Multiculturalism – a good idea at the time?

Maurice Newman I 24 August 2024 I The Spectator Australia

Yet Labor keeps bringing in more people from dangerous places

Once upon a time the Australian national anthem was played at sporting fixtures and when the cinema lights went down. Australia Day and Anzac Day were celebrations of our collective achievements and reaffirmed pride in our heritage and cultural homogeneity. People respected the police and street crime was mainly limited to a brawl outside the pub after six o’clock closing.

Waves of New Australians, rapidly assimilated. Speaking a foreign language in public was broadly frowned upon and driving licences were applied for in English.

True there were migrant enclaves and some soccer teams were ethnically based, but most newcomers assimilated and their loyalty and commitment to the Aussie way of life was unquestioned.

They readily committed to the values of a liberal democracy like freedom of religion, freedom of speech, respect for the rule of law and the rights of others.

Notwithstanding, in 1978 the Fraser government decided to support migrants’ rights to retain their former identities. Rather than assimilate, they were encouraged to remain separate, and so, yet another special-interest industry was born.

Over time, the change from assimilation to multiculturalism invited different interpretations of what being Australian entailed with distinctly monocultural minorities unapologetically thriving within the dominant culture. Inevitably, Australia’s traditional Anglo-Christian values have been diluted, or, conveniently, ignored.

Indeed, thirteen years ago at a Sydney Uprising in the Muslim World conference, they were outright rejected. Speakers told the 700 delegates that Muslims were obligated to resist democracy. They urged them to establish sharia law and a caliphate stretching from the Middle East to Indonesia. It was inferred Australia would be part of that caliphate.

Migrants obeying that command would have breached their oath of allegiance. If they refused, liberal Muslims risked being accused of apostasy, potentially punishable by death. It left many Muslims torn between their allegiance to the nation and their religious faith.

Recent events have brought this dilemma into sharp focus. The catalyst came on 7 October last year at the Nova music festival, when armed Palestinians slaughtered 1,139 Israeli men, women, children, and babies in their cribs, as well as abducting 251 hostages, including women and the elderly. Emphasising the depth of ancient hatreds, a gleeful Sheik Ibrahim Dadoun told his western Sydney followers, ‘I’m smiling and I’m happy. I’m elated. It’s a day of pride it’s a day of courage. It’s a day of victory.’

The next day, at the Sydney Opera House, onlookers heard Palestinian sympathisers chant, ‘Gas the Jews’ or the equally chilling ‘Where’s the Jews?’.

Since then, pro-Palestinian protestors have defaced Australian war memorials and, in shades of 1933, ‘A Jew lives here’ was daubed on someone’s wall.

Meanwhile, and signalling abject appeasement, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s Marrickville electoral office has remained shut since January due to safety concerns related to pro-Palestinian demonstrators.

Emboldened by the Prime Minister’s weakness, a western Sydney cleric publicly forbade Muslims from further participating in democracy because ‘legislation belongs solely to God’. He foreshadowed the time is coming when Muslims will be called upon to kill Jews.

With this in mind, the granting of visas to nearly 3,000 Gazans, despite glib claims of security checks, seems reckless. When so many zealots coming from a similar background show such little respect for existing minorities, it seems prudent to press the pause button. Playing the racist card is simply shooting the messenger and proves we’ve lost interest in our borders.

With Muslims outnumbering Jews eight to one and with their leaders’ rhetoric ramping up, it is time for Labor to put Australia’s national security ahead of votes in Muslim-dominated electorates.

Time, yes. But the truth is Labor and the Greens are fundamentally anti-Semitic and side with Hamas. Their calls for a two-state solution belie the reality that the Palestinians and their Iranian backers don’t want one. ‘From the river to the sea’ means what it says – the elimination of Israel. The Nova music festival massacre was actually intended to provoke the response it got.

The other reality is that Israel has lost the public relations war at home and abroad. Mainstream and social media overwhelmingly favour the Palestinian side.

Despite this, Greens leader Adam Bandt pushes to silence alternative views on social media. Both sides of politics along with eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, who faces allegations of censorship, support him. But silencing alternative views on social media won’t stop people being mean to one another. It simply drives frustrations underground.

Of course it’s easy to label online critics of hostile foreign behaviour, ‘right-wing extremists’, but doing so ignores the experience of an increasing number of Australians who are witnessing fundamental Islamism creeping into secular classrooms, who increasingly fear for their lives and property and who know they are living in a society they didn’t vote for, including the two-tiered application of the law.

When pro-Hamas demonstrators take to the streets, or invade university classrooms, authorities acquiesce, while white protestors carrying Israeli flags, are rapidly escorted away. How long before another pregnant woman is arrested in front of her infant children for posting online views authorities deem blasphemous or spreading false information?

Between 2023 and 2025 nearly 1.2 million people, or the equivalent of two and a half Canberras, will settle here. However the threat to our culture is an even bigger risk than the threat to our infrastructure. Many? arrivals are from backgrounds which have already demonstrated an unwillingness to integrate. Yet the ruling elite cynically put GDP and declining productivity ahead of a cohesive society.

Well intentioned perhaps, but multiculturalism is failing. What it has achieved is a growing sense of division and alienation. The number of murderers and sex offenders among asylum seekers recently released into the community by the High Court adds to this perception.

Little wonder, pressure to halt immigration along with? Australia’s withdrawal from the United Nations Refugee Convention, is growing. Rather than concentrate on differences, indigenous or otherwise, it’s time, to promote integration, social cohesion and national? security before the Australia that most still treasure is forever lost.

Author: Maurice Newman