Saturday, July 31, 2010
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Sunday, July 25, 2010
Tony Abbott plans to block 130,000 people from migrating to Australia
From news.com.au
THE Coalition will slash immigration by about 130,000 people - dramatically ending bipartisan population growth policy in Australia.
The cuts will focus on the family and student visa programs.
Opposition Leader Tony Abbott will announce the cut today ahead of Sunday's leaders' debate.
"A fair dinkum debate about population can't avoid immigration because that's what's driving the increase," Mr Abbott writes in today's Sunday Herald Sun.
read more here
Monday, July 19, 2010
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Friday, July 16, 2010
Dutch lawmaker forms anti-Islam group
THE HAGUE, Netherlands — Maverick Dutch lawmaker Geert Wilders says he is launching an international "freedom alliance" to spread his anti-Islam message across the West.
He told The Associated Press in an interview Thursday he will launch the international movement late this year, initially in five countries: the United States, Canada, Britain, France and Germany.
Geert Wilders told The Associated Press in an interview Thursday he will launch the movement late this year, initially in five countries: the U.S., Canada, Britain, France and Germany.
"The message, 'stop Islam, defend freedom,' is a message that's not only important for the Netherlands but for the whole free Western world," Wilders said at the Dutch parliament.
Among the group's aims will be outlawing immigration from Islamic countries to the West and a ban on Islamic Sharia law. Starting as a grass-roots movement, he hopes it eventually will produce its own lawmakers or influence other legislators.
Ayhan Tonca, a prominent spokesman for Dutch Muslims, said he feared Wilders message would fall on fertile ground in much of Europe, where anti-Islam sentiment has been swelling for years.
"So long as things are going badly with the economy, a lot of people always need a scapegoat," Tonca said. "At the moment, that is the Muslims in Western Europe."
Tonca called on "well meaning people in Europe to oppose this."
Known for his bleached-blond mop of hair, Wilders is a shrewd politician who has won awards in the Netherlands for his debating skills and regularly stands up for gay and women's rights.
But he rose to local and then international prominence with his firebrand anti-Islam rhetoric that has led to him being charged under Dutch anti-hate speech laws and banned from visiting Britain — until a court there ordered that he be allowed into the country.
He said he hopes to position the alliance between traditional conservative parties and far-right wing groups, saying that in Britain there is "an enormous gap" between the ruling Conservative Party and the far-right British National Party.
"The BNP is a party that, whatever you think of it, it's not my party — I think it's a racist party," Wilders said.
Wilders, who calls Islam a "fascist" religion, has seen his support in the Netherlands soar in recent years, even while he has been subjected to round-the-clock protection because of death threats.
His Freedom Party won the biggest gains in a national election last month, coming third with 24 seats in the 150-seat Parliament, up from the nine before the election. However, mainstream parties will not form a coalition with Wilders, leaving him on the margins of Dutch politics for the next parliamentary term.
Wilders is due to stand trial in October on hate speech charges stemming from his short Internet film "Fitna," which denounced the Quran as a a fascist book that inspires terrorism.
The film aroused anti-Dutch protests around the Muslim world, and he was banned for several months from entering Britain. But he is unrepentant and said he now wants to take his message outside the Netherlands.
"The fight for freedom and (against) Islamization as I see it is a worldwide phenomenon and problem to be solved," he said.
Wilders declined to name any of the other founders of the organization he is calling the Geert Wilders International Freedom Alliance.
He said he would hold speeches in the five countries where the alliance will first launch in coming months to drum up support.
Wilders has been criticized in the Netherlands for running his party as a one-man show that is shrouded in secrecy because he holds all the reins.
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
The bond between Nazis and Islam
THE Islamists have silenced Western intellectuals on their anti-Semitism.
IN our present Age of the Zipped Lip, you are supposed to avoid making any of the following inconvenient observations about the history and doctrines of the Islamist movement:
You are not supposed to observe that Islamism is a modern, instead of an ancient, political tendency, which arose in a spirit of harmony with the fascists of Europe in the 1930s and 40s. You are not supposed to point out that Nazi inspirations have taken root among present-day Islamists, notably in regard to the demonic nature of Jewish conspiracies and the virtues of genocide.
And you are not supposed to mention that, by inducing a variety of journalists and intellectuals to maintain a respectful silence on these awkward matters, the Islamist preachers and ideologues have imposed on the rest of us their own categories of analysis.
Or so I have argued in my recent book, The Flight of the Intellectuals. But am I right? I glance with pleasure at some harsh reviews, convinced that here is my best confirmation.
No one disputes that the Nazis collaborated with several Islamist leaders. Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, orated over Radio Berlin to the Middle East. The mufti's strongest supporter in the region was Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. Al-Banna, too, spoke well of Hitler.
Tariq Ramadan, the Islamic philosopher at Oxford, is Banna's grandson, and he argues that his grandfather was an upstanding democrat, and that everything the Islamists did in the past ought to be viewed sympathetically - as logical expressions of anti-colonial geopolitics.
Reviews in Foreign Affairs, the National Interest and the New Yorker have just now spun variations on Ramadan's interpretation.
The piece in Foreign Affairs insists that, to the mufti of Jerusalem, Hitler was merely a "convenient ally", and it is "ludicrous" to imagine a deeper alliance.
Those in the National Interest and the New Yorker add that "unlikely alliances" with Nazis were common among anti-colonialists. The articles point to some of Gandhi's comrades, to a faction of the IRA, and even to a dim-witted Zionist militant in 1940, who believed for a moment that Hitler could be an ally against the British.
But these various efforts to minimise the significance of the Nazi-Islamist alliance ignore a mountain of evidence, some of it discovered last year in the State Department archives revealing links that are genuinely profound.
"Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history and religion," said the mufti of Jerusalem on Radio Berlin in 1944.
And the mufti's rhetoric echoes today in major Islamist manifestos such as the Hamas charter and in the popular television oratory of Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi: "Oh, Allah, count their numbers, and kill them, down to the very last one."
Foreign Affairs, the National Interest and the New Yorker have expended nearly 12,000 words in criticising Flight of the Intellectuals. And yet, though the book hinges on a series of such genocidal quotations, not one of those journals has found sufficient space to reproduce even a single phrase.
Why not? It is because a few Hitlerian quotations from Islamist leaders would make everything else in those essays look ridiculous - the argument in Foreign Affairs, for instance, that Hamas merits praise as a "firewall against radicalisation". The New Yorker is the only one to reflect even briefly on anti-Semitism. But it does so by chastising Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-Dutch champion of liberal values.
In the New Yorker's estimation, Hirsi Ali's admiration of the philosopher Voltaire displays an ignorant failure on her part to recognise that, hundreds of years ago, even the greatest of liberals thought poorly of the Jews.
But this reeks of bad faith. Hirsi Ali is one of the world's most eloquent enemies of the Islamist movement. She makes a point of singling out Islamist anti-Semitism. And the anti-Semites have singled her out in return.
Six years ago, an Islamist fanatic murdered Hirsi Ali's filmmaking colleague, Theo van Gogh, and left behind a death threat, pinned with a dagger to the dead man's torso, denouncing Hirsi Ali as an agent of Jewish conspirators. And yet, the New Yorker has the gall to explain, if anyone needs a lecture on the history of anti-Semitism, it's Hirsi Ali.
Such is the temper of our moment. Some of the intellectuals are indisputably in flight - eager to sneer at outspoken liberals from Muslim backgrounds, and reluctant to speak the truth about the Islamist reality.
Paul Berman's latest book, The Flight of the Intellectuals, will be published in Australia in September by Scribe
Sunday, July 11, 2010
“Famous” bin Laden: teaching children our fear of terrorism is racist
This article is from The heraldsun. Yeah, I know, I'm surprised too. - Dave
What an offensive corruption of our curriculum. Children are to be taught the fabled best of Islam and the imagined worst of Australia to blind us all to the real challenges Islam poses even to a country that’s peacefully integrated the many more Buddhists here:
EVERY Australian school student would be taught positive aspects about Islam and Muslims - and that Australia is a racist country - under a proposal by an education think tank.
The plan is outlined in the Learning From One Another: Bringing Muslim Perspectives into Australian Schools booklet, published during the week by the Australian Curriculum Studies Association and the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Excellence in Islamic Studies.
It says there is a “degree of prejudice and ignorance about Islam and Muslims”, and Australian students must be taught to embrace difference and diversity.
The booklet refers to the al-Qai’da of Osama bin Laden as “a famous name” synonymous with the traditionalist movement in Islam. It makes no reference to terrorism.
It says “most texts used in Australian English classes still have a Western or European perspective”.
How impudent for a largely immigrant community, comprising a very small minority, to demand English classes now be taught more from their perspective rather than the communal perspective of the country to which most chose to come - a communal perspective that reflects the values and institutions that have made this country worth coming to in the first place. It is particularly offensive in that the host nation is demonised as racist while the very real and in some cases lethal challenges posed by the newcomers are glossed over.
This National Centre of Excellence for Islamic Studies document is the well-meaning - but dangerously foolish and deceptive - work of Dr Eeqbal Hassim, a former research fellow in Islamic Law at the University of Melbourne, and Jennet Cole-Adams, director of Curriculum Services at the Australian Curriculum Studies Association.
Most tellingly, it has only passing and vague references to Islamic terrorism, which is the key explanation for Australia’s alleged “racism” towards Muslims - something that might in many case might be more properly described as a natural caution, and one limited to Muslims here than to Buddhists or any other largely immigrant group that seems curiously immune to our “racism”. There is no mention at all of the Islamist killings of some 100 Australian in Bali, or of the Muslim terrorist plots in Australia itself, which have seen 20 people jailed.
Here is the document’s reference to Islamist terror groups, suggesting that Islamist terrorism is created by Western arrogance more than any sickness within Islam itself or Arabic cultures:
The rapid nature of this change has seen the Muslim world struggle to cope with modernity at times. The decline of Islamic influence has been met with two broad responses from the Muslim world. The first has been to adapt Islam to modernity, the approach of those we generally call the ‘modernists’ or ‘moderates’. The second has been to oppose it, an approach labelled, correctly or incorrectly, ‘traditionalist’ or ‘fundamentalist’. The first group focus on the inherent harmony between Islam and scientific progress, regardless of who is leading that advancement, and are not generally in conflict with the West…
The second group believe, in general terms, that the West has always tried to subvert and gain ascendancy over Islam. Their focus is on giving Islam global dominance once again. Some famous names synonymous with this movement are the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwanul-Muslimin) of Syed Qutb and Hasan al-Banna, and Al-Qaeda of Osama bin Laden.
After the Oil Boom in the 1970s and the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the 1980s saw an Islamic revivalism that reflected the second response. This revivalism has exacerbated tensions between Islam and the West. The mutual distrust between the Islamic and Western worlds is nothing new; it was evident during the Crusades. Often, this mistrust is caused by, and/or coupled with, ignorance and prejudice. The current tensions, particularly concerning Arab-Israeli relations, the oil trade, the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and terrorism, are constant reminders of this distrust.
And that’s it. Oh, and the Crusades are presented largely as noble Muslims defending holy lands from barbaric Christians. You’d never guess that Christians thought they were recapturing holy lands from Muslim armies that had overrun them militarily.
Then there is this pious assertion, claiming an overwhelming public rejection by Muslims of Islamist terrorism that very few, if any, Australians would have actually heard:
On the contrary, most Muslims are outspoken in their criticism of terrorism, regardless of the perpetrator. This is because Islam only allows for a just war as outlined above. It cannot be denied, however, that some Muslims condone terrorism in the name of Islam. From their perspective, the ‘enemies of Islam’ are the terrorists and they are the warriors of the faith.
Well, at least the authors admit some Muslims here do indeed condone Islamist terrorism, which is precisely why many Australians are so jittery about the people they’ve invited here.
Nor is this the only grudging and muted acknowledgement of the difficulties we will have in integrating Muslim students here, and not because we are racist. In fact, the difficulties are of the kind and extent that suggest to me that in many cases we will fail to integrate Muslims, and perhaps to our cost.
Examples from this teaching guide for schools (and note the blameshifting from Muslim culture to Australian racism):
Muslim unemployment figures are generally higher than the national average. The reasons for this are numerous but underlying discrimination and prejudice towards non-Europeans in Australia may be a factor ...
Religious beliefs held by Muslims (and others, including Christians) can lead to concerns about some content covered within the science curriculum. Many Muslims oppose Darwinism and the theory of evolution, deeming these to be in opposition to Islamic creationism....
Some Muslims also ask why some of their fellow believers are so socio-economically and educationally disadvantaged in the world today. They argue that the reason for this is not Islam; it is the fault of the former colonial powers who left Muslim lands unprepared for independence.
Many make the same argument about America’s involvement in various Muslim countries on the grounds of fighting terrorism and introducing democracy....In visual art, some Muslim students and/or their parents will be uncomfortable with drawing and sculpting animate objects (people and animals). .. While most Muslims do not see any harm in drawing animate objects, some students have gone as far as defacing their works and the works of others…
Here are some of the opinions that you might encounter on this issue:
1. Music is prohibited in Islam except during the two Id festivals and at weddings… 2. All types of musical instruments are prohibited in Islam except for the daff, which may be used for musical purposes at all times....
Most Muslims recognise that swimming is an important life skill for all Australians, but some Muslim women in this country will not swim unless they can find an all female (and preferably all Muslim) pool....
Some Muslims see capitalism as a greed-driven economic system that leads to an imbalance in the global distribution of wealth. They argue that it makes the rich richer and the poor poorer, noting that many Muslim communities live in poverty. They also see capitalism as a product of the West. However, most Muslim students will approach the study of business at school with an open mind…
The quotes below, from her interviews with Muslim parents, identify some of their common concerns. “Morally, Australia is not a good place to rear children. Smoking, drugs and illicit relations are a constant threat. We have to be particular about children’s friends, try to know the family and make sure that the child has good company."… “You cannot become part of mainstream Australian society due to the cultural difference. So, for the sake of maintaining one’s identity, you tend to find refuge in religion and start practising it more strictly."…
Muslim student absenteeism during Ramadan is common…
However, it is common for female Muslim students not to attend (school camps)…
While many Muslim states across the world do not adopt democracy, the Quran actually orders Muslims to engage in consultation (shura) in order to run their daily affairs. The system of shura is somewhat similar to democracy. However, many Muslims still live under authoritarian regimes and/or believe that democracy is the product of the West and should be dismissed…
While some Muslims believe (women are inferior to men under Islam), due to their cultural and family background, others strongly oppose it…
Some Muslims do want this (their own system of law) but the vast majority of Muslims will abide by the laws of the land.
Only a fool could not see a problem in importing more people from a faith that sets many so apart from, and at odds to, the culture of their host country.
Friday, July 9, 2010
In reply to the article below
Sadly though, most of the damage has already been done here in Australia. We have had so much immigration over the last 10-20 years or so, sometimes I get the feeling I'm living in India or Africa or some other 3rd world shit hole. The Australia I grew up in, the country I loved, the people I love, has been slowly transformed into a multicultural hell hole. My Australian culture and Australian way of life has been trampled on, shit upon, and generally treated like a used up old whore, and for what? I'm just glad it has finally been recognised that we ought to protect our culture, our way of life, for the benefit of all Australians and now and into the future.
Cultural relativity can go to hell.
Politicians finally hear the people say 'enough'
VOTERS in Australia and Britain have had their fill of out-of-control multiculturalism.
AT first blush, Julia Gillard's volte-face over immigration would seem to be as unlikely as Osama bin Laden singing the Star Spangled Banner or Richard Dawkins taking holy orders.
Here is a politician with a solid pedigree on the "anti-racist" Left rejecting former prime minister Kevin Rudd's call for a "Big Australia" formed by continuing large-scale immigration.
Instead, Gillard has said she understands the anxieties of folk in western Sydney, western Melbourne or the Gold Coast growth corridor in Queensland.
As for the boats of asylum-seekers, Gillard has made clear she wants to be even more effective in stopping them in order to protect "our sanctuary" and "the Australian way".
In other words, Gillard is signalling that she sympathises with the concern that large-scale immigration and multiculturalism are threatening Australia's core values and identity, a position the Left denounces as bigotry.
Consequently, Gillard's remarks have produced predictable cries of "racism" and "dog-whistling". So why has the new Labor leader ventured into this particular cultural minefield? The explanation is that something tumultuous is happening, not just in Australia but in Britain too, something so unusual that people are stumbling around in a state of stunned disorientation.
It is that politicians are at last actually taking seriously what their electorates are saying to them about immigration and multiculturalism. This is that they will no longer put up with a policy which threatens to destroy their country's values and way of life, and will vote accordingly.
In Britain even more than in Australia - where at least John Howard or Tony Abbott have tackled such issues - race and culture have long been totally taboo. No debate has been possible about whether mass immigration might be a bad thing for communities or the country as a whole.
Even to question this has been to invite instant denunciation as a racist from the dominant left-wing intelligentsia, for whom anti-racism has long been their signature creed.
The Conservative leader and now Prime Minister, David Cameron, who is driven by the need to bury the label of "the nasty party" that was hung round the Tories' neck, was accordingly too nervous even to mention immigration during the recent election campaign, even though it was at the very top of the list of voters' concerns.
But Cameron didn't win the election, and is now forced to govern in a coalition with the left-wing LibDems. His failure to talk about immigration is said to be the reason why he failed to win an election that was thought impossible for him to lose.
Nothing concentrates the political mind so well as the spectre of defeat. And so now in both Britain and Australia a political sea change is taking place.
In both countries, voters are stating unequivocally that they have seen through all the spin about multiculturalism, all the false arguments about the alleged economic advantages of mass immigration, all the bullying and name-calling about racism.
They look at their neighbourhoods and realise that their culture and national identity are being replaced by something entirely new. No one has ever asked them for their consent to this. And they are simply not going to take it any more.
In Britain, the public services are buckling under the sheer weight of the numbers coming into the country.
More explosive is the cultural transformation, particularly by the large influx and expansion of Muslims who, rather than accommodating themselves to British society, expect it to accommodate itself to them.
So Britain is being steadily Islamised, with more than 1700 mosques, the development of a parallel jurisdiction of sharia law in Muslim enclaves, banks offering sharia financing, extremists given free rein on campuses and relentless pressure to suppress and censor any criticism of Islam or the Muslim community.
In parts of Australia too there are similar worries about the growth of the Muslim community, the pressure not to criticise any aggression it may display and the simultaneous onslaught upon Australian values by the likes of [Muslim cleric] Sheik Hilaly.
Listening to such concerns pays electoral dividends, as shown by Abbott, who has made such headway by defending the traditional values and national integrity of Australia as an entirely justifiable and moral position.
So Gillard is now humming the same tune, saying she sympathises with voters' desire for strong management of Australia's borders, and pledging "sustainable population" increase with the "right kind of immigrant".
A similar political convulsion is occurring in Britain. The Conservative Home Secretary, Theresa May, has promised to put a cap on immigration, a pledge that was in the Conservative manifesto but rarely mentioned during the election campaign.
Even more striking is the abrupt change of tune among several contenders for the leadership of the defeated British Labour Party. While front-runner David Miliband is sticking with its open-door immigration policy, his younger brother Ed has said "we never had an answer for the people who were worried about it".
Former Labour health secretary Andy Burnham claims the party has been "in denial" about the issue, which was "the biggest doorstep issue in constituencies where Labour lost".
Most jaw-dropping of all, former education secretary and hard man of the Left Ed Balls has said high levels of immigration under Labour had affected the pay and conditions of "too many people", and has called for better protection for British workers if the European Union expands any further.
Such death-bed conversions are of course driven by cynical political considerations. Nevertheless, they are levering open an ideological fixation which has not just sunk democratic politics into disrepute but driven culture and morality in both Britain and Australia off the rails altogether.
For the doctrines of anti-racism and multiculturalism have not ended intolerance, prejudice or discrimination. They have instead institutionalised reverse discrimination and up-ended truth, morality and justice.
Following the Marxist doctrine that prejudice is restricted to those with power, they have given Third-World ethnic minorities special protection from rules or conventions that apply to everyone else.
They have also served to falsify the history of both Britain and Australia in the minds of countless thousands of young people, who are taught propaganda based on a false or distorted story of national oppression and shame.
Multiculturalism threatens to undermine societies, by removing the cultural glue that binds all citizens together and balkanising the country into interest groups fighting for supremacy.
Once upon a time, the need to have strong borders and endorse a historic cultural identity were axiomatic elements of citizenship and national survival.
But mass immigration and multiculturalism are predicated on what is called "transnationalism", the belief that the nation is the source of all the ills of the world and must be replaced by supranational institutions and cultural identities.
This is precisely what -at a visceral level - the people of both Australia and Britain understand and are refusing to accept.
And at last, in both Australia and Britain, politicians are being forced to listen.
Melanie Phillips is a columnist for the UK Daily Mail.
Thursday, July 8, 2010
A Holocaust Survivor's View on Fanatical Islam
We are told again and again by 'experts' and 'talking heads' that Islam is the religion of peace and that the vast majority of Muslims just want to live in peace. Although this unqualified assertion may be true, it is entirely irrelevant. It is meaningless fluff, meant to make us feel better, and meant to somehow diminish the specter of fanatics rampaging across the globe in the name of Islam.
The fact is that the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history. It is the fanatics who march.. It is the fanatics who wage any one of 50 shooting wars worldwide. It is the fanatics who systematically slaughter Christian or tribal groups throughout Africa and are gradually taking over the entire continent in an Islamic wave. It is the fanatics who bomb, behead, murder, or honor-kill. It is the fanatics who take over mosque after mosque. It is the fanatics who zealously spread the stoning and hanging of rape victims and homosexuals. It is the fanatics who teach their young to kill and to become suicide bombers.
The hard, quantifiable fact is that the peaceful majority, the 'silent majority,' is cowed and extraneous.
Communist Russia was comprised of Russians who just wanted to live in peace, yet the Russian Communists were responsible for the murder of about 20 million people. The peaceful majority were irrelevant. China's huge population was peaceful as well, but Chinese Communists managed to kill a staggering 70 million people.
The average Japanese individual prior to World War II was not a warmongering sadist. Yet, Japan murdered and slaughtered its way across South East Asia in an orgy of killing that included the systematic murder of 12 million Chinese civilians; most killed by sword, shovel, and bayonet.
And who can forget Rwanda, which collapsed into butchery. Could it not be said that the majority of Rwandans were 'peace loving'?
History lessons are often incredibly simple and blunt, yet for all our powers of reason, we often miss the most basic and uncomplicated of points: Peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by their silence.
Peace-loving Muslims will become our enemy if they don't speak up, because like my friend from Germany, they will awaken one day and find that the fanatics own them, and the end of their world will have begun.
Peace-loving Germans, Japanese, Chinese, Russians, Rwandans, Serbs, Afghans, Iraqis, Palestinians, Somalis, Nigerians, Algerians, and many others have died because the peaceful majority did not speak up until it was too late. As for us who watch it all unfold, we must pay attention to the only group that counts -- the fanatics who threaten our way of life.
Emanuel Tanay, M.D. 2980 Provincial St. Ann Arbor , MI 48104
*Dr. Emanuel Tanay MD is a well-known forensic psychiatrist who has been an expert witness in many famous cases. He has served as an officer or committee member on the Michigan Psychiatric Society, the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, the American Psychiatric Association (APA), and others. He is a diplomat of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology and of the American Board of Forensic Psychiatry and a distinguished fellow of the APA and the American Academy of Forensic Sciences (AAFC).
A Holocaust survivor himself, Dr Tanay coauthored a book about the survivors of the Holocaust and was asked by the German government to consult on just compensation for the Holocaust survivors. Dr. Tanay has served on several journal editorial boards, authored many publications, and presented countless times on forensic medicine. His efforts have also produced many awards and commendations from groups such as the Michigan State Medical Society, APA, the Detroit Institute of Technology, and AAFC, among others.
I hope this letter gets read by millions of people all across the nation!