Last year's Bondi Beach massacre in Sydney, Australia, should have opened some eyes. Australia has been taking in immigrants from the majority-Muslim world for years, and singing the praises of Australian multiculturalism while they were doing so. And while doing so, they tamped down on the free speech of people who questioned the mass immigration.
The dead at Bondi Beach are the result. Now, in a column at the Daily Sceptic, one Australian, Dr. James Allan, Garrick Professor of Law at Queensland University, is calling the Australian government out, and he's making some great points that the Australian government will probably ignore.
I start this first column of the new year with the heavy heart that I am sure all our readers have for the families of the victims of the horrific mass-murders on Bondi Beach just before Christmas. And let us not deal in the usual Labour Party euphemisms, misdirecting abstractions and Kumbaya platitudes. This was the deliberate attempt to murder Jews, by Islamic extremists, done solely because they wanted to kill Jews. And they did, with the odd non-Jewish bystander thrown in. That makes Australia, outside of Israel itself, the country where the most Jews have been murdered in a single incident since the Second World War. Embarrassed?
We should note, in all fairness and candor, that one of the heroes of the Bondi massacre was himself a Syrian Muslim immigrant, Ahmed al Ahmed, who snuck up on and tackled one of the shooters, and got shot himself in the attempt. But while Mr. Ahmed was legitimately a hero, while he carried out an act of great courage to help those he didn't seem to see as Jews but as fellow humans, he's one man, out of many. And it's the "many" that is the worry; the two shooters at Bondi were among that many.
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The Australian government, in the name of multiculturalism, invited this.
Dr. Allan continues:
And this brings me to the topic of multiculturalism. As I have said in past columns, it has been a massive failure. Be clear though. I don’t mean that sane immigration that accepts people with specific skills to offer, that refuses to deal in doling out welfare to new arrivals and that aggressively insists on assimilation has been a failure. That works. Indeed, my wife and I are beneficiaries of that sort of immigration. No, what is and has been a disastrous failure is this progressive-Left, vague-and-amorphous warm fuzzy known as ‘multiculturalism’. You see, multiculturalism deals in either untruths or patently unwise outcomes.
Australia is leaning hard into the "patently unwise" side. As Dr. Allan points out, Islamic clerics are allowed to preach hate and promote jihad in mosques in Australia; pro-"Palestine" protestors are allowed to block roads. These acts do not fall under the purview of free speech; they are incitements to violence.
The Australian government, in the name of multiculturalism, invited this.
The untruth is that all cultures are equal. In fact, they simply are not. Judeo-Christian Western culture has delivered the freest, wealthiest societies in human history, ones that gave birth to the industrial revolution and the scientific worldview. In significant part that was due to the Enlightenment (and in my view the Scottish Hume-Smith variant more so than the French Rousseau-Voltaire one). Cultures that kill or scare witless those deemed apostates have, shall we say, not done so well. Cultures that downplay curiosity and open debate and disagreement in favour of enforced orthodoxy don’t deliver those either. One of the worst things to happen to the anglosphere has been the progressive cancer from within that has eaten away at our patriotism (in the sense of love of country) and our understanding of the net-benefit greatness of our heritage, imposing a sort of hairshirt ‘only focus on our faults’ worldview
Dr. Allan is correct in every particular. But Australia is taking the darker path. Instead of deporting Islamic shouters who preach jihad and hate, they clamp down on Australians who question the Labour government's multicultural orthodoxy. Just two days before Christmas, a few days after the shootings at Bondi, the Premier of New South Wales, Chris Minn, took to the stump once again to advocate clamping down on Australian citizens' freedom of speech, so as not to offend the "multicultural" immigrants to Down Under.
Following the awful carnage on Bondi Beach, NSW Premier Chris Minns gave a press conference about new legal restrictions on speech, and said this:
“I acknowledge that we don’t have the same free speech rules that they have in the United States and I make no apologies for that, we have got a responsibility to knit together our community, that comes from different races and religions.”
Nor was this a one off, he has said exactly this before, several times – perhaps most pithily in March when he phrased it thus: “I’ve fully said from the beginning that we don’t have the same freedom of speech laws that they have in the United States, and the reason for that is that we want to hold together a multicultural community.”
That's a real jaw-dropper. Premier Minns is completely, 180 degrees off course here; here's why, and I'm going to tell you.
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The truth is that not all cultures are created equal. The Western world, the Western culture that Dr. Allan describes above, is, yes, generally more tolerant of other nations, other ways of life. You won't find many Australians, or Americans for that matter, going to a place like Japan and insisting that the Land of the Rising Sun change to accommodate them. We just don't think that way. But other cultures out there produce people who are so insecure in their beliefs, so intolerant, and so steeped in pure distilled poison, that they insist that any country they migrate to change to accommodate them. Not only that, they threaten murder if the people of those newer, more civilized cultures fail to comply.
Now, Australia, as demonstrated by this statement by Chris Minns, is advocating squashing the rights of Australians to object to the co-opting of their culture, their civilizations, their nation, by hostile immigrants.
Bondi Beach is the result of Chris Minn's kind of thinking. The Australian government, in the name of multiculturalism, invited this.
