Conservatives caught distributing pro-terrorism propaganda leaflets

[ck4829]

Australian prime minister John Howard's faltering re-election campaign was badly damaged yesterday by a last-minute scandal in which supporters were accused of a dirty tricks campaign that sought to show the opposition as terrorist sympathisers.

Two days before the general election members of Howard's Liberal party were caught distributing bogus pamphlets falsely linking the Labor party with Islamic terrorists. The flyers, purporting to be from a fake organisation called the Islamic Australia Federation, were posted through letterboxes in the marginal seat of Lindsay in suburban Sydney. They suggested that the Labor party approved of forgiving the men involved in the 2002 Bali nightclub bombings which killed more than 200 people, 88 of them Australian. There was a forged Labor logo on the leaflet and the phrase Allahu Akbar, God is Great, had been misspelled as Ala Akba.

Howard was forced several times to condemn the hoax flyer, calling it "tasteless and offensive". He said it had not been authorised by the party and had not been produced with public funds.

But Labor took full advantage of the stunt, with the party's leader Kevin Rudd saying: "After 11 years it's clear the Liberals have nothing left to offer other than desperation, negativity and dirty tactics."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/australia/story/0,,2215795,00.html

[Selatius]

1. See, the Liberal Party is liberal in that they favor loose regulation of the markets.

They actually use the term "liberal" in its correct, historic sense. Only in the United States was the term co-opted to mean the exact opposite. It was co-opted by FDR to demonstrate to middle voters that he can reach out to the right. Since then, the term "liberal" took on a new connotation in the United States but kept old ones in other parts of the world. In Australia, the liberals are more right wing on economic policy than Labor is.

[silverojo]

2. Thanks for explaining

I was beginning to feel as if I were in the Twilight Zone, there for a minute....