I received an interesting email from Marit Hegge and I reproduce below her letter sent to various news outlets:
GREEN PARTY SUPPORT FOR LASHKAR-E-TAIBA MEMBER DAVID HICKS IS DESPICABLE
A while back I resigned after 15 years of membership of the Queensland Green Party. I had been a founding member, state and local office bearer, national delegate, candidate, campaign manager and office worker for that party.
My resignation related to the continuous and misguided support the Green Party has given to ex-Taliban member David Hicks. He was trained by the Pakistan based terrorist group Lashkar-E-Taiba who, it is now emerging, were the group responsible for the terrorist attacks on Mumbai. Who knows, possibly he even had the same trainer? The facts on Hicks’ terrorist training are available online at Wikipedia.
The Greens and groups such as Get Up were the major organisations lobbying for and responsible for Hick’s release from Guantanamo Bay and his subsequent release from incarceration in Australia. They promoted him as some sort of martyr and helped him to become the cause célebre of the chattering classes. Now they are campaigning to have him live in our society totally surveillance free. They are promoting a video called “David Hicks Speaks” where he complains about the control orders placed on him.
Hicks is quoted on Wikipedia to have said he had a ”desire to ‘go back to Australia and rob and kill Jews . . . crash a plane into a building,’ and to ‘go out with that last big adrenalin rush.”
Chilling words from a former Lashkar-E-Taiba member given the attack on the Jewish Centre in Mumbai.
I have written to the Qld Green Party today and also to Senators Bob Brown and Christine Milne informing how despicable I think their continued support of ex-terrorist Hicks is.
The Green Party was set up to address the environmental crisis facing this planet, but from what I can see, they have seriously lost the plot and have become the party of the deluded and the so-called politically correct.
Marit Hegge
Ex-North Brisbane Branch Green Party member
Interesting stuff and no surprise to those of us who have for some time believed that the environmental Raison Detré of the party has been hijacked by the loonies from the far left who mindlessly support anyone who opposes the west.
Cheers Comrades
Filed under: Australian Politics, David Hicks, Ethical questions, Federal politics, Islam, Justice, Law, Leftism, Multiculturalism, Political Correctness, The War On Terror, international politics, the Law | Tagged: David Hicks, The Greens
Thanks for posting that Iain.
Have heard from friends still in Greens that they may be in big trouble financially in Qld. Only have about $300,000 in the bank, had to move from their more expensive office in West End to one at a community centre in Albion a few months back, no longer able to pay office staff. Now back to running on volunteers like they were in the ’90s.
Ronan Lee may be in for a bit of shock if he thinks he is going to have the sort of campaign budget he had with ALP.
If they do not achieve high vote in State election and get election funding they may be down the tubes financially.
Also having trouble with member renewals. Lots of old time members like me have resigned in last few years, including their web master Sam Stainsby, a stalwart who for years kept up their online presence.
They have lost a lot of hard workers as they move further over to the “looney left”. The booth I coordinated for years in Kelvin Grove Brisbane usually pulled one of the highest state votes for Greens as I really worked the electorate.
Also people often join up, meet the crazies and then are never seen again! So they are managing to maintain the 800 members for registration, but only just!
Welcome to My Blog Marit
I am glad that you were able to work out the admin stuff.and post a comment here.
I consider myself to be a realistic environmentalist even though I am rather conservative and I find your revelations of the perilous state of the party here in Queensland rather interesting, sad but interesting.
I am also quite familiar with Kelvin Grove as i Lived there for a while.
Cheers
Iain
Marit Hegge, and Iain, thank you for posting this info. You guys give me hope, especially Marit, an ex-member of the Greens, a whistleblower. Keep posting both of you…
If you enjoyed this post G D then you will just love today’s effort
I was not all that impressed with the recent Hicks video appeal and was surprised that the Fed’s rolled so quickly on the surveillance issue. Of course I am under-informed on the whole thing as the news is only 10 minutes long after ads and sport and I just assumed he would be locked up somewhere. Did we actually decide officially that he was a card-carrying terrorist? I guess those anti-terror laws are a bit muddled but at least there is a security fence around the airport at Birdsville now. THAT will slow ‘em down eh?
Iain.. I like your term “realistic environmentalist”
I think I see myself in a similar light but had not yet defined it. I don’t like this “denialist” tag I see emerging. That is misleading and inaccurate.
She’s not a “whistleblower”, she’s a crank.
She either knows that the Greens’ support is for the justice that was denied in the Hicks case, and not for the character of the man in question, and is lying about it: or she’s wilfully stupid.
Obviously she has a problem with the Greens being a lefty party (as if lefties don’t deserve parliamentary representatives), so obviously she didn’t fit with what the rest of the party wants to do and it’s probably a good thing that she’s gone. She can join the Liberals or Fundies First or something and be with other people who equate progressive politics with “radicalism”.
I know that you recently joined the Greens Jeremy but I will say that someone who was involved with them from their beginnings in the early nineties has a bit more credibility when it comes the internal machinations of the party than you do. Her criticism seems to me to be much more that it is the extreme left who have hijacked the party rather than it being of the left in general.
When it comes to Hicks It seems to me that Marit is like so many other people who are not lawyers, myself included, who judge him for what he has done and do not hide behind the technicality that training with terrorist groups only became a criminal offence in Australia after 9/11.
She has obviously done the hard yards in the party because she believed that it was a party about protecting the environment first and foremost and If you read her post in detail you will see that many on issues that she clashed with the loonies most strongly on (like the drugs policy) have resulted in a more moderate stance that arguably has made the Greens more attractive to middle of the road voters, those without whom the greens stand NO chance of gaining any seats in any parliament.
Oh yeah and welcome back to commenting at my blog