Cameron is right and multiculturalism has failed

HOW mad has multiculturalism made us? Dangerously so, when it’s had us financing even an Osama bin Laden fan club.

Let me tell you of this perfect example of all that’s wrong with multiculturalism, a policy to sponsor what divides us.

Then you might understand why the speech British Prime Minister David Cameron gave last week, demanding an end to the great multiculturalism disaster, must be heard here, too.

You’ll know why we must particularly heed his call for a more “muscular” defence of Western liberal values, and the stripping of government support from ethnic and religious groups that attack them and preach separatism.

Or as Cameron put it: “Let’s properly judge these organisations: Do they believe in universal human rights—including for women and people of other faiths? Do they believe in equality of all before the law? Do they believe in democracy . . .? Do they encourage integration or separatism?

“These are the sorts of questions we need to ask. Fail these tests and the presumption should be not to engage with organisations. No public money. No sharing of platforms with ministers at home.

“At the same time, we must stop these groups from reaching people in publicly funded institutions like universities and prisons.”

What’s the big deal, you’ll ask. Who’d be so crazy as to do anything else?

Which brings me back to my example.

The Islamic Youth Movement used to meet in Australia’s biggest mosque, the one in Lakemba presided over by Sheik Taj Din al-Hilali, for years the Mufti of Australia, despite praising suicide bombers, backing the Hezbollah terrorist group, calling the September 11 attacks “God’s work against oppressors” and saying uncovered Australian girls invited rape.

Among its activities, the IYM published a magazine called Call to Islam, edited by Bilal Khazal.

In it appeared fawning interviews with members of some of the world’s worst terrorist groups, including the one that bombed the World Trade Centre in 1993 and another that killed 58 tourists in Luxor, Egypt.

It even interviewed—and praised—al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden, who’d already declared war on the West and was planning his September 11 attacks on the United States.

It also published articles by extremists such as its translator, Keysar Trad, now head of the Islamic Friendship Association, who wrote: “The criminal dregs of white society colonised this country, and now, they only take the select choice of other societies, and the descendants of these criminal dregs tell us that they are better than us.”

Now here’s how our government-funded prophets of multiculturalism and their fellow travellers dealt with this hotbed of imported hate and us-against-them separatism.

Khazal’s youth movement was not punished (at first), but given three government grants. Two were multicultural grants totalling nearly $7000 from the NSW Government, to teach its supporters not English but Arabic.

The other was a federal work-for-the-dole grant to spruce up its office and arrange its library of propaganda.

Yes, true.

How perfectly multicultural. Here were our multicultural commissars, so broad-minded, encouraging young Muslim Australians to keep their distance, speak Arabic, loathe their new home and recruit others for their jihad.

So tolerant of us. So insane.

Nor did it end there. Hilali himself benefited from the political carpetbaggers who exploited the vote-trading possibilities that multiculturalism inevitably encouraged, with its doling out of cash to favourite ethnic “spokesmen”.

In 1985, the Hawke government’s immigration minister, Chris Hurford, finally decided Hilali, here from Egypt on a visitor’s visa, had outstayed his welcome. He ordered the bigot thrown out.

But Paul Keating and Leo McLeay, Labor MPs representing the electorates where Hilali’s followers were most numerous, lobbied hard for a permanent visa for this hatemonger, and Hurford was overruled.

Nor was that the first favour done Hilali. In 2001, SBS, the multicultural broadcaster, filmed him in his mosque praising suicide bombers as “heroes” days before September 11.

Then came the terror attacks, and rather than show Australians proof that the ideology that had just killed 2985 people, including 10 Australians, was shared in at least part by our most prominent Muslim cleric, SBS destroyed the tape.

It would give us the “wrong idea”, it claimed. Which actually means the “right idea”—about Hilali, Islam in Australia and the multicultural project of which SBS is a beneficiary.

Hilali thrived, and four years later won the greatest honour multicultural politics could deliver, ironically from one of the policy’s greatest critics, prime minister John Howard.

Having preached separatism for so long, Hilali was one of 14 Muslims picked to advise the prime minister directly on how to deal with the very problem he himself had helped make worse.

Howard quickly regretted what he’d done, especially after learning a full third of his advisers, nominated by multicultural experts, were supporters of Hezbollah, listed by his own government as a terrorist organisation.

And let’s give Keysar Trad, Hilali’s spokesman, a footnote. Two years ago, he was invited by the Sydney Opera House’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas to give a lecture arguing for polygamy in Australia. Oh, and Khazal, his old editor, has been jailed for terrorism-related offences.

In almost every detail of this example you see the madness of our multiculturalism, and that suicidal accommodation by government agencies with hostile values they should resist.

This is exactly the approach Cameron now rejects—letting in hate-preachers, defending them, rewarding them, and giving them platforms to advance values at fundamental odds with those that have made this country so free, stable and cohesive.

It is true that our politicians have quietly rowed back a bit already from the extremes of the multicultural policies they so stupidly inflicted on us.

Even the Gillard Government no longer has a minister for multicultural affairs, rebadging that position as Minister for Citizenship instead. Meanwhile, extremists are more likely to be shunned, and multicultural agencies proclaim loyalty to Australian values, even if they do little to promote them.

It’s taken Muslim immigration to break multiculturalism here as it has in both Britain and Germany, where the Chancellor, Angela Merkel, three months ago declared the policy had “failed, utterly failed”.

Our signs of stress are inevitably anecdotal. For instance, all 20 people jailed here for terrorism offences are Muslim.

Another sign: a University of Technology Sydney study of young people last year found only a third called themselves Australians, even though two-thirds were born here.

And ANU economist Dr Andrew Leigh warned four years ago that the Australian Community Survey showed trust was lowest in the suburbs that had the most people born overseas.

It’s obvious, of course. People tend to trust least those they think don’t share their values. They also tend to feel they owe them less, too. Sometimes a lot less.

That’s in part what had the Government’s White Paper on terrorism warning last year: “The scale of the problem will continue to depend on factors such as the size and make-up of local Muslim populations, including . . . the success or otherwise of their integration into their host society.”

Seen like that, the duty of governments seems clear. It’s not, as the Victorian Multicultural Commission stupidly insists, “to encourage all . . . culturally and linguistically diverse communities to retain and express their social identity and cultural inheritance”.

Whether I keep wearing my Dutch clogs and eating poffertjes—or wear R. M. Williams and eat pies—is entirely my personal business, and there’s no public benefit in a government grant to make me stay more “Dutch”.

Similarly, it’s no business of, say, the Victorian Government to encourage groups that are marked off along racial, ethnic or religious lines.

Yet watch it go, showering $10 million a year in multicultural grants on the Somaliland Society of Australia, Burmese Muslim Community Association, United Women’s Group of Liberia, Hellenic Writers’ Association, Mexican Social and Cultural Association, and 2000 more of their like.

Our governments’ most fundamental duty is not to keep a community divided into tribes, but to defend the shared values that are our only hope of making a one out of many.

So how about a little more loving for the things that unite us, whether it’s our history, symbols, institutions or traditional values?

And how about saying to the ideologues who reject them to do so on their own dime, not ours?

Time we woke up. To spend public money to create a nation of tribes is the great experiment that has failed—because it’s succeeded only too well.