Bennelong Papers

Can we check that?

by Michael Connor

May 15, 2012

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It may be the debate we are not allowed to have, but are they claims we are not allowed to check?

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In America, 2012:

The claim that Elizabeth Warren was 1/32 Cherokee has been suspect from the start, yet the media repeats the claim as if it were documented.

Read on at legalinsurrection.com

In Australia, 2012:

Cherokee no more
by Andrew Bolt

It is the kind of debate and investigation too dangerous to hold in race-obsessed Australia, where freedom of speech is so curtailed.

But in the US, Democrat Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren’s claim to be part Cherokee - a racial identification that gained her preferment at university - has not just been ridiculed but now debunked

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I would like to discuss certain Australian analogies, but lawyers advise me the risks are now unacceptably high.

Such are our disgraceful laws against free speech.

Source: Andrew Bolt’s blog

In Australia, 2005:

[Greg] Lehman claims with mathematical precision to be 1/64^th Aborigine. Faced with this bizarre formula, author Nicholas Shakespeare wrote: ‘How could someone who was 1/64^th Aborigine – like, it appeared, most leaders in the Aboriginal community – choose this fraction of his ancestry over and above the rest?’ Lehman explained to the English author that the remainder of his ancestry was ‘mongrel’.

Source: Michael Connor, The Invention of Terra Nullius (Macleay, 2005), page 20

 

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