Nick Ryan: Social media lunatics unfairly hurting Fleurieu milk company over halal products BULLIED: Nick Hutchinson of the Fleurieu Milk Company. It's fair to say there's more than a few concepts beyond my comprehension but nothing baffles me in quite the same way as the notion a man could so despise another's faith that he'll take it all out on a poor defenceless yoghurt. The good, gumbooted people of the Fleurieu Milk and Yoghurt Company have found themselves hounded by a modern-day lynch mob that has traded its flaming torches and shouted threats for a surprisingly slick social media campaign. All this because the dairy had, in the interests of opening new markets, got themselves certification to say their products meet the requirements to be labelled halal. Should anti-halal groups be allowed to influence legitimate business? This, according to the teeth-gnashers behind the "Boycott Halal" campaign, is a form of treason, an affront to the good Christians of this country and a direct monetary contribution to terrorist organisations. This is the moment when the paranoid, knuckle-dragging fringe took us all down into the sludge. This campaign has bubbled up from the darker sewers of our national consciousness, fuelled by acute Islamophobia and propped up by the flimsy assertion that this is not "the Australian way." It has gone to great lengths to compose a list of grocery items that have been tainted by the process of halal certification. This list includes Cornflakes, Bega cheese, Golden Crumpets, Beerenberg's sauces and jams, Mars Bars, Tabasco, the burger buns at Hungry Jacks and KFC, Extra chewing gum and Vili's pies. According to the "Boycott Halal" blowhards all these, and a whole lot more, must be strictly avoided to preserve the purity and protect the traditions and beliefs of their chosen people. Now where did they get that idea from? These people are pushing the argument that a rise in Halal certified products on our supermarket shelves is the thin edge of the wedge, the first steps towards the total Islamification of Australia. It's nothing more than paranoia looking for a cause to call home. Even Vegemite is Halal but if you really want to see something dark and unpalatable check out the "Boycott Halal"" Facebook page and you quickly realise the greater danger facing this country are the ignorant people thinking they alone are entitled to it. Once you get past the creative spelling and the multitudinous typos - it can't be easy to type accurately when you hit the keyboard with a clenched fist - you get the kind of reasoning produced by the kind of people who physically wince when their brain produces its one coherent thought for the day. "This country was founded on Christian principles, so why should we be forced to consume halal," bleats one angry poster. It's more accurate to say this country was laid out by 40,000 years of songlines and dreaming before a bunch of English soldiers, in 1788, marched a few hundred Irish Catholics and eight lonely Jews off to the first Anglican service in the newly established settlement at Sydney Cove. "I've been drinking Coopers for 30 years but I'm never touching it again," proclaimed one bloke at news some malt products produced as a small subsidiary of the Coopers brewing business carried halal certification. There is legitimate squeamishness about the methods employed in the slaughter of halal meat but these people use it as a convenient cloak to drape over their paranoia and it's fair to say not a drop of blood was spilt in the production of a tub of Fleurieu yoghurt. There's one thing that needs to be said to these people: next time you're racing to your computer to post a picture of some consumer good that secretly wants to ruin your life, wipe the dribble from your keyboard and google ""Dr Gillian Hicks," a woman with greater reason to hate than you'll ever have, a woman who spends her time trying to understand and reach out to proponents of the radicalism that took away her legs, a woman with better things to do than flush out the Caliphate hiding in crumpets. Maybe then you'll learn that you can't fight against someone's radicalism by just imposing your own.