17 14, June, 2020 catholicweekly.com.au E ditorial & letters Dorin’s World Send your letters to:
[email protected] By the post: The Editor, Level 13, 133 Liverpool St, Sydney NSW 2000 AUSTRALIA Opinion piece seemed to lean towards racism I want to write to register my distaste with the article by Dr Kevin Don- nelly this week posted online by The Catholic Weekly . It starts off well making important points about the decay of law and order. However it becomes very clear early on that there is a racist undertone run- ning through the article which goes on to whitewash the mistreatment of Aborig- inals. I am grateful that the CW has lost its modernist editorial bent that plagued it in the 80’s and 90’s but I would also point out it is not a Murdoch tabloid (for the record I read The Australian - I am no Fairfax/ABC apologist, but I can’t stand the Murdoch tabloids). But this article is poorly written and is full of clickbait bias - something I would expect Andrew Bolt to write. It reads more like a speech to the party faithful at a One Nation meeting. I think it’s entirely inappropriate for The Cath- olic Weekly to be publishing something like this. Gerald Keane Keilor East VIC Young cafe evangeliser spotted in my area too A s a committed reader of The Catholic Weekly , I was reading the 7 June edition and was delighted to come across the letter by Erasmus Mills. I believe it’s likely I came across the same ‘young Lebanese man’ in my morning coffee last Friday at Mosman village. At around 10am I was having my regular morning flat white at my local cafe. As with the account by Erasmus Mills, I too witnessed a young (I guessed Lebanese) man who was catching up with a group of about three young men, followed by another catch up with about four young women. My interest was struck each time by the young man’s grace conducted before each croissant. ‘Benedic Domine, nos et haec tua dona quae de tua largitate su- mus sumpturi.’ I thought this tradition had been lost! After the second group left, I ap- proached him to tell him how thrilled I was to see the Latin Grace. We spoke briefly. He is an aspiring young doctor and deserves credit for his witness to the faith. At 12.30 pm he told me he must go off and do some work, and while smil- ing quipped ‘Laudate Dominum’. What a young man to behold. Douglas Fenton Mosman NSW Americans not the only black lives that matter T he world has been marked by an- ti-racism protests for the past two weeks. It was distressing to watch a video of a police officer placing his knee on George Floyd’s neck and com- pletely disregarding his tragic pleas that he could not breathe. This should be a pointer to police reform everywhere - not sparing Zimbabwe police. Zimbabwean police have for years been brutalising fellow citizens. Many have died in police cells due to beatings and no arrests have ever been heard of. In as much as we are talking of black lives matter, the Zimbabwean government should also be held to account so that Zimbabwean lives really do matter. Presi- dent Emmerson Mnangagwa of Zimba- bwe must reform his police and ensure that they get off citizens’ necks and stop harassing opposition members,human rights activists or anyone who is not af- filiated to his ruling Zanu Popular Front government. Yes, black lives matter. But so do Zim- babwean lives matter too. Esther Tafadzwa Munyira Middlesbrough UK Lessons from experiences of past generations W e like to know where we come from. This is evident in the growth of ancestry sites. It’s pleasant to sit with friends and family sharing anecdotes about our distant relatives. Still, it’s fashionable today to blame the Catholic Church for being the source of all societal ills. But what if, in our search, we discover that we come from a Catholic family. If we are of European origin, there is a good chance that over the last 500 years, at least one of our fore- bears belonged to the Catholic Church. This leads to the question, the answer to which we don’t always want to know. Why did they leave? Often we meet peo- ple who have had similar experiences. It is comforting to share them. Ecumenism is wrought with difficulty. Friendships can be severed. While seek- ing knowledge of our ancestors is valu- able and satisfying it is a relatively soft option. But perhaps, if we were to em- bark on a journey to uncover the origins of our religious beliefs, we could share those as well. Kevin Rowney Towradgi NSW Do Black Lives really Matter to protesters? F or several years, The Catholic Weekly has carried let- ters to the Editor from expatriate Zimbabweans pro- testing the brutal genocidal policies of the regime established by Robert Mugabe. Last week, one cor- respondent recounted the kidnappings of three members of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, one of whom is a member for Parliament, Harare West MP Joana Mamombe. On 15 May the website of the New Zimbabwe newspaper carried photographs of the badly beatenMs Mamombe ly- ing in her hospital bed, together with details of her torture by her abductors. Yet despite half a century of extensively doc- umented and reported brutal and, at times, genocidal rule in Zimbabwe, there is no #BlackZimbabweanLivesMatter movement, nor are there any protests on the streets of cities around the world. In its coverage of world news in recent years, T he Catholic Weekly has also reported on issues such as the kidnapping of Christian and Shi’ite Muslim girls in Pakistan who are sold toMuslimmen for marriage and never seen again by their families. Yet there is no #PakistanGirlsMatter movement - nor are there any accompanying protests on the streets of the world’s cities. In China’s Xinjiang Province, as many as three million Uighurs have been kidnapped by Chinese authorities and jailed in concentration camps and prisons that the Chinese government ludicrously describes as TAFEs. Children are abducted and brainwashed to praise the Chinese Father- land and Comrade Xi Jinping as the leader and architect of the nation. The jailed are beaten, murdered, raped and, it is believably reported by numerous sources, often sorted by blood group for the purposes of organ harvesting. The same treatment, by all available evidence, was pioneered against followers of the Falun Dafa meditationmovement. Yet there is no #UighurLivesMatter movement, no #Med- itationLivesMatter movement and, of course, no protests flooding the streets of the world’s cities. We could continue to nominate the most serious violations of human lives and human rights around the world. So what is going on? The global spread of protests associated with the death of George Floyd in the US on 25 May has been, at a certain level, fascinating, both for its rapidity and global popular embrace. But it is also seriously troubling for the looting, vi- olence and incandescent hostility leveled against anyone who disagrees with or questions any aspect of it. Strangely, much of the movement appears to have morphed into the very thing it supposedly denounces – mob violence towards others facilitated by zero regard for the law. Sydney’s 7 June protest involving an estimated 20,000 protesters was just the latest example. It was something of a surprise so many Australians were suddenly manifesting a previously unknown passion about issues of race in the US when it seems clear that almost all Australians know nothing about it at all. It is not too much of a generalisation to conclude that few of the protesters on Sydney streets know anything about the history of the US nor the race issue which has blighted its existence since slavery and the Declaration of Independence. The prob- lem is exacerbated with every passing day, month and year as young Australians adopt their credulous view of world events purely from social media. Of course, the media’s symptomatic ignorance plays a fundamental role in the whole #BlackLivesMatter phenomenon as well. One positive observation that might be made is that the protests represent a clear sense of outrage and, in their own way, testify to the sanctity of life which is universal and tran- scends all barriers, times and places. Yet the significant problemwith the protest movement is its clearly visible ignorance. The youthful protesters know nothing about anything except what they absorb on so- cial media. They believe passionately – many (and prob- ably most) of them – the ludicrous conspiracy theories of history and politics which flourish in the oxygen of a web- based world. And they know only what they see in the me- dia, which is why they are outraged (as we all should be) by what happened to George Floyd. Yet they give not even the faintest evidence that they are aware of far worse problems in other parts of the world and they are blind to their own lynchmob rule. Who are these protesters? The truth is that they are Facebook, and Google, and In- stagram and Tinder and SnapChat and all the social media they have spent the greater part of their lives on. And the greatest tragedy in this whole affair is that they know nothing at all. Nor, apparently, do they seem care about that either. LETTERS