Sydney Morning Herald sub-editor Tim Wallace
thinks his newspaper and the media are so intent on demonising Opus Dei
they’re refusing to look at the facts. He writes:

The NSW Liberal politician David Clarke hardly needs a hair shirt for
self-mortification. He has a media with seemingly unlimited reserves of
incredulity about religion to deliver the lash. It’s a pity, though,
that journalists presumably better versed in politics than theology
haven’t been inclined to muster an equal amount of suspicion about the
possible motivations behind the accusations that under his deep-blue
suit is really a brownshirt.

The portrait painted of Clarke as an extremist and zealot, most notably in the Sydney Morning Herald
but elsewhere as well, has had a definite touch of Kandinsky about it:
abstract expressionism from a two-faced perspective. According to the
press Clarke is too much of a Christian, also not enough. A spiritual
Semite, but anti-Semitic. A life-long member of the Liberal Party, but
an infiltrator. Against Islam, but signing up Muslims. Pushing the
party hard right, but recruiting Labor voters. Homophobic, but in bed
with the likes of David Flint. It’s possible he is a man of such radical
contradictions. Or the accusations might be a tad overdone.

The Sydney Morning Herald had a field day, actually a field
week – with accusations about Clarke’s far-right connections, on the
basis that 30 years ago he was photographed in the company of a Liberal
Party member “later exposed as a Nazi propagandist.” “Later” in this
case actually means ten years after the photo was taken, when he was outed by the author
Mark Aarons, who in another book (The Secret War against the Jews)
asserted that the US and British governments have secretly sought to
destroy the state of Israel. Someone should notify al-Qaeda.

Much was made of Clarke having attended an April “function organised
by a group linked with sympathisers of the notorious far-right Croatian
militia group Ustashi.” Though what the actual function was, or why it
made the front page of Spremnost Hrvastski Tjednik, the
Croatian weekly, or why John Ryan – a member of the Liberals’ moderate
faction – was also there, or who else had attended such function –
like, say, ALP politicians – wasn’t deemed worthy of explanation.

It all seemed somewhat tenuous evidence by which to condemn a man. In
other circumstances guilt by association would be called McCarthyism. I
wonder what reporters three decades from now will make of the happy
snaps of John Howard with Hu Jintao, a known member of the Chinese
Communist Party.

Even the notorious nationalist Jim Saleam was wheeled out in supposed
support of the extremist claims. But here’s what he said about Clarke
and Clarke’s faction in August last year: “Jokingly they are called
the Taliban. Not because they’re radicals or hard men. It’s because
they are fundamentalist-Menziesites, dreamers who extol 1950s Menzies
as their idol. Whatever! They are not nationalists.”

And this is what Saleam said of Clarke in October 2003: “This man is an
inveterate enemy of groups he defines as extreme-right and that don’t
melt into the Liberal Party as good (pseudo) conservatives. He has
intervened several times to stymie certain groups and individuals.”

Read the full article in the politics section of the Crikey website.