Posted on 02/27/2006 7:34:31 AM PST by Dark Skies
IT WAS an unexpected double act which again demonstrated the power of the written word. On Monday, the media reported comments by John Howard to journalist George Megalogenis, which are in Nick Cater's edited collection The Howard Factor (MUP, 2006). The Prime Minister expressed concern that for the first time in Australian history, there is a "fragment" among immigrants "which is utterly antagonistic to our kind of society". The comments were made on December 9, shortly before the social unrest which followed events in Cronulla.
Howard referred to (unnamed) groups "raving on about jihad" and holding "extreme attitudes" to women. However, in response to a question, Howard said "most" Muslims would settle as readily in Australia, as others have. Even so, the comment engendered controversy, including the familiar critique that he should not have raised the issue.
Then it was Peter Costello's turn. Addressing the Sydney Institute last Thursday, the Treasurer said that "we expect all those who call themselves Australians to subscribe to … loyalty, democracy, tolerance [and] the rule of law", and depicted such a commitment as enshrining "the values of Australia and its citizens". He contrasted this position with the views expressed by Abdul Nasser Ben Brika (sometimes called Abu Bakr) who told Lateline last August that Islam "doesn't tolerate other religions" and that in Australia "there are two laws; there is an Australian law and there is an Islamic law".
Costello's position was blunt. There is "one law we are all expected to abide by", namely, "the law enacted by the Parliament" under the constitution. He added that "if a person wants to live under sharia law" there are nations - he mentioned Saudi Arabia and Iran - where "they might feel at ease".
This was not the first time Costello has made such a comment. On December 16 he said that "if your loyalty isn't to Australia, well, there may be another country where you feel happier". Asked about his attitude to multiculturalism, he replied: "If multiculturalism means eating souvlaki and dancing the zorba, I'm absolutely for it; if multiculturalism means not assimilating into Australia and not having your first love for this country, then I'm against it."
Costello's message last week gained much more attention than his previous comment because it was delivered as a well-crafted speech. Similarly, Howard's comments received attention primarily because they were published initially in a book. Both statements have been criticised by some as out of place. The journalist Michelle Grattan, on ABC Radio National, described them as confronting and provocative and the commentator David Marr had a similar criticism on last Sunday's ABC TV Insider program. Grattan said that similar comments could have been made in the past about migrants from Yugoslavia and Ireland. Yet no members of either immigrant group ever expressed an intention to dismantle Australian democracy and replace it with another system of government.
It was notable, however, that most Labor figures chose not to criticise either Howard or Costello. The ALP frontbencher Tony Burke replied to Howard's comments by declaring that it was the role of the Immigration Department "to let the people who will be good contributors to society in and to keep the people who will be a problem out". And Kim Beazley responded by saying that if Costello "wants to prevent people who have a jihadist mind coming into this country, let him ensure that that happens". The NSW Premier, Morris lemma, supported Costello.
What Beazley and lemma have in common with Howard and Costello is that they, too, receive briefings on national security from intelligence and/or police sources. In other words, they know from official advice that there is a threat, albeit probably a small one, to national security from radical Islamists. Already one radicalised Muslim has pleaded guilty of conspiracy to bomb the Israeli embassy in Canberra and another has been found guilty on a terrorist-related charge in Melbourne.
In his speech Costello reflected that the Australian immigration experience is a broad one. He said "originally it was Anglo-Celtic but after the war our immigrants came increasingly from southern Europe" and that in more recent times "Vietnamese and Chinese immigrant communities have grown considerably in numbers". He said "all these immigrants have made successful contributions to Australian life". The same can be said for Muslims from Afghanistan, Turkey, Bosnia, Indonesia and the like.
What Howard and Costello have said, and what Beazley and the premiers understand, is that there is a problem of alienation among a minority of young men within the minority of Muslim groups which have come to Australia from parts of the Middle East and North Africa in recent decades. This is a fact which has been acknowledged by some courageous moderate Muslim Australians.
Australia is not unique in this. The same can be said of many Western democracies including Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain. To refuse to acknowledge this is to engage in an act of denial.
Revolutionaries deserve to be taken seriously. If radical Islamists say they want to overthrow Western democracies and establish sharia law, they should be regarded as being serious, unless the contrary is proven. The potential problem in Australia should not be exaggerated but nor should it be ignored. The conservative Howard Government has taken a similar stance to Tony Blair's social democratic government in Britain. It is only the left in both countries which is seriously into denial and which rails against discussion of a genuine social issue.
Gerard Henderson is executive director of the Sydney Institute.
ping
Hear hear!
When you see it coming,
do something. Like this Howard guy.
The peculiar human passion for the exoskeletons of mollusks has been around since early humans first started picking up pretty objects. Shellfish were, of course, already familiar as food: some scientists argue that clams, mussels, snails and the like were critical to the brain development that made us human in the first place. But people also soon noticed their delicately sculpted and decorated shells. Anthropologists have identified beads made from shells in North Africa and Israel at least 100,000 years ago as among the earliest known evidence of modern human culture.
Interesting post.
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