Posted on 11/09/2005 1:30:04 AM PST by naturalman1975
SO it wasn't a political stunt. It isn't about Iraq. And the threat of Islamist terror right here is more real than many pretend.
How real? If the police are right, they have saved scores of you from being blown up -- as people in Madrid and London were blown up.
As NSW Police Commissioner Ken Moroney put it, the arrest yesterday of 17 Muslim men disrupted "the final stages of a large-scale terrorist attack". He said explosive material had already been collected.
Yet only last week, Prime Minister John Howard was pilloried by many for having warned of an "imminent" terrorist threat and recalling Parliament to amend our terror laws to deal with it.
He was just distracting us from his industrial relations changes, wasn't he? It was by "incredibly coincidence or by political design" that the terror warning came just as the IR bill was unveiled, said The Age with a sneer.
And how silly were these sedition laws in his new anti-terrorism Bill that ban the preaching of violent change?
Artists such as Max Gillies and Wil Anderson thought them such a farce that they are putting on a Sydney concert to mock them. God spare us such unserious men.
We do not know that the 17 Muslims arrested in Melbourne and Sydney yesterday are guilty of any crime. That is for a court to decide.
We do know, however, enough to be sure this was not cooked up by Adolf Howard just the other day when his polls slid south.
These arrests follow an investigation that's lasted 18 months, and were conducted by three police forces.
One of the men arrested is Algerian-born Melbourne preacher Abdul Nacer Benbrika, who recently told ABC television that al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden was "a great man". Another was shot yesterday when he allegedly pulled a gun.
But our unserious men will soon be back to find a new way to make the villains not those who wish to kill us, but those who seek to protect.
Blame Iraq, they'll insist again. If only we hadn't invaded, we'd be safe.
But now I interrupt to bring you the latest war news from the Western front.
In France, police have imposed curfews to try to halt almost two weeks of riots by French Muslims who have so far burned more than 3500 cars, torched schools, shot at police and killed a 61-year-man. France has about six million Muslims, mainly from north Africa, and mainly poor and jobless.
In Germany, police report possible copy-cat attacks in Berlin and Bremen. Cars are burning in Brussels.
In Denmark, Muslim youths have rampaged in Aarhus after a Danish newspaper printed cartoons mocking the Prophet.
In Britain, two Muslims appeared in court on Sunday charged over an alleged bomb plot. They are not believed to be linked to the London suicide bombings by British jihadists in July.
In Spain's African enclave, police recently shot desperate Muslims scrambling over barricades to reach the West. With the population in Muslim lands soaring, while Europe's falls, more such confrontations are expected.
In Holland, mourners have marked the first anniversary of the murder of Dutch director Theo van Gogh, who was almost decapitated by a Muslim extremist for making a film mocking Islam.
If I had time, I'd give you the latest from the Eastern front, too -- the beheading of three Christian schoolgirls in Indonesia, for instance, or Iran's call for Israel to be "wiped off the map".
Was all this caused by Iraq? Or do we face a problem even bigger than the prejudices of Howard's haters? So back to the topic -- the cause of our danger.
We have for decades now seen Muslim societies, especially in the Middle East, go rotten. Choked, beggared and silenced by thieving despots, these nations have bred little but despair -- and children. With little work or hope at home, millions have left the Middle East to find money and air in the West. Perhaps 10 million Muslims are now in Europe alone. More than 350,000 are here.
BUT many of these immigrants -- with their archaic and even fossilised culture -- have struggled to fit in.
We're told, for instance, that behind the French riots is the shameful fact that the unemployment rate among Muslims is at least twice that of other Frenchmen.
Hmm. Here in Australia, Muslim Lebanese in Australia are also twice as likely as anyone else to be jobless -- and to be in jail, too.
No one likes failure, but everyone likes excuses. And from the Middle East came the deadliest of all excuses. It was preached that the cause of Muslim misery -- at home and abroad -- was the West. The jihad began, and in 1998, Osama bin Laden officially declared war on the United States and its allies. In 2001, two years before Iraq, New York's World Trade Centre was destroyed.
Many of us have already been killed in this jihad -- in Bali, New York, London, Israel, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. But what threatens us more is that this jihad may take hold among Muslims here.
So far we have preferred to assume it will not. We often repeat that most Muslims are moderate, which I believe, but we don't do much to make sure that's actually the case -- and stays so.
In fact, we've been so naive that we've instead imported preachers of this new Islamist hate, and not just the Algerian Benbrika.
We also let in the Egyptian Sheik Taj el-Din el-Hilaly, now our mufti, who vilified Jews, called suicide bombers "heroes" and called the September 11 attacks "God's work against oppressors".
From Jordan we let in Sheik Mohammed Omran, friend of a suspected al-Qaida boss, who claims September 11 is really the work of a US-based conspiracy and now leads our biggest radical Islamist group. From Lebanon we let in Sheik Abdul Salam Zoud, who also has links to al-Qaida clerics and was reported last week giving a sermon in which he screamed "God grant victory to the mujaheddin in Iraq!"
Even "moderates" such as the Islamic Information Services Network of Australia put links on their website to advice like this: "In regard to non-Muslims who are at war with the Muslims and do not have a peace treaty with the Muslims or are not living under Muslim rule, then Muslims are commanded to kill them . . ."
It took us long to realise that such calls to war had willing hearers, even after Islamist convert Jack Roche was jailed for plotting the bombing of the Israeli embassy in Canberra.
Other warnings were also seemingly dismissed by our preaching classes as trivial. Sydney Muslims were found guilty by Lebanese courts of terrorist-related charges, and French Muslim Willie Brigitte was arrested here on suspicion of organising a terror attack, but neither case caused much fuss. In fact, many commentators still treat al-Qaida recruit David Hicks, now in Guantanamo Bay, as a kind of hero.
How blind we've been at times, so eager to seem non-racist that we push every culture but our own.
And so we gave the pro-bin Laden Islamic Youth Movement, since investigated for links with terrorism, two multicultural grants to teach Arabic, and a third grant to arrange its propaganda. Why do we, even now, give grants to teach Arabic to immigrant children, when the mufti of Australia barely speaks English?
Our institutions bent over to be tolerant to the intolerant. Monash University even invited as its guest speaker Yvonne Ridley, a Muslim convert who praises suicide bombers and has defended the killing of Israeli children on the grounds that they grow up to be Israeli soldiers.
In Victoria, two Christian pastors who laughed at the Koran as they warned of the rules of jihad were even prosecuted for hate speech.
And all of this we've done while preaching in our schools, films, universities and museums a version of Australia so shameful that no immigrant would wish to own it, let alone defend it.
Have you finally had warning enough? Do you finally see the threat is so real that it demands real solutions?
At home, multiculturalism must go, and true integration promoted. Radical preachers must be kept out, or held to account. We must let in only Muslims with the skills and desire to adapt and thrive. We can afford no French-style ghettos here, including ghettos of the mind.
A BROAD, the solutions seem clear, too, but hard. The countries breeding Islamist hatred -- and breeding the immigrants who overwhelm Europe -- must be hurried into freedom. As Iraq is already beginning to show, a free country does not turn its citizens into refugees. It gives them a future back home. A reason not to hate.
All this will takes us years, even decades. Cultures are not easy changed, or assimilated. Meanwhile, it will be wise if we learn that some people really are so unhinged as to hate this country and want to kill us. We have been warned enough. It's serious.
Come on, this never woulda happened if you played patty cake with your "disaffected Muslim youth". White Australia is to blame!!!!
(/sarcasm)
Playing fair with the unfair always loses and when IslamoPuke are involved always costs lives.
Oh yeah, it's probably the west's fault that these Islamic maniacs are "forced" to kill and destroy. The emblem of all libs should be a picture of a person with his head in the sand. It's not The Donkey Party anymore...it's The Ostrich Party. Although the Ostrich Party is still comprised of a lot of asses.
France, Germany, and Belgium--the Axis of Weasels who utterly resisted and still oppose the Iraq War. This puts the lie to the idea that the war in Iraq is the cause of Muslim alienation.
Those who are kind to the cruel end up being cruel to the kind. And Muhammadanism was founded by one cruel SOB who all Muslims are called upon to emulate. Because he was the most perfect man, who lead the most perfect life, who is a worthy example for all mankind in all times and places (sic)
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