Australia's Multicultural Disaster

Australia’s recent "race" riots were anything but, according to Keith Windschuttle, writing in The Australian. Mr. Windschuttle contends that the clashes between Lebanese Muslim immigrants and white native-born Australians had nothing to do with skin color, and everything to do with culture. The root of the clashes, isn’t racism, Mr. Windschuttle says, it’s multiculturalism, an idea which had divided Australians by the very ethnic identities it was supposed to blur.

The tensions that exploded this week were defined into existence by multiculturalist policies and ideas. It wasn't the youths at Cronulla beach who decided that all Lebanese constitute an ethnic group. That was done for them by politicians, bureaucrats and academics in the name of constructing ethnic communities. Those youths certainly can be blamed for trying to beat up a few outnumbered innocents but not for responding to people as ethnics in the first place.

Of course, the purpose of multiculturalism was never to bring people together or to erase the divisions of race and culture. The point of multiculturalism wherever it is implemented – and it is only implemented in Western countries – is to demonize European-descended peoples and erode Western culture. One must give credit where it is due, multiculturalism is the one leftist idea that actually does what it was designed to do.

Multicultural policy was always justified by the assumption that the xenophobia of old Australia was the problem. This presumption still reverberates in the voices of politicians and journalists who have responded to this week's events as if Australian youths are the real culprits. Hypocritically, they denounce racial stereotyping of ethnic groups but freely typecast Anglo Australia.

Multiculturalism is also at odds with the core tenets of liberal democracy, where rights inhere in the individual, not the collective, and where people's representatives are elected politicians, not self-appointed ethnic spokesmen or godfathers. Multiculturalism is a reversion to tribalism that is anachronistic in a modern, liberal, urban society.

In Sydney it has been plain for at least a decade that, instead of ethnic communities living happily in the diversity of social pluralism, multiculturalism has bred ethnic ghettos characterised by high levels of unemployment, welfare dependency, welfare abuse, crime and violence. The social engineers responsible should have been well aware of the likely outcome, especially for young men.

All the evidence from the numerous studies of similar ethnic ghettos in North America and Europe show they produce much the same result, whatever the colour or ethnicity of their inhabitants. Ghetto culture for young men everywhere is characterised by interpersonal violence, sexual irresponsibility, incomplete education, substandard speech, a hypersensitivity about being disrespected and a feckless attitude towards work.

The Lebanese assaults on the Cronulla lifesavers that led to this week's mass retaliation were nothing new.

This behaviour has been with us for more than a decade. When the former principal of Punchbowl Boys High, a school dominated by Lebanese Muslim youth, suffered a breakdown and sued the NSW government, he gave an insight to the local culture.

Between 1995 and 1999, students armed with knives had threatened classmates, teachers were assaulted and gangs invaded classrooms. On one occasion, the principal had a gun held to his head by a Lebanese gang member who threatened to shoot him. One of his students was convicted of murdering a Korean schoolboy and three other students were jailed for their roles in some of Sydney's most notorious gang rapes.

Of course, the provocations that led to the riots will be dismissed as irrelevant by the politically correct, multiculturalist elite. When non-whites riot, it’s because they are oppressed or under attack. But if whites behave the same way, it’s because they are - being white, ipso facto, racist and evil. This double standard produced the Cronulla riots. It will produce even more violence in the future. The solution to Australia’s riots will work just as well in France, Germany, and the United States: stop importing people from alien cultures, insist that those immigrants already there assimilate, and defend rigorously the values and traditions of Western culture.

Zimbabwe's Nightmare Gets Worse

Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe can no longer hide the fact that his confiscation of white-owned farms has been a disaster. Zimbabweans are now starving, and dependent on international food aide as a result. But being unable to hide the disaster of one’s mistake doesn’t mean one takes responsibility for it, nor does it mean one doesn’t go right ahead and make an even bigger, more disastrous mistake.

In an attempt to rescue his failing programme of land redistribution, Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe is trying to involve the army in a "command agriculture" programme.

"Instructions have already been passed onto battalion commanders," a Zimbabwean army major told the BBC.

Five years after Mr Mugabe ordered the seizure of the white-owned commercial farms, agricultural production has halved.

Mr Mugabe has admitted that the people to whom he gave some 4,000 farms have some responsibility for the country's current problems.

"Mugabe is now saying that the people who are on the farms are opposition supporters and that they are sabotaging the country. He says the army must take over," the major said.

"This is an idea which Mugabe got from China, where the army is used in agriculture and industry".

Well, the Chinese do have a great deal of experience with this. That experience is called famine. Mao’s collectivization of agriculture worked about as well as the Soviet effort, which produced – surprise, surprise – a famine. Now, Mugabe will send soldiers to tend Zimbabwean farms. Guess what’s coming to Zimbabwe next? Hint: it begins with "F."

Mugabe’s latest debacle is so inane that even members of the military are aware of the likely outcome.

The major risked his job and his life in talking to us. We met on a street in the capital, Harare, late at night and interviewed him in the safety of a car, away from the eyes and ears of Zimbabwe's network of informers.

I asked the major whether he believed the idea would work.

"I don't think it will because soldiers are not trained for farm work," he says.

"They're trained to fight. They don't have the skills. It's out of desperation that he's doing this. It will not work."

Others I spoke to in Zimbabwe agree. John Robertson, the country's foremost economist, pointed out that "the idea has been tried out in China, North Korea and Stalin's Russia and look where it got them."

Indeed. But then, leftists never learn, no matter how many people die.

Australian Churches Attacked

The current rioting in Australia, the direct result of that country’s inane immigration policies, which were designed to "diversify" its population in strict adherence to multiculturalist dogma (that western people are bad), has taken on a religious aspect as the Muslim Lebanese immigrants who started the fighting by repeatedly assaulting white beach goers, have now taken to attacking Christian churches. But don’t look for these reports in US media, which are towing the predictable line that the rioting is the result of neo-Nazis and racist white youths. That would require both real, in-depth reporting, which few American media outlets have either the inclination or talent to do, and it would require breaking free from the politically correct, multiculturalist presuppositions that frame all news reportage in the US.

In an act many fear has escalated Sydney's racial violence to religious ground, two churches in Auburn were firebombed and trashed.

The twin attacks began another dramatic day of unrest in which racial tensions threatening to explode across Australia and ended with two rioters being thrown behind bars for their part in Sunday's riot at Cronulla.

Less than 24 hours after a neigbouring Catholic primary school was sprayed with gunfire, Auburn's Uniting Church hall was firebombed.

As the hall burned, 16 windows at nearby St Thomas Anglican Church were smashed.

The attack on Christian churches is a sure sign that the hundreds of thousands of Muslims that the Australians foolishly invited into their country are behaving in exactly the same fashion as their brethren in France, German, Britain, Phillipines and the US. That is, waging jihad against the cultures that let them in.

Turkey is Not Europe

A perfect example of why Turkey is not culturally compatible with the other members of the European Union which it seeks to join, can be found in the proceedings that will begin Friday in a Turkish courtroom.

Turkey's most internationally-acclaimed novelist will go on trial here charged with "insulting Turkishness".

The charges relate to a magazine interview in which Orhan Pamuk said 30,000 Kurds and one million Ottoman Armenians were killed in Turkey and no-one dares talk about it.

He could face up to three years in jail.

In some European countries, it is illegal to deny the Holocaust due to those countries’ particular involvement in the Holocaust. In Turkey, it is a crime to admit the fact of the Armenian genocide. To even suggest that the Turks committed genocide is a crime against "Turkishness." This alone should be a stark warning that Turkey is culturally foreign to the nations of Europe, that is shares few if any values with Europe and that its admission to the EU would only erode the values that Europeans cherish (by virtue of Turkey’s much greater birth rate).

This high-profile prosecution has caused a stir in Brussels.

It has raised serious concerns about EU-hopeful Turkey's commitment to the basic democratic principle of free speech.

Raised serious concerns? Is the BBC kidding? The fact that Mr. Pamuk is being put on trial for comments in a magazine is objective proof that Turkey has little commitment to the principle of free speech.

Fortunately, Mr. Pamuk has emerged as a champion of truth, a glimmer of hope for Turkish society in the future.

Orhan Pamuk fled the country after the interview was published amid what he calls a hate campaign.

Now he is back, determined to use his time in court to defend his comments, and his right to make them.

"What happened to the Ottoman Armenians in 1915 was a major thing that was hidden from the Turkish nation; it was a taboo," the writer explains, at an Istanbul cafe overlooking the waterfront.

"But we have to be able to talk about the past."

Indeed.

Calling Harry Belafonte...

Everyone’s favorite communist dictator – excuse me, president for life – Fidel Castro is at it again. In a move that will doubtless be completely ignored by the US media, not to mention all of Castro’s adoring fans in Hollywood, the Cuban government (which is Castro), has slyly denied a group of Cuban women permission to visit Europe to collect a human rights prize.

The group, known as the Ladies in White, are joint winners of this year's Sakharov prize for freedom of thought.

For the last two years the women, who are relatives of jailed dissidents, have staged a weekly protest march.

They have been invited to Strasbourg by the European Parliament to receive the award, to be presented on Wednesday.

The other winners are Nigerian human rights lawyer Hauwa Ibrahim and Paris-based Reporters without Borders.

The Cuban government has denied their request to leave Cuba with the usual bureaucratic sleight-of-hand that repressive governments everywhere like to use when brute force would make too much of a PR mess.

Like all Cubans who wish to travel, the Ladies in White had to first get specific permission from the Cuban authorities. The women say they applied weeks ago.

They say their requests were not officially turned down; instead, it was indicated to them that no decision on their applications would be made until well after the Strasbourg ceremony had taken place.

Miriam Leiva, one of the group who was intending to travel, said she is disappointed but not surprised.

"The government does with our lives whatever it wishes," she said.

"They control whether we can travel abroad, they won't allow any opinion other than theirs and we are very peaceful people and we have been just striving for our rights."

Three years ago another Cuban dissident, Oswaldo Paya, won the same award.

He was allowed to leave the country to collect it.

But a few months after his return, Cuba arrested, tried and jailed 75 dissidents accusing them of being mercenaries in the pay of the US government.

The Ladies in White are relatives of those and other imprisoned dissidents.

Perhaps some enterprising US journalist could ask one of Castro’s American devotees, perhaps Harry Belafonte or Ward Churchill or Noam Chomsky, their opinion of this incident. Surely such great advocates of freedom of speech and the rights of women would be happy to denounce the Cuban government’s actions, or personally appeal to Castro on their behalf. Or perhaps why every communist state has to forcibly keep its people from leaving… But don’t hold your breath waiting for any such question to be tossed their way.

Islam's "Democratic" Future

President Bush has made spreading democracy throughout the Arab world a centerpiece of his foreign policy and a key strategy in the evasively named "War on Terrorism." But a closer examination of the result of recent election in the Middle East should give pause to those who think democracy a panacea for either terrorism or the general backwardness of the Islamic world. In Egypt, the fanatical Muslim Brotherhood saw its candidates win a historic and surprising number of seats in the national legislature, in spite of brutal efforts by the secular government to prevent such an outcome. In Palestine, the situation is no better, according to Lee Harris, writing on TCS Daily:

Mariam Farhat, a 56 year old mother, will be running alongside her male colleagues in the upcoming January elections for the Palestinian parliament, and, by all accounts, she will easily win a seat, due to her enormous popularity among the Palestinians. At first glance, this might seem like good news: a Muslim female who has the will to play an active role in the future of her country, and who is supported in her ambitions by the male-dominated political party to which she belongs. But, unfortunately, the party that is backing her is the terrorist organization Hamas, and her popularity is based on her well-deserved reputation as "the mother of martyrs."

Mariam Farhat got her nickname because three of her sons died either during an attack on Israeli settlers in Gaza or else while preparing for such an attack. Yet a good bit of her immense popularity must be attributed to a video that Hamas is using as part of its electoral campaign -- a video in which Mrs. Farhat is shown advising her son Mohammed on how to kill Israelis, and in which she herself is seen toting a gun, like a Palestinian Ma Barker. Mohammed, by the way, was just seventeen -- not old enough to buy cigarettes in the USA.

Mother’s tactical advice must have been first-rate, because Mohammed was able to kill five Israeli settlers before he was himself whisked away to join the ranks of the martyrs in paradise. No wonder she is seen as "a sure vote-winner," as the writer of a Reuters news story breathlessly reported. Who could resist a woman who has happily sacrificed three sons to the cause of wiping Israel off the map, and who still has three more sons left to give the same sacred cause?

Harris also notes the differing mindsets of Western parents who try to discourage their sons from playing with ‘violent," "militaristic" toys like guns, and Islamic parents who encourage their sons to become martyrs by blowing themselves up and taking as many of the infidels with them as possible.

What happens to a society where moms forbid their boys to play with toy guns? Especially if this society is living in a world where there are moms like Mariam Farhat who are willing to offer their boys pointers on how to kill people with real ones?