TOLERANCE IS A TWO-WAY STREET

There are editorials and opinion pieces like the one below popping up all over the world lately. The one below is by Des Houghton and appeared in the Brisbane "Courier Mail" on Saturday August 13, 2005

I'm getting a little tired of do-gooders preaching the virtues of multiculturalism. would like to see them espouse the virtues of integration with similar vigour. I'm not saying multiculturalism is a dirty word. But there is a risk that by over-stressing its benefits we may encourage some minorities to think their extreme beliefs are superior to the values of this country's majority.

More than 90 per cent of us still proclain a Christian heritage. We have welcomed no fewer than six million migrants since World War II, and more are arriving every day. The peaceful integration of migrants into Australian society is one of our enduring national achievements. I have friends whose parents were born in Italy, Greece, Lebanon, Italy and China, who retain many of the values of their parents' homeland while embracing the values of this grand land.

Most of us now have friends and colleagues from other cultures who have enriched our lives. We welcome newcomers, provided they come through our front door. And we need not apologise to any one for our record on immigration. This country's tolerance of different religious beliefs, social mores and political views is at the heart of what it means to be Australian and no one understands this more than migrants who have sworn allegiance under the Southern Cross.

For years, however, any politician wishing to court public approval - especially in metropolitan regions - has nailed his colours to the mast of multiculturalism. Terrified of appearing "racist", our dripping wet liberal commentators, ignorant schoolteachers and simpering politicians have bent over backwards to appease minorities.

Prove to me that this kind of "multiculturalism" has not encouraged branch stacking by political parties and electoral pork-barrelling that verges on corruption.

In welcoming migrants we also have opened the door to a few extremists who use our democracy to espouse an abhorrent political order which preaches violence and subjugates women. In Dubai recently I went to the mosque and took an introductory course in the six pillars of Islam. It was fascinating. To its true believers, Islam means peace. We must not fear Muslims; only a very small number of them are hellhounds bent on destroying the West.

When John Howard meets Muslim leaders next week he must remind them that while we value their cultural traditions, they must also respect ours. He must also make it clear that migrants of all faiths are welcome, but that our national unity and stability demands a high level of integration, not segregation. This can be achieved with tolerance. Tolerance is the core of civilisation, and it is a two-way street.

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ELSEWHERE

McDonald's bombing mastermind jailed for life: "An Indonesian court today sentenced the alleged mastermind of 2002 bombing of a McDonald's restaurant to life in prison, saying the Islamic militant planned the attack that came just weeks after the Bali nightclub attacks. Agung Abdul Hamid, 38, was found guilty of being the "field co-ordinator and financier" of the early evening bombing that killed three people in the South Sulawesi provincial capital of Makassar. The dead and injured were all Indonesians."

Arlene Peck thinks that Australians are less tolerant of the Islamists than people in the U.S. and U.K. are.

More hate-speech from San Francisco's Mark Morford: "I have never been to a big creepy megachurch. This is my first confession. I have never been to, say, Lakewood Church in Houston, the biggest glossiest megachurch of all, which just dumped a staggering $75 million to renovate the former stadium for the Houston Rockets and turn it into a massive pulsing swaying arm-raisin' eye-glazed weirdly repressed House o' Jesus. ... I mention all this because megachurches are the latest phenomenon, the hottest trend in the Christian godfearin' biz, arena-scaled piety polished up and bloated out and aimed like a giant homophobic cannon straight at the gloomy face of a new and improved God ... But you really don't need to attend one of these surreal spectacles to realize that most of us should kneel down right now in heartfelt gratitude that we have never been forced to endure, say, the all-paunchy-married-male revue of a Promise Keepers rally, or the bizarre pious cheerleading of a Harvest Crusade in L.A."

Nutty Swedes: "In the last four years, 50% of those who have been refused asylum in Sweden have gone underground and have simply vanished from the Board of Migration's statistics. And of the half who have actually been sent home, a full 20% have come straight back to Sweden to try their luck again. That is in accordance with the rules of the Geneva Convention, which states that asylum seekers who have been deported to their homeland have the right to return and have their case tried again. Each time they return must be treated as a new case..... In 2004, a total of 2,026 supervised deportations cost 148.3 million kronor, up 34% on the year before. The rise is blamed on the increasing demands for more staff to help take people out of the country. One deportation requires at least two people, said Tina Hendriksson, a finance inspector at the Prison Service's transport office. "Lately more people have been needed. That's because those who are deported are in poor psychological or physical condition, or simply don't want to be expelled," she told Dagens Nyheter. "We have also been forced to charter whole planes to a greater extent than earlier," added G"ran Stenbeck, head of the transport office. In fact, the transport office chartered 92 planes in 2004 - sometimes for just one person - at a total cost of 12.5 million kronor".

Clueless Norwegians: "New figures from Norway's immigration authority (Utlendingsdirektoratet, UDI) indicate that nearly 7,000 would-be refugees disappeared from asylum centers in 2003 alone. Another 1,136 have disappeared so far this year, reports newspaper Stavanger Aftenblad. Around 60 percent of those who left the asylum centers, which aren't run as locked institutions, are between 18 and 34 years of age. Around 20 percent are younger than 18. No one can say what has happened to those who applied for asylum but left with no forwarding address while their cases were being processed".

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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