The Chronicle

COPS AID ATTACK ON OUR FREEDOM

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NOTICED something sinister about our police? How they’re now helping the violent against the peaceful?

Two weeks ago, Victoria Police billed Canadian internet star Lauren Southern $68,000 for protecting her from Leftist rioters who tried to shut down her speech on multicultu­ralism and the murder of white farmers in South Africa.

Police charged the peaceful speaker rather than the fascist Leftists attacking her listeners.

NSW police last week proved that this bizarre reversal of responsibi­lity was no mistake.

Again, their target was Southern. A police inspector stopped her and her small TV crew from walking along Haldon St towards Sydney’s Lakemba mosque. Inspector Rick Agius stepped in front of her and asked her “not to attend” because “they are highly religious there”.

“I have a fear that you may create an imminent breach of the peace and you may also commit an offence,” he said.

The offence? Clearly, to be attacked by “highly religious” Muslim men simply for standing outside their mosque and — possibly — asking locals questions they could choose not to answer. Nothing that Southern planned involved anything other than what should be a legal right to peacefully walk our streets and engage in conversati­on.

Had she been walking to a church or synagogue, I’d bet Melbourne to a marble no police officer would have stopped her.

Ditto had a Muslim film crew from Al Jazeera chosen to film outside a cathedral. Free speech and all that. And had any Christians in the cathedral run out and started punching, they — not the Muslim reporter — would have been arrested.

But clearly different rules apply for Australia’s biggest mosque, which still hosts Sheik Taj Din al-Hilali, infamous for praising the September 11 terrorist attacks as “God’s work against oppressors” and calling suicide bombers “heroes”.

There, police have decided that anyone that the “highly religious” might attack must be stopped, warned off or even charged — no matter how peaceful they are — to spare Muslims the bother of bashing them first.

This is a symptom of a sickness in a West that’s lost the courage of its few remaining conviction­s.

Call it the policing of the moderates. It’s now easier for police to bully moderate people into giving up their freedoms than to confront the violent men who threaten them.

And so do pygmies surrender the freedoms that giants risked all to gain.

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