Australia urges sharia believers to leave

Here is an article with lengthy statements by Australian cabinet members made between August 2005 and the present telling Muslims, including native born Muslims, that if they believe in some law other than Australian law, namely Islamic law, they should depart for some other country where such beliefs will be welcome. Such bold, clear-minded, and unafraid declarations coming from the country’s political leaders show an Australia that is light-years closer than the rest of the West to the truth about Islam and the truth of what to do about Islam. And what is that truth? It is that Muslim believers—and all genuine Muslim believers believe in sharia—are incompatible with the West and do not belong in any Western country, period, as I have been saying for years. For its government ministers to be unapologetically declaring such things makes Australia seem so radically different from dhimmified Europe and half-dhimmified America that it is like a Bizarro World, where everything is the reverse of the normal. I don’t know if there has been much follow-up from these remarks,—for all I know, they were a lot of hot air—but the fact that they were made at all is enormously significant and hopeful.

Why is Australia—or, at least, why does Australia seem—so bracingly, healthily distinct? Is it that the country is so distant geographically from decadent Europe that it is mentally far away from it as well? Is it that the country, surrounded by non-Western countries, has fewer of the “buffers” that make other Western countries complacently ignore obvious threats to their existence? Is it that the Australians are just naturally ballsy? Is it that the country’s name begins with the letters “Austr”? (Joke.) Your guess is as good as mine. Whatever the cause, Australia at the least has taken an important intellectual step in the direction of saving the West from its main external and internal enemy, marking out a path for the rest of the West to follow … and to go even further.

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Maureen C. writes:

The operative word here is “urge.” Just words. “Enforcement” of U.S. and Australian laws is what is needed—not exhortations. I wait for the Australians to do something, even if it is to adopt the wimpy French solution of paying illegals and Sharia-adherents to leave the country.

LA replies:

I know. But the principle they laid out is the key thing. Establishing that principle is the major shift away from the liberal mindset. Now they have act on it. However, acting on it would require much more than just the enforcement of existing laws (as in the case of U.S. illegal immigration). It would require new laws. It would even require radical constitutional changes, defining Islam as a political ideology and restriting or banning it, stripping citizenship of naturalized or even natural-born U.S. citizens.

Maureen replies:

Yes, it would be a huge step forward if our lawmakers understood that Sharia Law directly conflicts with Western Constitutional Law. It’s a start. The dangers cannot be addressed until they are clearly defined.

Unfortunately, liberalism confines itself to “feel-good” rhetoric (making laws) and deliberately ignores “not so feel-good” enforcement (deportation). For example, current U.S. immigration regulations proscribe polygamy. That, one would think, should be sufficient to deny entry to most Muslim immigrants—or make subsequent deportation easier upon the inevitable Islamic violations. Multiculturalism has so undermined Westerners’ sense of their own decency that the U.S. does not even deport or deny entry to polygamists.

AZ writes:

Remember Australia once excluded non-whites from immigration. I think they changed their immigration laws sometime in the 1980s. It’s therefore not surprising that Australia would take a stronger stance against radical Islam than other Western nations. People who have visited Australia and New Zealand have told me they are much like what the U.S. was in the 1950s. These countries simply lag behind the U.S. in terms of their evolution. Remember also that after WWII members of proto-Marxist “Frankfurt School” came to the U.S., and their decedents have invaded and changed academia from Kindergarten to graduate school.

Generations of students have been bathed in the doctrines of the Frankfurt School. If you want to understand “cultural Marxism” study the “critical theory” as advanced by the Frankfurt School and the communist theoretician George Lukacs. Then you will better understand the racial grievance industry and why we have so many “studies departments” at our universities. I conjecture that many people have simply lost their ability to reason about social matters. An important part of the “critical theory” school is the notion of “antipositivism” as advanced by Max Weber where the successful methods of reasoning used in the physical sciences cannot be applied to social questions. Note how people readily reject IQ as an explanation of success difference between groups. I claim this is because students have absorbed antipositivism so completely they can no longer reason. Have you noticed that people without a college education seem to have more common sense?

For some mysterious reason a few “mutants” exist that seem to have a natural immunity to indoctrination. They instinctively resist cults like Scientology and academic conditioning in critical thinking. I hope one of these people will eventually arise as a leader.

LA replies:

Boy does this get confusing. I thought conservatives respected Weber for seeing the limits of positivism and its reductionist approach to all knowlegdge. Now AZ is telling us that Weber is a bad buy for not wanting positivism applied to the non-physical sciences. Does AZ want all knowledge reduced to “scientific” knowledge and everything else excluded? A society that followed that approach would be dead and would be unable to defend itself, just like a society run by cultural Marxism.

Karen writes from England:

Australia is quite tough on all immigrants. It is very difficult to emigrate there and they are selective about who they accept for settlement unlike Britain and the USA which take anyone from anywhere, no questions asked. Do you remember the “boat people” who tried to arrive illegally in Australia? Well they were left on the boats and never allowed to land and were eventually landed on an offshore island until their return to their native countries was organised. It’s not easy to go illegally to Australia and most of the illegals are white holidaymakers who overstay their visas.

I hope they back up this language with actions and start deporting some Moslems.

LA to Mark Richardson in Australia:

While I’ve seen shorter versions of these quotes, these fuller versions struck me more strongly than what I’ve seen before. Yet most of them were made in summer ‘05 and I’m not sure what has happened since then overall. Am I overstating their signifance? Were they nothing but (as I suggest) hot air?

Mark Richardson replies:

Let me reassure you that your comments on the Islam situation are close to the mark. I think it’s true that it’s more permissible on the right in Australia to criticise Islam than most other places, and that this criticism edges into a lack of enthusiasm for Muslim immigration.

I can think of several reasons for this. First, from the start there were several influential columnists in the press and on the internet who strongly pursued the Islam and violence connection. Second, the behaviour of Muslims themselves confirmed the connection. We had the Bali bombings, the rape gangs in Sydney, the violence leading up to Cronulla, extremist literature being sold in Melbourne mosques, Muslims beating up TV cameramen in Melbourne etc. There have been a number of extreme statements from the Mufti of Australia and from various sheiks.

Third, there are members of cabinet whose one unprincipled exception to their liberalism is their belief that Australia must retain its Judeo-Christian character. I don’t know how they square this with their encouragement of mass Buddhist and Hindu immigration. However, it possibly makes them less sympathetic to the mass immigration of Muslims, given the more assertive nature of Islam as a rival to Christianity.

There are no formal restrictions on Muslim entry to Australia, but the Government does seem to favour business and student migrants from Asian sources, which effectively limits the amount of Muslim migration (though I don’t have the statistics at hand to confirm this).

One last point. It’s accepted at the moment that to win office in Australia it’s critical to win the support of the more conservative white working-class vote in Sydney. This, perhaps, gives Australian politicians a more secure base to make the kinds of critical statements on radical Islam than if electoral politics required pandering to minorities.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 06, 2007 05:06 AM | Send