Sport

OUT: State government must clamp down on tennis terror

The horrifying spectacle yesterday of young men claiming Croatian heritage acting like Nazi thugs at Melbourne’s Australian Open brings into focus just how vulnerable the tournament is to despicable attacks of the kind planned by Sonja Karkar and her cadre of Palestinians bullies against the Israeli tennis star Shaheer Peer.

The men intimidated fans, let off flares, attacked photographers recording the ugly spectacle and according to the Herald Sun “brought shame on Melbourne.” The young hoons attended in support of a Croatian player and was an example of youthful stupidity. Karkar’s plans are even more insidious, she’s planning to attend to oppose an athlete purely on the basis of Karkar’s hatred of her nationality.

Karkar is no ill-educated, drunk young yob. She is the wealthy wife of one of Melbourne’s leading commercial barristers, one of Her Majesty’s Queen’s Counsel no less.

TERRORIST TACTICS?
Our story revealing Karkar’s fiendish non-violent terror plot aimed at disrupting the tennis tournament triggered a response from a Martin Pakula who is most definitely not the state Industry minister who wrote a comment on our report that was republished on the excellent ICJS site:

While I very much don”t like what Sonja Karkar is planning to do at the Australian Open I think it is ludicrous to call such action “terrorist tactics”. This is a free country where people are allowed to protest. Clearly it is an inappropriate time and place to protest and most Australians will accordingly view such protest with distaste.

They certainly will. We took the opportunity to respectfully disagree with his excessively charitable assertion that what Karkar has planned is a legitimate or acceptable or even lawful political protest. It’s clearly not:

We used the term “non-violent terrorist” quite deliberately to describe Karkar”s disgraceful plans to disrupt a tennis match from the crowd. This goes well beyond a mere protest out to the front of a building or whatever, this is nothing less than an attempt to disrupt tennis matches where an Israeli sportswoman is playing. They”re not protesting anything she”s actually done either, just her nationality. It is plainly despicable. What Karkar has planned is not legitimate nor is it lawful protest, by any reasonable measure. “Terror” comes from the Latin “terrere” meaning “to frighten” which is exactly what these people have in mind. We hope the authorities are ready to deal with what threatens to be a serious disruption of one of Australia”s great sporting tournaments. We should protect our sporting guests from racist and disgraceful attacks calculated to do nothing less than terrorise their targets.

PROTESTING AGAINST AN ISRAELI INDIVIDUAL PURELY BECAUSE SHE’S ISRAELI IS RACIST
Another interesting contribution made the point that Karkar’s planned protests are not political, they are nothing less than a racist attack:

No explanation for Shahar Peer wearing an IDF uniform needs to be given. Peer is not representing Israel; she is an Israeli competitor in a sporting event. That is the difference between protesting against Peer and the protest decades ago against the Springboks. Even if Australia is a country where free speech is guaranteed, it must not be used recklessly or maliciously. A silent vigil, even with placards, is acceptable. Disrupting a game of tennis and thus affecting the outcomes of Peer and her competitors, is not acceptable.

Melbourne is perhaps the world’s most spectacular success story of cultural diversity and cosmopolitanism.

At the heart of our success is zero tolerance for ethnic based violence and hatreds. We even shut down a national soccer league in order to cleanse the great game of ethnic bigotries, a move that worked spectacularly well.

WE MUST BE INTOLERANT OF THE INTOLERANT
Whether they be young men disgracing the ethnic background of their parents and grandparents or those so obsessed with hatred for another country that they’d pay to go into a sporting tournament with the aim of disrupting it, destroying the concentration of one of the competitors and drawing attention to their hateful cause, it’s unAustralian.

The authorities need to warn off Sonja Karkar and her brigade of bullies. They have the right to protest anywhere else in Australia but not during a tennis match where all the great things of this country are to be celebrated. Karkar’s determination to bring the hatreds of the Middle East to one of our greatest sporting tournaments needs to be vigorously opposed by a state government determined to protect the event for all the competitors and spectators.

Senator Steve Fielding’s call to have thugs like these banned from sporting events makes a lot of sense. The public investment in sport and its important place in our society means it needs protection from those determined to wreck it to prosecute their agenda of hate.

PLEASE NOTE: An earlier version of this story confused the pro-protest Martin Pakula with another one whose patriotic ways are beyond question. Our apologies to Martins everywhere.

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