He spoke about the failure of “four decades of state-sponsored multiculturalism” in Britain when he appeared with Fox’s Neal Cavuto on Wednesday:

Farage sensibly recommended [...]]]> The head of the UK Independence Party, Nigel Farage, recently visited the United States for a few days and got a fair amount of attention from the conservative media.

He spoke about the failure of “four decades of state-sponsored multiculturalism” in Britain when he appeared with Fox’s Neal Cavuto on Wednesday:

Farage sensibly recommended that ISIS fighters from Britain not be allowed to return to the country, a suggestion that PM David Cameron picked up, though Obama hasn’t.

NIGEL FARAGE: We’ve seen an increased radicalization within the United Kingdom, much of this I’m afraid to say is a self-inflicted wound. We’ve had four decades of state-sponsored multiculturalism. We’ve actually encouraged people not to come together and be British but to live separately, to live apart.

NEIL CAVUTO: Kind of like what we are doing here.

FARAGE: Yes, there are similarities. We even have the last Archbishop of Canterbury suggesting that Sharia law be acceptable in British cities. So, I’m afraid we have been weak and we have not been muscular in standing up and saying to people, ‘We are a Christian country. We have a Christian constitution, a Judeo-Christian culture. We’ve allowed our schools to be infiltrated. Our prisons, you know, are now perhaps where jihadism is on the march more rapidly than anywhere else. Much of this we’ve done to ourselves.

Below, Britain-residing Muslims protested the return of UK troops from Afghanistan in 2010.

For another interview with Nigel Farage, check out Laura Ingraham’s talk with him, where the subject of immigration was included: “Controlling immigration is a logical, sensible thing to do,” Farage remarked.

The diversification project, which is run by and for elites, requires decades of steadfast propaganda from media, schools and churches, because human nature dictates that we all prefer the safety and familiarity of our [...]]]> It’s always interesting to see how other countries are responding to the state-enforced destruction of their traditional culture via diverse immigration.

The diversification project, which is run by and for elites, requires decades of steadfast propaganda from media, schools and churches, because human nature dictates that we all prefer the safety and familiarity of our own tribe. There has been some success with convincing people that diversity is the highest good, loyalty to tribe always resurfaces under stress, such as happened in the former Yugoslavia when ethnic wars broke out after the breakup of the central government.

In Britain, the Labour Party was finally outed for using its time in power to import a replacement people, one more amenable to socialist policies. One example of the rapid transformation: the number of Muslims residing in the UK doubled from 2001 to 2011. White Britons are now a minority in London.

To measure the Brits’ reactions to these and other changes, the IPSOS pollsters recently published a wide-ranging paper titled The British Future — State of the Nation 2012.

IPSOS is a French company, and seems to ask probing questions, such as the following about whether immigration is a positive:

Have any American pollsters asked whether we have too many immigrants? In 2011, IPSOS asked the question of nations worldwide, and many said yes (including Americans and British), although not all by any means:

Back to the present time, here’s a report on the recent poll:

Immigration Seen As Britain’s Biggest Problem: Poll, The Link Paper, January 19th, 2013

LONDON: British public views immigration as the biggest problem facing their society with one in three people believing that tension between immigrants and people born in the UK is a major cause of division, a new survey has found.

A report by the thinktank ‘British Future’, titled “State of the Nation: Where is Bittersweet Britain Heading?”, found that one in three people believes tension between immigrants and people born in the UK is the major cause of division, while well over half regard it as one of the top three causes.

It, however, also suggests people are, at heart, tolerant of those who come into the country.

Sunder Katwala, director of ‘British Future’, said the survey highlighted a national anxiety about immigration to which national politicians needed to respond.

An expected influx from new EU member states of Bulgaria and Romania has thrown the issue into the limelight this week, with communities and local government secretary Eric Pickles stressing on “problems” this is expected to cause.

Prime Minister David Cameron also backed these fears, saying any influx is “a very difficult calculation to make” and “the detail is not there yet”.

The ‘British Future’ poll, conducted by Ipsos MORI, coincides with warnings that the expanding migrant population will put increased pressure on both the private and social housing sectors.

MPs fear that as many as 300,000 migrants could enter the UK from Bulgaria and Romania when current restrictions on their movement are lifted next year.

Pickles, however, has refused to put a figure to how many new EU migrants the government expects to enter into the country after getting the right to live and work in the UK.

Can readers also hope to see a left-handed superhero to portray the [...]]]> In the latest example of the cruelty of demographic change, Marvel Comics has killed off its Spiderman-Peter Parker character and replaced him with a diverse persona who is half black, half hispanic and maybe even gay in a three-fer opportunity for comic sales.

Can readers also hope to see a left-handed superhero to portray the struggles of southpaws for respect in a ruthlessly right-handed world?

As a mere civilian in the comix universe (whose favorite was always the mysterious Dr. Strange), I find it odd to axe one character to be replaced by a more demographically advantageous one, when the captains of publishing could just create a new book. Marvel might cobble together a Divers-o-man concoction to promote the flawed ideology that diversity is the highest good.

Comics are increasingly used to bend kids’ minds with propaganda of various agendas. Consider “The 99,” a copious gaggle of Muslim superheroes to instill Islamic values.

Since comics are fantastic fiction, however, reality has a level of squish built in, where normal rules don’t apply. Miles Morales, the new diverse Spiderman, exists in the Ultimate imprint of the Marvel company, while the Peter Parker superhero is alive and well in the regular universe. If only real life were so flexible.

Half-black, half-Hispanic Spider-Man revealed, USA Today, August 1, 2011

We have an African-American president, so why not an African-American Spider-Man, too?

Revealed in Marvel Comics’ Ultimate Fallout Issue 4, out Wednesday, the new Spider-Man in the Ultimate universe is a half-black, half-Hispanic teen named Miles Morales. He takes over the gig held by Peter Parker, who was killed in Ultimate Spider-Man Issue 160 in June.

In his first appearance, he simply breaks up a fight. But readers will learn the true origin of Morales and how he became the new Spider-Man when Ultimate Spider-Man relaunches in September with a new No. 1 issue.

“The theme is the same: With great power comes great responsibility,” says writer Brian Michael Bendis. “He’s going to learn that. Then he has to figure out what that means.”

The new Ultimate Spider-Man series, as well as Wednesday’s Ultimate Fallout issue, will be available digitally the same day as in stores.

In the regular Marvel Universe, Peter Parker will still be the same web-swinging Spidey as he has been since his first appearance in 1962. But in the Ultimate line, launched in 2000 to tell contemporary stories, he received a new origin and a reimagined supporting cast that paralleled the Spidey in regular Marvel continuity.

Morales’ journey will be a similar vehicle for today’s fans, says Marvel’s editor in chief, Axel Alonso.

“What you have is a Spider-Man for the 21st century who’s reflective of our culture and diversity. We think that readers will fall in love with Miles Morales the same way they fell in love with Peter Parker.”

In addition to an alliterative name, Miles has a connection to his predecessor in how he received his powers. But he will have different abilities, too. Supporting characters such as Peter’s Aunt May and Gwen Stacy also will give Miles nuggets of wisdom to help his transition from young kid to New York City superhero.

Italian artist Sara Pichelli, who was integral in designing the new Spider-Man’s look, says, “Maybe sooner or later a black or gay — or both — hero will be considered something absolutely normal.”

Actually, more people are grasping that Islamic cultures seem to be in a different zone [...]]]> It is always admirable when persons in the public eye have the grit to say when they have made a mistake. And when an apparent liberal admits that multiculturalism is a dumb idea, then it’s practically a flying pig moment.

Actually, more people are grasping that Islamic cultures seem to be in a different zone altogether, when it comes to violence, misogyny and hostility to anything not of their tribe. You see that in polling and general outspokenness on the topic. The top European leaders recently declared multiculturalism (meaning Islamic immigration) to be a failure. Thilo Sarrazin was clear in his recent book that the problem in Germany is Islamic immigrants only, not the Indians or Vietnamese etc. who make an effort to assimilate.

Anyway, an Australian newspaper editor, Greg Sheridan, recently explained how he came to reject multiculturalism as a worthwhile political goal, a learning process that is interesting to observe. You can read his “before” viewpoint from 1996 at the end of the article.

The lengthy piece at times wanders off into the weeds of Australian public policy and the definition of multiculturalism, but the real story is how the author came to fear the crime and violence spawned by Islamic immigration. When Sheridan no longer felt safe walking home from the train and his son was challenged by a Muslim kid with a gun, he no longer felt enriched by Islamic diversity.

You can listen to a recent radio interview with Greg Sheridan here.

How I lost faith in multiculturalism by Greg Sheridan, The Australian, April 2, 2011

IN 1993, my family and I moved into Belmore in southwest Sydney. It is the next suburb to Lakemba. When I first moved there I loved it.

We bought a house just behind Belmore Sports Ground, in those days the home of my beloved Bulldogs rugby league team. Transport was great, 20 minutes to the city in the train, 20 minutes to the airport.

On the other side of Belmore, away from Lakemba, there were lots of Chinese, plenty of Koreans, growing numbers of Indians, and on the Lakemba side lots of Lebanese and other Arabs.

That was an attraction, too. I like Middle Eastern food. I like Middle Eastern people. The suburb still had the remnants of its once big Greek community and a commanding Greek Orthodox church.

But in the nearly 15 years we lived there the suburb changed, and much for the worse.

Three dynamics interacted in a noxious fashion: the growth of a macho, misogynist culture among young men that often found expression in extremely violent crime; a pervasive atmosphere of anti-social behaviour in the streets; and the simultaneous growth of Islamist extremism and jihadi culture.

This is my story, our story and the story of a failed policy.

THE three great settler immigrant societies of Australia, the US and Canada have not seen an anti-Muslim backlash on anything like that of Europe’s. Australia, the US and Canada are more successful immigrant societies than those of Europe in the modern era, but the usual self-congratulatory explanation we offer for this is simply that our settlement practices are superior to that of Europe.

In the three countries identity can be credal. Recite the nation’s creed, believe the creed, and you are an insider. It’s a powerful mechanism because it focuses on values, not ethnicity.

You sign up to the US constitution and by golly you’re an American.

You take out Australian citizenship and you’re Australian. Immigrants are more welcome and make a better contribution than is the case in Europe.

There is some truth in all this, and in any event it’s a mostly benign myth, but it doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny as a serious intellectual explanation.

Certainly the presence or absence of multiculturalism as a state policy seems to have no effect. Canada practices multiculturalism. Australia did for a while but then stopped and is now, apparently, half-heartedly starting again, according to a recent speech by Immigration Minister Chris Bowen.

The US, on the other hand, does not practice multiculturalism, yet is the biggest and most successful immigrant society in history — more than 310 million people live there from every corner of the globe. It has a black President, Asian state governors (including two Punjabis) and a vastly more ethnically diverse cabinet and corporate leadership than Australia.

There is a big problem of illegal immigration in the US, but that is overwhelmingly from Latin America. The Hispanic desire to be part of America at a civic level is evident in the huge recruitment rates of Hispanics in the US military. If you’re willing to die for your new country that is surely a convincing sign of commitment.

Here in Australia Bowen, in his February 16 speech, titled “The genius of Australian multiculturalism”, posited the comforting notion that it is the superiority of our own multiculturalism policies that have made so big a difference between us and the tensions of Europe.

I’m afraid Bowen’s speech had the opposite effect on me. It completed my transformation.

Whereas once I wholeheartedly supported multiculturalism, I now think it’s a failure and the word should be abandoned. Australian society and government were mostly doing this until Bowen’s speech.

As a policy, multiculturalism was introduced by immigration minister Al Grassby during the Whitlam government. It was formalised a bit more by Malcolm Fraser and then further refined by Bob Hawke and Paul Keating before being gently left to die of natural causes under the Howard government. In 1988, during the Hawke government, former ambassador to China Stephen FitzGerald wrote a landmark report on immigration and multiculturalism. He concluded that the policies behind Australian immigration were broadly sound but the program needed a much stronger emphasis on skilled migration and the economic contribution migrants could make to Australia.

He also essentially said, though in different words, that the term multiculturalism was useless and confusing, but the policies pursued under its heading, such as teaching migrants English and welcoming their contribution and so on, were good policies.

Hawke and Keating nonetheless stuck with the term. It was hotly contested and highly divisive. It had two big political dividends for Labor: it led to deep divisions within the Liberal Party; and it helped convince migrants that Labor was more naturally sympathetic to them.

It’s very unclear that the term made any positive contribution to the happy settlement of migrants. In the 1990s and beyond, Australia moved away from multiculturalism. A key moment came when then NSW premier Bob Carr abolished the NSW ethnic affairs commission. He felt the constant repetition of ethnic this and ethnic that was not productive and he didn’t think migrants needed a special bureaucracy to watch over them.

Community relations is a more inclusive term than ethnic. It includes everybody, not just migrants.

Similarly the immigration department acquired the word citizenship in its title and lost the word multiculturalism. This was a natural and sensible evolution and one that reflected the maturing, the normalisation, of a welcoming diversity within Australia.

Now Bowen proudly proclaims “I am not afraid to use the word multiculturalism” and has restored Multicultural Affairs to the title of his Immigration parliamentary secretary, though not to that of his department.

Could it be that Bowen hopes once more to inflict division on his political opponents? Is Labor is playing politics with the rhetoric of settlement policies?

For the word has no agreed meaning. Bowen can’t be under the misapprehension that he is communicating something clear by the resurrection of this hotly contested, wildly elastic and downright ugly jargon word, multiculturalism. It seems instead to fulfil George Orwell’s observation that “political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind”.

Multiculturalism has not been used much in Australia in the past decade. Its primary meaning now comes from Europe, and to a lesser extent American university debates. If it means something different in Australia there will need to be a massive effort to convince people of its special, non-standard meaning. What is the purpose of such an effort?

But Bowen’s speech alone has not turned me into an opponent of multiculturalism. While I remain a proponent of a big, non-discriminatory immigration program and celebrate and love Australian diversity, it is the real world that has changed my views.

In particular it is four real-world experiences: watching the debate unfold about the illegal immigrants who come to Australia by boat; a month in Europe researching and writing about immigration issues; 30 years reporting on political Islam in Southeast Asia and the Middle East; and, above all, living for nearly 15 years next door to Lakemba in Sydney’s southwest, the most Muslim suburb in Australia.

In his speech Bowen sets up a neat dichotomy between a good Australian multiculturalism and a bad European multiculturalism.

Bowen is right to point out that Australian official policy, whether at any given moment describing itself as multiculturalism or not, has always stressed English as the national language and the need for immigrants to commit to democracy and the rule of law.

But at the declaratory level, European multiculturalism has also stressed the national language and a commitment to democracy.

Bowen accuses Europe of not welcoming immigrants in the way Australia has.

Certainly some European nations have not been generous in making citizenship easily available to immigrants in the way Australia has. Citizenship is the great integrating instrument of government policy in Australia, the US and in most immigrant societies.

But Bowen’s broad accusation is not true for most of Europe. Certainly in Britain migrants can become citizens. Similarly, it would be absurd to suggest, at the official level at least, that Britain has not had an officially welcoming attitude to immigrants. London, with New York, is one of the great, diverse metropolises of the world.

And most important, while all of western Europe seems to be suffering a variety of the same immigration problem, European nations have had radically different settlement policies.

Britain has practised multiculturalism, France has not.

There are two obvious, logical flaws in the way Bowen treats immigration into Europe.

The first is that he puts the entire burden for the success or failure of an immigrant community’s experience down to the attitude of the host society and places absolutely no analytical weight at all on the performance and behaviour of the immigrants themselves.

Second, the problems that Bowen is talking about are problems with Muslim immigrants, not with immigrants generally. Chinese and non-Muslim Indian immigrants have been immensely successful in Britain. Indeed, being Indian in Britain is extremely chic.

These minorities for the most part have done OK in France, too. Certainly immigrants to Britain from the rest of Europe don’t display anything like the alienation of a serious minority of Muslim immigrants.

So this must, logically, lead to one extremely inconvenient, politically incorrect and desperately fraught question. Could it be that the main difference between Europe, with its seething immigration problems, and the US, Canada and Australia, with their success, is not actually a difference based on some footling interpretation of multiculturalism?

There is one other variable that is consistent with the results. The US, Canada and Australia have far smaller Muslim migrant communities as a percentage of their total populations than do most of the troubled nations of Europe. Could this be the explanation?

Several trends in Australian society give pause to wonder whether we, all unintentionally and all fast asleep, may be heading away from the US-Canada-Australia success story and towards a European future. That would be a very bad outcome for Australia.

Discussing these issues is very difficult. It goes without saying that most Muslims in Australia are perfectly fine, law-abiding citizens. The difficulty with discussing Muslim immigration problems is that you don’t want to make people feel uncomfortable because of their religion.

Muslims are not only individuals, wholly different from each other, but national Islamic cultures are very different from each other.

The Saudi culture is different from the Turkish culture, which is different from the Afghan culture. So generalisations are dangerous.

Then there is the ever present risk of being labelled a racist. No matter how calmly the discussion is conducted, that is a big danger.

But the only people who don’t think there is a problem with Islam are those who live on some other planet. The reputation of Islam in the West is not poor because of prejudiced Western Islamophobia, still less because Western governments conduct some kind of anti-Islamic propaganda.

Instead, it is the behaviour of people claiming the justification of Islam for their actions that affects the reputation of Islam.

In January, the governor of the Punjab province in Pakistan, Salman Taseer, was murdered because he opposed the severity of the nation’s blasphemy laws.

One of his last acts was to visit a Christian woman sentenced to death for insulting the prophet. The governor’s murderer won wide public support.

ABC television recently showed a documentary on the killing of Ahmediya sect members in Indonesia, among the most liberal Muslim nations, because their Muslim murderers regarded them as a deviant sect. On YouTube you can watch scenes of a young Afghan woman being publicly flogged because she was seen in the company of a man who wasn’t her husband or brother.

In Saudi Arabia, women are not allowed to drive cars.

In Iran, government thugs beat protesters to death to safeguard the rule of the mullahs.

This list could go on and on. It may very well be that the overwhelming majority of the world’s Muslims reject such actions. But it is fatuous to try to find a similar pattern of Christian, Buddhist or Jewish behaviour. You can find extremists in every religion and from every background, but there is no equivalence in the size and strength of the extremist tendency in other religions.

The Australian Muslim population is still relatively small, perhaps 400,000 or just under 2 per cent of the population.

The US-based Pew Research Centre has recently completed a big study on Muslim demographics and migration trends. It predicts that for Australia the Muslim population will grow by 80 per cent between now and 2030, to about 715,000, growing about four times as fast as the rest of the population, and reaching about 3 per cent of all Australians.

Such forecasts are always rough estimates, but this is based on fertility, migration and mortality trends, and it’s highly plausible.

It may be that by 2030 we will start to have a much more European-style, polarised society as a result.

Coming to these sombre conclusions marks a crisis of faith for me. All my life I have been, intellectually and as a matter of personal experience, strongly supportive of a big and completely racially non-discriminatory immigration program. This grew out of my convictions, my world view, and also my personal experience.

Mark Latham once remarked that the journalists and commentators who most vigorously support big immigration in Sydney live in the eastern suburbs, the inner city or the north shore. They don’t live in the western suburbs where life is much more hard scrabble.

Latham has something of a point. It’s easy to be completely relaxed about your society when you look down on it from a metaphorical penthouse. But his point never applied to me. I grew up in Lewisham, a modest little suburb about 7km west of the Sydney central business district. Its more affluent neighbours, Petersham and Stanmore, yearn to be seen as inner city. On the western side, Lewisham is flanked by Summer Hill and Ashfield, both a little more affluent. When I was a kid in Lewisham in the 1950s and 60s it was already racially diverse, surely as racially diverse as any suburb in Australia at the time. It was a bit of a religious ghetto: a big Catholic church with four priests, a Catholic hospital, two Christian Brothers high schools, a convent, a Catholic infants’ school.

But because the church was racially universal, so was the suburb. For a time at school we were placed alphabetically: Saad, Scarfone, Sheridan, Taurian — Lebanese, Italian, Irish, Italian.

In primary school I had one close Aboriginal friend, whom I now suspect may have been part of the Stolen Generations, and very close friends from Singapore, Papua New Guinea, Britain and Ireland. In primary school I didn’t seek out diversity, it was just naturally all around me.

I was a happy kid, I liked my friends and I assumed that a multi-coloured classroom and playground were as natural as the air.

Like many children of that era, I was more than half in love with America and early on imbibed an American-style belief in growth and greatness. I wanted Australia to be big and strong, and that meant lots more people.
The politics of the time were all about the Cold War. I was deeply anti-communist. As a result I strongly supported the South Vietnamese in the Vietnam War, which meant I supported the Australian and American commitments in support of the South Vietnamese.

By the war’s end in 1975 I was at university and this was an unusual position among student activists, but support for the alliance was the majority position among the wider population.

When the South Vietnamese lost the war in 1975 and were invaded by North Vietnam, I knew we had to help our former allies. When the South Vietnamese refugee outflow began, I became committed to refugees.
This also began a lifelong involvement with Asia.

My advocacy on behalf of the South Vietnamese refugees was passionate, almost monomaniacal, and I tried the patience of many editors with endless writing on the subject, even, or especially, when it wasn’t in the news.

One politician I met way back then in the late 70s was Philip Ruddock, later immigration minister. We worked together on a number of Vietnamese refugee cases.

But between the late 70s, and today, the nature of people seeking to come to Australia as refugees has changed fundamentally. Ruddock recognised this before me, but I have caught up eventually.

For Ruddock, who had argued very strongly on behalf of the Vietnamese, there were two moments that told him things had changed.

One came in a coastal Vietnamese city, when he met a manufacturing boss, who was also a senior figure in the local Communist Party. He was looking after his grandchildren because his son and daughter-in-law had left as boatpeople, trying to win the prize of resettlement in the US, Canada or Australia. That certainly did not make them bad people, but neither did it make them genuine refugees. The outflow of real refugees had ended and the refugee system for the Vietnamese had become a channel for immigration.

The second epiphany for Ruddock came when members of the Vietnamese community asked him why the government was admitting so many former Viet Cong to Australia as refugees. Being a former Viet Cong doesn’t make you a bad person, even in the eyes of a South Vietnam partisan like me. But neither does it mean logically that you are a refugee from your own political force.

Because of my passionate commitment to the refugee issue, it took me a long time to wake up to the routine scamming of refugee processes today.

The Vietnamese outflow ended before I faced up to the change, and when the Muslim boatpeople started to arrive in Australia I mistakenly applied my old paradigm to the new situation.

In 2009 I spent a month in Europe — Britain, Germany, France and Belgium — working on Muslim immigration issues.

I interviewed government ministers, immigration officials, non-government organisation advocates, immigrants themselves and almost anyone who would talk to me. What became clear was that uncontrolled Muslim immigration from North Africa (and from Pakistan in Britain’s case) had presented itself as an asylum issue, and thereby disabled Europe’s political response, and had been a disaster on the ground.

Christopher Caldwell’s book, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, the best book of any kind on public policy I have read, establishes definitively that this has been overwhelmingly a determined illegal immigration, not a refugee question.

The same is happening in northern Australia now, and as the Gillard government loses control of the situation, the number of illegal immigrants, almost all Muslim, will increase, exactly replicating the dynamics of Europe’s disaster, though of course on a much smaller scale.

So while I remain an advocate of a bigger immigration program, and would be happy to have the refugee quota enlarged, I am now a strong critic of lax borders and allowing illegal immigrants to turn up without papers and then settle permanently.

Caldwell’s book, along with the evidence of my own eyes, also convinced me that many North Africans were not going to Europe to embrace European values but to continue their North African life, with its values, at a European living standard and at the expense of the European taxpayer.
Living next to Lakemba for nearly 15 years also gave me a different view of how immigration can go wrong. Our sons went initially to a state primary school that had a brilliant principal and did a fine job.

But as they approached secondary school a senior teacher told us that our boys had academic potential and it would be a tragedy to send them to the local high school. It was riven with violence and misogyny, drugs and gang and ethnic conflict.

If you find yourself unexpectedly in a war zone, your instinct is to evacuate the family, so the boys went to a private Catholic school, which was racially and even religiously diverse, though I don’t believe there were any Muslim kids there. It was excellent.

Lakemba and surrounding areas such as Punchbowl had a large Lebanese Muslim population, many of whom had come when Malcolm Fraser crazily instituted a come-one, come-all admissions policy for those claiming to be refugees from the Lebanon conflicts of the 80s.

Replicating the European experience that the second generation had more trouble than the first, it was the sons of some of these immigrants who figured heavily in anti-social activities.

I was shocked to discover the growth of jihadi culture in Lakemba. We used to go to its main street for shopping and for food.

One day, waiting for a pizza order, I wandered into the Muslim bookshop. I was astounded to see titles such as The International Jew or The Truth about the Pope, amid a welter of anti-Semitic, anti-Christian and pro-extremist literature.

The revenge attacks on white Australians after the Cronulla riots originated out of Punchbowl. A number of media crews were attacked when they went to local mosques. A large number of those charged with terrorism offences in Australia stayed in or had associations with the area.

Due to the brilliant and fearless reporting of this paper’s Richard Kerbaj, who spoke perfect Arabic, we found that at a number of the mosques in the area outright hatred was being preached: anti-Semitic, misogynist, conspiratorial. Most of the time, these sermons didn’t advocate violence. The speakers were what Britain’s David Cameron has called “non-violent extremists”.

The advent of satellite television made it easier for these folks to live a life apart. Hezbollah’s Al-Manar TV station was available on satellite packages. Most Arab homes you went into had Arabic TV playing in the background.

The anti-social behaviour became more acute.

One son was playing cricket with friends when they were challenged by a group of teenagers, whom they presumed to be Lebanese but may have been of other Middle Eastern origin, who objected to white boys playing cricket. A full-scale, if brief, fist fight ensued.

One son was challenged by a boy with a gun. Lakemba police station was shot up. Crime increased on the railway line.

I was in the habit of taking an evening constitutional, walking a long route from the station to home. At some point it became unwise to walk on Canterbury Road. A white guy in a suit was a natural target for abuse or a can of beer or something else hurled from a passing car.

Occasionally at the train station I was recognised and my pro-Israel articles were not popular, though nothing serious ever came of these incidents.

The worst thing I saw myself was two strong young men, of Middle Eastern appearance, waiting outside the train station.

A middle-aged white woman emerged from the station alone. She was rather oddly dressed, with a strange hair-do.

The two young men walked up beside her, began taunting her and then finished their effort by spitting in her face. They laughed riotously and walked away. She wiped the spittle off her face and hurried off home. It was all over in a few seconds.

These events in Lakemba and nearby are not unique. Lots of people from lots of different backgrounds commit violent crime in Australia. There is a good deal of unemployment, combined with a highly advanced informal culture of welfare exploitation, often freely discussed at the local schools, in the area. But Lakemba is different from most of Australia.

A senior policeman from nearby Bankstown once told me that policing in the Bankstown area was unlike working anywhere else in Australia, and he was amazed how much violent crime went unreported by the media.

Does Islam itself have a role in these problems? The answer is complex and nuanced but it must be a qualified, and deeply reluctant, yes.

This is the only explanation consistent with the fact other immigrant communities, which may have experienced difficult circumstances in the first generation, don’t display the same characteristics in the second generation.

But there is a deeper reason as well. As the great scholar of Islam, Bernard Lewis, has written: “The community of Islam was church and state in one, with the two indistinguishably interwoven.”

This isn’t just a theoretical observation. It means that imams at mosques tend to be preaching about politics, and doing so from a cosmology deeply influenced by paranoia and conspiracy.

Many Australian Islamic institutions receive funding from Saudi Arabia, but I know from my work in Southeast Asia and Europe that the Saudis almost always fund an extremist interpretation of Islam.

To have concerns about these matters is not racism or xenophobia. It is reasonable.

It may also be that when young men of Islamic background experience failure and alienation they are much more readily prone to entrepreneurs of identity who offer them purpose through the jihadi ideology, which has a large overlap with what they hear at the mosque and what they see on Arabic TV.

This is simply not true for Buddhists or Confucians or Sikhs or Jews or Christians, and to pretend so, to make all religions seem equal, is to simply deny reality.

Islam is a deep sea with a tradition of much spiritual goodness and genuine insight.

However, the Koran itself contains numerous injunctions to violent jihad and suppression of infidels. It also contains passages against violence and against compulsion in religion.

These things are to a considerable extent matters of interpretation but it is undeniable that at the very least a sizeable minority of Muslims choose an extremist interpretation.

How can Australia sensibly take account of all this while maintaining a non-discriminatory immigration program? Three obvious courses suggest themselves.

In the formal immigration program, there should be a rigid adherence to skills qualifications so that the people who come here are well educated, easily employable and speak good English.

The inflow of illegal immigrants by boat in the north, almost all Muslim, mostly unskilled, should be stopped.

Within the formal refugee and humanitarian allocation of 13,500 places a year, a legitimate stress should be placed on need but also on the ability to integrate into Australian society.

And, finally, we simply should not place immigration officers in the countries with the greatest traditions of radicalism.

A few years ago there was an informal view across government that very few visas should be issued to people from Afghanistan, Pakistan or Iraq, as these were the three likeliest sources of extremism.

These sorts of discussions take place all the time among senior officials, politicians and others. But I have never encountered a policy area in which private and public positions are so different.

It is right to be sensitive and avoid needless offence.

It is wrong to avoid reality altogether in such an important area of national policy.

No one in Europe, 25 years ago, thought they would be in the mess they’re in today.

Australia has been a successful immigration country. But the truth is not all immigrants are the same. And it may be much easier than people think to turn success into failure.

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EUROPE TURNS AGAINST DIVIDED SOCIETY
IN France, recent polls put National Front leader Marine Le Pen ahead of all other contenders for the French presidency. The National Front is a traditionally far-right extreme group, with an inheritance of anti-Semitism.

It has recently ditched the anti-Semitism and now stands primarily against Muslim immigration and Islamic influence in France.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said recently Germany’s attempt to create a multicultural society had failed completely.

Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron recently denounced European-style multiculturalism, saying: “We have encouraged different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and apart from the mainstream.

“We’ve failed to provide a vision of society to which they feel they want to belong. We’ve even tolerated these segregated communities behaving in ways that run completely counter to our values.”

France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy has agreed with Cameron and Merkel, that multiculturalism is a complete bust, as has Spain’s former leader, Jose Maria Aznar.

Britain’s former prime minister Gordon Brown said shortly before he lost office that 75 per cent of terror plots in Britain came from Pakistan or had a direct Pakistani connection. There are 800,000 Pakistanis living in Britain.

Across Europe, anti-Muslim parties are gaining electoral strength. They are often described as anti-immigration parties but in truth they have little complaint about immigrants other than Muslim immigrants. Switzerland has banned minarets. Even Sweden has an anti-Islam party.

All this is happening in Europe, the most liberal continent on earth, in the face of furious opposition from the liberal elite, who regard it as racist and, worse, incipient fascism, leftover colonialism and every other kind of -ism you can imagine.
Greg Sheridan

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THERE ARE NO WORRIES
GREG Sheridan in The Australian, November 6, 1996: There is nothing in multiculturalism that could cause any worry to any normal person. Multiculturalism officially promotes an overriding loyalty to Australia, respect for other people’s rights and Australian law, recognition of people’s cultural origins, respect for diversity, the need to make maximum economic use of the skills people bring to Australia and equity in access to government services.

What mostly passes for “debate” about multiculturalism is really the psychology of paranoia as a political style. That is why opinion polls on these issues are often self-contradictory. People will say they think there should be fewer migrants from Asia, but that the policy should be non-discriminatory. Or people might say that everybody should speak English, but then denounce funding for multiculturalism when its chief expenditure is to teach migrants English.

Science has shown that the tribal nature of our species is deep seated.

New research indicates that [...]]]> Everybody likes their own tribe the best, a fact of psychology that is ignored by the insistent multiculturalism ideology so beloved by liberal elites. We humans just feel more comfortable among those who share our language and culture.

Science has shown that the tribal nature of our species is deep seated.

New research indicates that a hard-wired tribal instinct extends back into the pre-human family tree. The study is another indicator that group identification is a strong force that should be handled carefully.

Therefore, programs that emphasize ethnic identity, such as seditious school Raza indoctrination, are dangerous practices that further balkanize the national community. Schools shouldn’t be dividing their students into warring tribes when educators should instead be teaching what unites all Americans.

Human Prejudice Has Ancient Evolutionary Roots, ScienceDaily, March 18, 2011

The tendency to perceive others as “us versus them” isn’t exclusively human but appears to be shared by our primate cousins, a new study led by Yale researchers has found.

In a series of ingenious experiments, Yale researchers led by psychologist Laurie Santos showed that monkeys treat individuals from outside their groups with the same suspicion and dislike as their human cousins tend to treat outsiders, suggesting that the roots of human intergroup conflict may be evolutionarily quite ancient.

The findings are reported in the March issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

“One of the more troubling aspects of human nature is that we evaluate people differently depending on whether they’re a member of our ‘ingroup’ or ‘outgroup,'” Santos said. “Pretty much every conflict in human history has involved people making distinctions on the basis of who is a member of their own race, religion, social class, and so on. The question we were interested in is: Where do these types of group distinctions come from?”

The answer, she adds, is that such biases have apparently been shaped by 25 million years of evolution and not just by human culture.

Santos and her lab studied the rhesus macaques living on an island off the coast of Puerto Rico. Like humans, monkeys in this population naturally form different social groups on the basis of family history. In order to assess whether monkeys made the same distinctions between ingroup and outgroup individuals, the researchers used a well-known tendency of animals to stare longer at novel or frightening things than at familiar or friendly things. They presented subject monkeys with pictures of monkeys who were either in their social group or members of a different group. They found that monkeys stared longer at pictures of other monkeys who were outside their group, suggesting that monkeys spontaneously detect who is a stranger and who is a group member.

“What made this result even more remarkable” noted Neha Mahajan, a Yale graduate student who headed up this project, “is that monkeys in this population move around from group to group, so some of the monkeys who were ‘outgroup’ were previously ‘ingroup.’ And yet, the result holds just as strongly for monkeys who have transferred groups only weeks earlier, suggesting that these monkeys are sensitive to who is currently to be thought of as an insider or an outsider. In other words, although monkeys divide the world into ‘us’ versus ‘them,’ they do so in a way that is flexible and is updated in real time.”

Santos and colleagues then asked whether monkeys evaluated ingroup and outgroup members differently — did they associate these individuals automatically with “good” and “bad” respectively? To study this, they developed a monkey version of a test of implicit attitudes known as the IAT. In humans, this test measures the extent to which people show implicit biases against members of other groups. To look at the same capacity in monkeys, the researchers showed monkeys a sequence of photos in which photos of ingroup or outgroup monkey faces were paired with photos of either good things, such as fruits, or bad things, such as spiders.

The researchers then recorded the time monkeys spent looking at both kinds of sequences. The monkeys spent little time looking at sequences that included ingroup faces paired with good stuff like fruits or outgroup faces paired with bad stuff like spiders, suggesting that the monkeys treated these two kinds of stimuli as being similar. On the other hand, the monkeys stared longer at sequences in which outgroup individuals were paired with positive objects like fruit suggesting that this association was unnatural to the monkeys. Like humans, monkeys tend to spontaneously view ingroup members positively and outgroup members negatively.

The Yale team’s results suggest that the distinctions humans make between “us” and “them” — and therefore the roots of human prejudice — may date back at least 25 million years, when humans and rhesus macaques shared a common ancestor.

“Social psychologists introduced the world to the idea that the immediate situation is hugely powerful in determining behavior, even intergroup feelings,” said Mahzarin Banaji, of the Department of Psychology at Harvard University and a co-author of the paper. “Evolutionary theorists have made us aware of our ancestral past. In this work, we weave the two together to show the importance of both of these influences at work.”

“The bad news is that the tendency to dislike outgroup members appears to be evolutionarily quite old, and therefore may be less simple to eliminate than we’d like to think,” Santos said. “The good news, though, is that even monkeys seem to be flexible about who counts as a group member. If we humans can find ways to harness this evolved flexibility, it might allow us to become an even more tolerant species.”

Other Yale authors of the paper are Margaret A. Martinez and Natashya Gutierrez. Researchers from Bar-Ilan University and Harvard also contributed to the study.

The work was funded the National Center for Research Resources, part of the National Institutes of Health.

Seattle thinks it knows better and wants to improve [...]]]> The city that prides itself having a statue of Lenin has advanced more forcefully into the social justice arena by turning the principle of equality under the law on its head. The blindfolded figure of Justice holding a scale represents the foundational idea that Seattle rejects.

Seattle thinks it knows better and wants to improve the system by instituting social justice, the multicultural idea that minorities are victims and need to be protected from the fair application of law enforcement. The city thinks there is institutional racism which shows up in more minorities being imprisoned and such.

Seattle particularly wants to help out immigrants and illegal aliens. It believes that illegal aliens should get less imprisonment for crimes so they won’t be deported by federal authorities.

So white people should receive the full punishment the law allows, while illegal aliens get cut slack for the same infraction. That’s the social justice formulation and is a way to celebrate diversity.

This controversy has been brewing up for a couple months, with the pot being stirred by a police newsletter article titled “Just Shut Up and Be a Good Little Socialist” by Officer Steve Pomper. (He has a website, StevePomper.com.)

The controversy burbled up to Fox News today:

That’s a lot of advertising. Ever wonder how they spend all that money?

One cost is renting mariachis.

US Census draws large crowd in Lower Valley

SOCORRO — The U.S. Census Bureau drew a large mass of people [...]]]> The Census Bureau is spending an unprecedented $133 million for marketing and outreach for the 2010 enumeration.

That’s a lot of advertising. Ever wonder how they spend all that money?

One cost is renting mariachis.

US Census draws large crowd in Lower Valley

SOCORRO — The U.S. Census Bureau drew a large mass of people on the day it took a snapshot of America.

The bureau gathered dozens of Lower Valley residents, including those living in the colonias, on Thursday in Socorro to answer questions about the 2010 Census and advertise jobs it offers.

Families enjoyed their afternoon hearing mariachis and eating pizza and hot dogs at the Rio Visa Community Center. Women were attracted by the raffles, in which prizes were food.

“It’s sort of like a festive environment where people can learn about census,” said Rebecca Robinson, a bureau’s spokeswoman. “People are into it. They are interested.”

Thursday was Census Day, the day people should use as reference to answer and mail back the 10-question form.

Census workers have visited colonia residents since March 22. In these impoverished areas, the bureau has doubled its efforts because the residents are hard to reach.

Census workers were on horseback conducting personal interviews, and 30 outreach workers called “promotoras” visited residents in March to answer questions.