Immigration challenges in the era of Islam

David van Gend I 27 April 2024 I The Spectator Australia

The motion was never going to pass, but the debate was needed in 2017 as much as now. The?Sydney Morning Herald?reported, ‘LNP convention rejects Muslim immigration ban’ and noted that ‘delegate David van Gend moved the resolution on foreign policy, calling on the federal government to suspend immigration from nations that “enforce sharia doctrines of death for blasphemy, apostasy, homosexuality or adultery”.’ The?Herald?then quoted my quote from the European Court of Human Rights, ‘Sharia is incompatible with the fundamental values of democracy.’

Pause there. The ECHR is no right-wing think tank, but it identifies a fundamental incompatibility between Islamic political culture and Western political culture. In the Court’s support for the banning of a Turkish Islamist party (Refah, 2003) it notes that ‘principles such as pluralism in the political sphere and the constant evolution of public freedoms have no place’ in sharia, the comprehensive religious-political-legal code derived from the Koran and the life of Mohammed, which faithful Muslims are bound to live by.

Take the first of the doctrines, death for blasphemy, under which the murders of the?Charlie Hebdo?journalists and the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh have been committed, and death threatened to the likes of Salman Rushdie, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Danish cartoonists and our own late great Bill Leak.

Look to our cricketing buddies in Pakistan, where sharia is ‘the supreme law’ and blasphemy has been punishable by death since 1986 – think of poor Mrs Asia Bibi, the Pakistani Christian mother who was kept on death row for years on spurious charges of speaking ill of Islam’s Prophet at the village well. As the Australian scholar of Islam, Mark Durie, writes, ‘under sharia conditions it is a capital offense to speak critically or sarcastically of Muhammad’.

In non-sharia countries, death for blasphemy must be imposed either by long-distance fatwa from religious authorities overseas (as with the Englishman Rushdie by the Iranian Ayatollah) or by vigilante Muslims avenging their Prophet’s honour (as with the cartoonists and writers above – and by the youth who allegedly tried to kill Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel in Sydney this month, allegedly saying at the scene in Arabic, ‘If he did not curse my Prophet, I wouldn’t have come here.’)

Spot the cultural incompatibility? Western democracies embrace the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, foremost of which is the right to speak freely about anything we think matters – including religious ideology. A doctrine of death to anyone who criticises a migrant’s religion should give pause to our immigration policy. A doctrine of death to anyone who quits that religion (as Mohammed said, ‘Whoever changes his religion, kill him’, Sahih al-Bukhari 9.84.57) is another notable problem. Show me a more fundamental incompatibility with the Universal Declaration’s ‘freedom to change religion’!

Sometimes a single face sums up a terrible truth. Ayaan Hirsi Ali marks twenty years this year of being marked for death for alleged blasphemy, after scripting the movie,?Submission, deeply critical of Islam’s treatment of women. Her co-producer, Theo van Gogh, was stabbed to death by Islamist Mohammed Bouyeri in 2004, leaving a note pinned with a knife to the filmmaker’s belly telling Ayaan Hirsi Ali she was next. Now a Christian, she adds the crime of changing her religion to the grounds for being killed under sharia law.

The?Herald?quoted a man I admire, Paul Scarr, opposing my sharia motion on big-hearted grounds: ‘We should provide the opportunity for people who are being subjected to all of these horrific laws in those countries to seek a better life in our beautiful country.’

Kind thought, but if the ‘horrific laws’ are part of a sharia package, which is not discarded merely by virtue of a change of country, then it is reckless kindness to admit those Muslims who adhere to such sharia principles. As I told the LNP convention, ‘They don’t leave their culture at the arrival lounge, nor should they. They bring it with them’.

I did make one clear proposal: let the Islamic authorities at the global level, such as the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation and the OIC’s International Fiqh Academy, formally repudiate the doctrines of death for blasphemy and death for apostasy, along with death for adultery and homosexuality, and we can celebrate the birth of a truly peaceful Islam and welcome migrants warmly. But if the global Islamic authorities tell us those doctrines of death cannot change, confirming sharia’s fundamental incompatibility with the values of democracy, then surely, surely, a half-sane Western nation will acknowledge those fatal incompatibilities, wish Muslims all the very best but agree to develop in separate spheres?

The inaction of our political leaders has consequences. Now a senator, Paul Scarr has given two moving speeches since 7 October, conveying the fears of Jewish Queenslanders experiencing unprecedented hostility, and reading a teacher’s letter about the trauma her children and other Jewish students are suffering from antisemitic harassment.

So how’s the non-discriminating, ask-no-cultural-questions immigration policy working out for your Jewish constituents and frightened students, Paul? They, too, suffer from the sharia doctrine of Jews being the designated enemies of Islam, as spelled out by Mohammed: ‘The Hour will not be established until you fight against the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say, O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him.’ (Sahih al-Bukhari, Book of Jihad, 4:56:2926).

I scandalised some LNP friends in 2015 when I warned that the duty of government lay in limiting Muslim immigration from sharia-based jurisdictions below the critical mass in marginal seats in western Sydney, beyond which the iron law of democratic numbers would change the policies of our major parties.

A decade of kicking that can down the road, a decade of mass immigration with no thought to cultural compatibility leading to massive minorities in western Sydney, and we see that iron law in action: federal Labor’s compromised response to 7 October and the antisemitic Opera House mob, its reluctance to stand unequivocally with Israel against the demonic depravity of Hamas.

My hope, and the prayer of many gentle Muslims I am sure, is that sharia’s doctrines of death might be revoked in the same way the Old Testament doctrine of stoning the adulteress was superseded by Christ’s compassionate response. Then, and only then, is there a future without fear.

AUTHOR David van Gend