London Tube a battlefield? ABC's new McCarthyism

I wish I could find more elegant terms for it, but I can't. Shame on PM for today's interview with a Muslim man in New Zealand.

For some years now, parts (not all) of the ABC have exhibited an extraordinarily reactionary stance on Islam. Not that I think Islam is a progressive religion, but the confusion of Muslims with Islamists, and Muslims with terrorists, seems as rife in the ABC as any of the quarters one would expect it. One does not appreciate the national broadcaster sounding like the public bar of the local pub. The times are too pregnant with danger for this.

Today's ABC McCarthyist victim was a man who kept protesting to the interviewer that for years he has been preaching against terrorism. He affirmed most earnestly that Islam condemns terrorism and the killing of women and children. In my view the young bloke was under no obligation to give Mark Colvin the dignity of a reply to such assertions as that, since he (the Muslim) believes that death on the battlefield is honourable, he must be promoting terrorism. Colvin ignored his protestations, without a scrap of evidence against them.

I would have told Colvin to get fucked and go and use the same slander on any serviceman or woman in Australia, or the world. Colvin's charge was not only preposterous, it was yet another case of the ABC's recent disturbing slide. It's a very troubling development which I first noticed some years ago when very few, if any, ABC sinecurists opposed the illegal invasion of Afghanistan.