RUTHFULLY YOURS

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For many years we have been sold the idea of multicultural Australia as a significant and energising factor in our national evolution. Cultural differences are supposed to be gradually absorbed into the mainstream, leaving it enriched and reinvigorated in the process. When multiculturalism means colourful costumes, exotic recipes and unusual music, there may be some truth in this. At least there is little appreciable harm.

But what happens when those imported cultures involve more than mere fancy dress, when they arrive with their own power relationships, their own political ideologies and a parallel legal system, all of which is incompatible with Australian norms and traditions? What happens when new arrivals have no intention of relinquishing these features of their cultures and integrating into the mainstream? What happens when the intent is first to modify the host culture and, ultimately, to replace it? How do multiculturalism’s promoters propose to deal with a scenario in which one or more of its celebrated minorities is fully committed to promoting its own political agenda?

Take Islam, which is not simply a religion. Rather, it is a political movement with imperialist intentions, stated quite openly in its sacred texts, and a vision of religion as the ultimate source of legal authority and social control. Rooted entirely in a theocratic conception of the world as it must be, Islam remains in its essence quite incompatible with democracy.

Peter Smith: Church and State, Mosque and Peril

The laws of Islam are those said to have been laid down by Allah via Mohammad in the Koran and Hadiths in the seventh century, and the idea that those religiously mandated laws could be changed or challenged by any democratically elected and secular assembly is fantasy. It is not as if this incompatibility with democracy is unrecognised. Muslims have been saying it openly and without apology for years. Consider this exchange, from 2002, aired on the ABC between Ms. Randa Abdel Fattah, a member of the Islamic Council of Victoria, in an interview with Radio National’s  Terry Lane:

Randa Abdel Fattah: But the whole idea of an Islamic state does differ from a Western concept of democracy, because it’s not about majority rule in terms of the majority deciding what is okay for the time being, and the majority of citizens deciding what is legal and what is illegal, we base it on the Qur’an and what God decides, so that there isn’t any people’s own input into what is moral and what is immoral, that it’s something that God decides, otherwise…

Terry Lane: Are you suggesting that the laws of the Qur’an, in an ideal state, should be the laws of the state?

Randa Abdel Fattah:  In an ideal state, in an Islamic state, yes.

This attitude is widely supported in the Islamic community. When polled in Britain, some 40% of Muslims declared they want to see Britain become an Islamic state under Sharia law. There is no reason to believe that Australian Muslims differ to any great or small degree.

In a previous article for Quadrant Online, I explained that Islam saw two distinct phases in its early development, the Meccan and Medinan phases. This has strong implications for Muslims today. Initially, while based in Mecca and  politically weak and isolated, Mohammad was conciliatory to the local non-Muslim population in which he lived. In this first phase, Allah reciprocated by revealing only moderate and conciliatory verses for inclusion in the Koran. However, after the move to Medina in 622, Mohammad’s political and military strength increased and the agenda of the Caliphate and the enforced conversion to Islam began. During this Medinan period, Allah’s revelations to Mohammad became more and more strident, including the so-called “sword verses” with their calls to wahge war on unbelievers.

Of importance is that Islam includes the Doctrine of Abrogation, in which the early and more peaceful verses are countermanded by the strident Medinan ones.  These early verses, however, remain in the Qur’an. And remember, too, that Islam also includes the Doctrine of Taqiyya — permissible dissembling when under pressure — which allows Muslims to cite those early and conciliatory Meccan verses as required, without mentioning that they have been superseded. Thus, Islam can be presented as the “Religion of Peace”, depending on the political climate and needs of the moment.

Clearly, the Islamic urge is for theocratic control with the political power vested in the same hands as religious power, meaning Western fantasies of democracy taking root in Iraq and the Arab Spring representing secularism’s triumph are denials of an obvious reality. As soon as the military’s influence in Egypt was reduced, the Muslim Brotherhood arose; with General Sisi’s ascent to power, it was forced to retreat.  Likewise, the rise of ISIS can be seen as representing the switch from the Meccan to Medinan persona, brought about by the Syrian civil war’s enfeeblement of the Asaad regime. It is ironic that the notion and hope of secular democracy filling any Middle East power vacuum is Western ethnocentrism on a grand scale.

This delusion is obvious here in Australia, where the political elites are determined to remain blind to the Islamic agenda within our borders. Islam is playing a long game — maintaining that PR-friendly and conciliatory Meccan front while quietly pursuing the Medinan vision.  The boundaries are tested constantly. Will a lone wolf attack prompt a realistic appraisal of Islam, or will it incite yet more multicultural cliches, photo ops and “moderate” Muslims being quoted at length on the ABC? Will ratepayers cop their community swimming pools being reserved during certain periods for the exclusive use of Muslims, or will there be a blunt response that the pool is non-denominational asset for the use of all. Should veiled women be allowed to enter Parliament House? The list of petty challenges to Australian traditions never ends, each concession prompting the next test of the host society’s willingness to draw a line.

Islam’s advancement of its cause by small steps has been aided and encouraged by native leftists, whose methods of infiltration and control Islam echoes. Consider, for example, how Patrick McCauley,  writing in Quadrant, captured the left’s disdain for the flag:

“Somehow, the progressive wisdom has decided that those who fly Australian flags are ‘racists’ rather than ‘nationalists’. So the word nationalism is now, in informed circles, code for the word racism. To add insult to injury, it seems those who fly Australian flags are less intelligent than those who don’t.”

Meanwhile, those who disagree with the punditocracy are dismissed as “bogans” whose unfashionable opinions are symptoms of a galloping stupidity. There is little to be said for Mike Carlton, the failed radio host who departed the Sydney Morning Herald after heaping obscene abuse on his critics, but one of his recent tweets is instructive: “Like so many of those hacks,” Carlton fulminated in reference to the Daily Telegraph’s Tim Blair, “he’s there to distract the bogans while Murdoch, Rinehart et al. do what they want.” See how it works? Disagree and it must be because you are the tool of some evil puppetmaster! This is an anti-democratic agenda to delegitimize the mainstream majority, and legitimise and advance their own position. As Oswald Spengler put it:

“It must be stated again and again that this society … is sick, sick in its instincts and therefore in its mind. It offers no defence. It takes pleasure in its own vilification and disintegration. ”

Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist, would have been proud, for it was he who charted the ‘long march through the core institutions’. From the universities to the ABC to Gillian Triggs Human Rights Commission and scores of other publicly funded bodies where leftists hire leftists, the destinations have been reached and the institutions colonised. Even the military has been unable to resist — its mission to be ready to give battle and defend the country subsumed by the leftist agenda. Here, for example, is an analysis published by the Sydney Morning Herald , is the blueprint for dismantling the military’s “warrior culture”:

“The Sex Discrimination Commissioner, Elizabeth Broderick, wants the ADF to fundamentally rethink the way it selects its leaders. She wants to temper the warrior culture that traditionally sees the most senior officers in army, navy and airforce come from backgrounds in combat or command. And she wants to open up more ‘gateways’ to the top Defence jobs from other areas within the military such as logistics, human services and health, where the 14 per cent of the ADF who are female tend to be clustered.

‘Senior leadership positions in all three services are traditionally appointed from categories in which women have been precluded, or in which they are under-represented,’’ she says. “So the ADF will have to create ‘pathways (to leadership) through non-war fighting categories”.’ ”

Two cultures — leftism and Islam — subscribing to incompatible philosophies are working together. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, the old adage goes, thus do we see so-called progressives encouraging Muslin immigration while simultaneously declaring themselves confused as to the motives of men waving bloody knives and shouting “Allahu Akbar”. State the obvious, that Islam is bent on conquest and always has been, and the charge of being an Islamaphobe rings out from the left’s institutional fiefdoms. Each creed, Islam and leftism, is a tool to be used by the other.

To what extent should the mainstream allow itself to be taken over by minority cultures with their own private agendas? To what extent is it legitimate for the mainstream culture to mount Spengler’s “desperate self-defence” against those bent on destroying it? More to the point, how much longer do we have before it is too late to reclaim all that has been lost and suborned?