Aussie Establishment
Wild Against LaRouche
by Allen Douglas
In a dramatic nationwide prime-time news bulletin on June 12, the Rupert Murdoch-controlled Channel 7 "Today Tonight" program told its viewers to "be warned" about Lyndon LaRouche and his Australian associates in the Citizens Electoral Council (CEC). In a public health-style "special bulletin," the announcer began, "You may find yourself answering a knock on the door or a telephone call from the Citizens Electoral Council. It sounds genuine enough, but this group is part of an American cult, and their message is bigotry, racial prejudice, hatred, and paranoia."
The vitriolic, lying Channel 7 piece was the peak of an almost constant media barrage against LaRouche in Murdoch-owned press, beginning in the Brisbane, Queensland Courier Mail on June 8, followed for the next week by almost daily diatribes in the country's largest circulation paper, the Murdoch-owned Herald Sun.
This latest outburst is part of a several-pronged offensive directed by the British Crown through stooges and lackeys such as Murdoch himself and the Anti-Defamation Commission of B'nai B'rith (ADC), whose purpose is to shut down LaRouche's presence on the Australian continent. It includes the recent passage of special, draconian "racial vilification" legislation in the state of Victoria, where the CEC is headquartered, and a call by federal Member of Parliament (MP) Michael Danby, for a federal investigation of the CEC's fundraising.
The Murdoch attacks are a qualitative escalation in a process which began on Jan. 24, 2001, when the ADC, whose board is dominated by three members of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth's Privy Council, the ruling body of the Commonwealth, launched an attack on LaRouche and the CEC in a press release, coincident with the launching of a court suit against LaRouche's associates in Brazil by the Brazilian wing of Prince Philip's World Wide Fund for Nature (see Lyndon LaRouche, "Look At What Happened in Brazil," EIR, Feb. 9, 2001). In fact, virtually everything printed in the recent outburst in the Murdoch media has been directly taken from the ADC or its affiliates, such as the Australia/Israel Review magazine of Melbourne tax lawyer, fanatical right-wing Zionist, and LaRouche enemy Mark Leibler, for whose magazine MP Danby used to work.
Bespeaking the establishment's growing hysteria about LaRouche, the media coverage breaks an almost five-year-long establishment policy of simply blacking out LaRouche and the CEC altogether from Australia's major media. The last major public assault on LaRouche in Australia was led by then-Deputy Prime Minister Tim Fischer in mid-1996. After several masterful appearances by LaRouche himself on Australian radio and television, the establishment switched to a blackout policy.
Since merely blacking LaRouche out could not stop his organizing, Murdoch and his fellow Australian, multi-billionaire press baron Kerry Packer, used their media to create a populist movement around former MP Pauline Hanson and her One Nation Party, to distract attention from LaRouche. Tapping into the enormous anti-globalization rage in Australia, One Nation has been causing a major upheaval in Australian politics from 1997 until the present.
Thus, all the more significant was the appearance of a new "line," as featured in the initial Murdoch Courier Mail attack of June 8. A commentary by Courier Mail journalist Terry Sweetman ended with the warning, "There is something intrinsically evil in the way LaRouche exploits the pressures of a society under stress to push his particular barrow. One Nation, by comparison, is positively benign." That line bespeaks the weakness and hysteria of the establishment's position, because it tells angry Australians who want to "stick it to the establishment," that LaRouche is their man, not Hanson.
Another new "line" is the warning, featured in a June 10 Herald Sun article entitled "Cult Gears Up for Poll Drive," that LaRouche's associates in the CEC may draw enough votes in the federal elections later this year (in which the CEC is running 40 candidates), to possibly shift the outcome in some key races. Until now, the ADC claim has been that "the CEC raises a lot of money, but has no electoral influence whatsoever."
