Newcastle is coming together together in a big way. Tomorrow is going to absolutely go off!

Aside from the pro-multicultural rally taking place at the Beaumont Street Clock Tower (11am), Newcastle City Council has organised something bigger to follow.

Members of the Newcastle community who wish to express their support for the local Sudanese community and their opposition to the recent emergence of organised racism in Newcastle are invited to attend the Palais (in Hunter St, Newcastle) at 12:30pm on Saturday (22 January) to celebrate cultural diversity.

The event has been organised by active members of the Newcastle community (the Newcastle Welcome Town group), representing a broad range of community interests and organisations, including churches and other religious organisations, many grassroots community-based groups involved in human services and equity issues, political parties, and local institutions.

Speakers at the Palais event will include:

• the Lord Mayor of Newcastle, Cr John Tate,
• Violetta Walsh OAM, Coordinator of the Newcastle Migrant Resource Centre and Newcastle Citizen of the Year 2004, and
• a representative of the local Sudanese community.

The event is designed to demonstrate the strong and broad consensus of local community support for the Sudanese community and for cultural diversity that has emerged in response to recent expressions of racist extremism.

As everyone on the Newcastle anti-PYL mailing list already knows, I will be speaking at both of these events. I can’t wait to meet and greet all the people I’ve been coordinating with over the last few months.

Offers for a security detail have been put forward by the Unions and the Newcastle Police have instructed me to contact them when I’m on the Newcastle Link Road so they can escort me safely in, around and out of the city. Sounds like a bit of security overkill if you ask me. What next? Will I be required to change vehicles on the Mooney Mooney bridge in order to throw the Nazis off my tail?

Still, the amount of threats I have receieved since Wednesday have been rather alarming. A group calling themselves the Iron Brotherhood are apparently planning ’something big’ to ’sort me out’ when I get to Newcastle.

Excuse me for not being suitably frightened, but I fail to see what five blokes who can’t even read a train timetable are capable of.

Now that the PYL have been informed that there will not be counter-rally staged face-to-face with their BBQ at Islington Park, they have apparently called the show back on. Pretty simple paradigm at work here:

• Shit, another 100 to 1 protest situation, BBQ is off.

• Yay, they’ve chosen to ignore us and do something in town, BBQ is back on, we won’t have to shit our pants and run away again.

Still, you better do as Ross “The Skull” May does and wear a hat and dark glasses. Those mega-zoom lenses can pick you off from a mile away.

I suppose you all want to know why there won’t be a confrontation. The decision came about at the request of the Sudanese community. They felt that inflaming the situation with a vitriolic confrontation would make them feel more at risk. That and well, media coverage of these goons needs to be selectively metered out. It’s a double-edged sword, is the publicity giving them oxygen? The wrong type of tabloid publicity would most certainly do that. The kind I have been orchestrating thus far aims to drag them into the public eye so they can trip over themselves and give us all a chuckle whilst at the same time imparting the message that there is a very sinister side to their alleged ‘patriotism’.

Expose, ridicule, inform and organise.

That is the Fight dem back! secret formula for conducting a selective media campaign. Oh, and speaking of ridiculing them, check out the Weezil’s Kangaroo Nazi Diet Plan.

See all you Novacastrian folk tomorrow!