journalist Mark Baker said that "much of the legend of the man with the donkey has been built on false or faulty evidence, richly embellished over the years as history has been turned into hagiography".
Writer Jan Wositzky was next, writing that Simpson was nothing without the donkey. "Take the donkey out of the picture and the story dies".
Both commentators said Simpson had been found to be no more or less courageous than the other stretcher bearers operating on the Gallipoli peninsula.

This fresh attack on Simpson's reputation comes in the wake of a federal Defence Honours and Award Tribunal rejecting his case for the ultimate recognition of courage and sacrifice, the Victoria Cross.
The tribunal announced its decision last month not to award Simpson a VC. Simpson's failure to qualify for a VC was technical and utterly predictable, as I wrote in May 2008 when the tribunal was just being formed.
But the anti-Simpson team now seek to obliterate his legend once and for all.

"Just about every word that has ever been written or spoken about Simpson, apart from the bare facts of his civilian life and his basic military service, is a lie," said Graham Wilson, in a private submission to the tribunal.

Wilson is a seasoned opponent to the Simpson legend. In a previous attack, he made the astonishing call that Simpson may have actually cost diggers' lives, saying it was "not a great leap of the imagination to actually wonder how many men at Gallipoli died because a stretcher-bearer team was short a man due to Simpson's absence".

Mark Baker quotes from Wilson's submission and says the Simpson story is "largely a myth inflated and exaggerated by the sloppy work of journalists, amateur historians and jingoistic politicians".

Another submission, by journalist and Gallipoli historian, Les Carlyon, said the Simpson "myths are stronger, and more numerous, than the facts. Simpson became the legendary figure of Gallipoli, not on the peninsula itself, but in Australian and British newspapers months after his death. He was beatified, then canonised".

Baker goes on to list the "fraudulent" claims of Simpson's deeds uncovered by Wilson and concludes that the tribunal was "unable to find any witness accounts of a specific act of valour ... which could single out Simpson's bravery from other stretcher-bearers in the Field Ambulance".

In saying so, Baker has unwittingly stumbled upon the truth, and it doesn't detract from the bravery of Simpson's actions at Gallipoli.
Certainly his legend has been burnished since, by people who bathed in his reflected glory and who probably never met him, but that does not make his original story untrue and undocumented.

In May 2008, when the tribunal was being formed as a Labor election promise "to take the politics out of medal decisions", the Defence Department told me the rules for establishing proof of valour to award a VC meant Simpson would miss out.

"It would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to make an award of a Victoria Cross to Simpson for his action at Gallipoli during World War I," a Defence Department spokesperson said.
He said recommendations "must be supported by signed statements of at least three eyewitnesses of the act for which the award is recommended. These statements should be on oath."

Simpson was previously recommended for the Victoria Cross on three occasions, in 1915, 1967 and 1995.
To examine why all of these VC bids have failed, let's go back to Anzac Cove,1915.

Witness accounts of Simpson at Gallipoli exist but they are mostly unspecific diary accounts of his journeys up and down the gullies from battlefield to dressing station.
My grandfather, then

Lieutenant Colonel Alfred Sutton, was Simpson's commanding officer of the medical unit, the 3rd Field Ambulance at Gallipoli.

His war diaries, available for reading at the Australian War Memorial, provide a meticulous account of his war in Gallipoli and later in France.

Among his diagrams of the ships off Anzac Cove before the landing, accounts of numbers and injuries of the wounded, descriptions of bright beautiful days on the peninsular interrupted by gunfire, Sutton remarks on Simpson's deeds at Gallipoli.
It was with Sutton's approval that Simpson was allowed to work independently in collecting casualties, living apart from his fellow soldiers in what was technically desertion.

He gave his Red Cross armband to Simpson for the donkey's snout, in a tongue-in-cheek endorsement of the animal as an enlistee.
Sutton's diaries also recount an "extraordinary order" regarding military award recommendations made in May 1915 by the senior Australian medical officer at Anzac, Colonel Neville Howse, who achieved his own VC in the Boer War.
And herein seems to lie the problem.

According to Simpson's biographer, Tom Curran, Howse's directive, which flabbergasted Sutton, was to assign the award recommendation to a more junior officer, and that is what happened with Simpson.

Curran says the bearer officer, Captain Fry, "recommended Simpson for the VC under an inappropriate category of heroism, citing a single pre-eminent act which could not be substantiated, instead of sustained selfless heroism over a prolonged period".
After Simpson was "shot through the chest" on the morning of May 19, 1915, as Sutton noted in his diary, he was buried at 6.30 that evening at Hell Spit, on the southern end of Anzac Cove.

The day after Simpson's death, Colonel John Monash, then the commander of the Australian Imperial Force's 4th Infantry Brigade at Gallipoli, sent a submission to Australian and New Zealand Divisional Headquarters.

Monash wrote: "I desire to bring under special notice, for favour of transmission to the proper authority, the case of Private Simpson ... [who] has been working in this valley since 26th April, in collecting wounded, and carrying them to dressing stations."
Sutton who, unusually for a commanding officer had condoned Simpson's abandonment of his unit, wrote in his diary on June 1, 1915: "I think we will get a VC for poor Simpson".

As history records, the witness accounts of Simpson's deeds are unspecific, such as Monash's description of Simpson's "fearless rescues" of "all cases unable to walk ... [he] moved unconcernedly amid shrapnel and rifle fire".

Lt Col Sutton noted in his diary: "It is difficult to get evidence of any one act to justify the VC; the fact is that he did so many."
While neither Sutton nor Monash made a formal recommendation for a VC for Simpson, their accounts of Simpson's bravery are arguably sincere and believable. They were no slouches.

Sutton was promoted to colonel, served in France at Pozières and Bullecourt, got a gong from King George V, and was twice mentioned in dispatches.

After taking charge of the Australian 3rd Division in France, Monash was made Australia's military commander of World War I in May 1918.

ANZAC Day 2013 Australia remembers it's finest

Anzac Day is one of Australia’s most important national commemorative occasions. It marks the anniversary of the first major military action fought by Australian and New Zealand forces during the First World War.

When is Anzac Day?

The official naming of Anzac Day occurred in 1916 and since then, has fallen on the 25th of April each year.

What does 'ANZAC' stand for?

'ANZAC' stands for Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. On the 25th of April 1915, Australian and New Zealand soldiers formed part of the allied expedition that set out to capture the Gallipoli peninsula. These became know as Anzacs and the pride they took in that name continues to this day.

Why is this day special to Australians?

On the morning of 25 April 1915, the Anzacs set out to capture the Gallipoli peninsula in order to open the Dardanelles to the allied navies. The objective was to capture Constantinople (now Istanbul in Turkey), the capital of the Ottoman Empire, and an ally of Germany.

The Anzacs landed on Gallipoli and met fierce resistance from the Ottoman Turkish defenders. Their plan to knock Turkey out of the war quickly became a stalemate, and the campaign dragged on for eight months.

At the end of 1915, the allied forces were evacuated. Both sides suffered heavy casualties and endured great hardships. Over 8,000 Australian soldiers were killed. News of the landing on Gallipoli and the events that followed had a profound impact on Australians at home. The 25th of April soon became the day on which Australians remember the sacrifice of those who had died in the war.

The Anzacs were courageous, and although the Gallipoli campaign failed in its military objectives, the Australian and New Zealand actions during the campaign left us all a powerful legacy.

What does Anzac Day mean today?

With the coming of the Second World War, Anzac Day also served to commemorate the lives of Australians who died in that war. The meaning of Anzac Day today includes the remembrance of all Australians killed in military operations.