An Obadiah Slope Column
Not a no go: Pauline Hanson thinks Lakemba, a few suburbs west of Obadiah’s home, is somewhere people can’t go.
“’It concerns me greatly that people can’t go into certain suburbs in this country … And I’ve been there myself, and you feel unwanted, you do not want to be there, she told ABC TV,” News.com.au reported.
“Asked to clarify what she meant, she said, ‘Lakemba. Lakemba. Have you been there?’”
But Obadiah is not much of a One Nation follower. So here are a few pictures from a short stroll down Haldon Street, the main street of Lakemba, today.
Haldon Street is very multicultural, not the Muslim enclave, Hanson imagines it is.
There is Muslim pride in Lakemba, but walk a few paces…
There’s a Christian tent for the Ramadan night markets, just outside Lakemba Uniting.
And just ti show Obadiah was actually there:
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Missing a word: It is a simplistic text, but Obadiah sometimes reads leaders’ speeches to see if a word is missing. For a church leader, such as a Bishop, to give a keynote speech, such as an annual report or what Anglicans call a presidential address [insert your denominational terminology here], without mentioning Jesus always dumbfounds Obadiah.
But here is a piece by an Australian Jewish leader, in The Australian, on the recent demonstrations and the increase in antisemitism in Australia.
There’s one word that is missing. Obadiah finds it odd that the word is missing.
Paul Rubenstein, NSW chairman of the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council, a long-established and generally articulate body, examines the protest movement that opposed President Isaac Herzog’s visit to Australia. He rightly emphasises the hate-filled atrocity at Bondi and the slaughter in Iran, but nowhere does he mention the driver for much of the protest, the death and destruction of Gaza.
Yes, it is also easy to find writings on Israel-Gaza from a progressive left view that fail to mention the deaths and kidnappings of October 7, 2023.
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Missing Jesse already: On the Planet Extra Podcast, Associate Professor David Smith described how, for the late Jesse Jackson, faith was at the heart of who he was, and he included God in his oratory quite sincerely. And on the way through, Smith said that a lack of enough religion holds back the left.
“Jesse Jackson described his constituency as the desperate, the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected, and the despised. A lot of politicians like to claim that they’re speaking for people who’ve been forgotten, but in the American context, it’s usually framed as ‘I’m speaking for the, what we would call, the temporarily embarrassed millionaires for good, hardworking middle classes who should be a lot richer than they actually are. That’s who I’m speaking for.’
“No, Jesse Jackson was genuinely speaking for the lowest and most marginalised members of society. People who were homeless, people who were in prison, drug addicts, and that was informed by his own background. So he was from Greenville, very poor background housing projects in Greenville, South Carolina. Jesse Jackson was the third name in his life that he had, which he didn’t get until the age of 12 because of the fact that he was shuttled between grandparents and adopted.
“He was the child of a single mother, a teen mother who was also the child of a teen mother. He described on Thanksgiving how his mother would go and prepare Thanksgiving meals for other people as a domestic servant, and then she would come back on the bus late at night and he and his brother would eat whatever leftovers of the Turkey she was able to bring back. So this was very much a lived experience for him. He was very sincere about the dignity of every person that was also very much informed by his Christianity. So you saw in [the poem often quoted by Jackson] I Am Somebody, one of the last lines is I am God’s child. In his two major convention speeches at the 1984 and 1988 Democratic conventions, one of the first things he does is to give very fulsome thanks to God and to declare that this is a nation that worships God.
“That was not Christian nationalism from Jesse Jackson. He was often emphasising the fact that the majority of the world’s people are not Christians. He was all about religious inclusiveness, including towards Islam. But certainly faith was a very powerful thing for him and something which he really took for granted as part of the political landscape. When people say that there needs to be a revival of populism on the left in order to match the populism on the right, one of the structural obstacles that the left currently faces, I believe is the inability to engage with religion and to engage with faith in the way that Jesse Jackson had that provided a really powerful basis for his populism. This is not to say that religion or faith is the only basis of of a belief in the inherent dignity and worth of every human being, but it certainly provides very, very powerful rhetorical shorthand that resonates with a lot of people. ”
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Here’s the poem, I am Somebody from a famous scene with Jesse Jackson and children for Sesame Street.