Price of freedom

IMMEDIATELY after the London bombings, one senior European-based intelligence official lashed Britain for failing to realise it had tolerated the intolerant for too long.

"The terrorists have come home," The New York Times quoted the senior spy, pointing to Britain's record of free speech, civil liberties and protections for political activism when some Islamic clerics preached hate.

As Australians ask whether terrorists can strike here, critics are questioning whether Canberra's policy of multiculturalism may also be allowing hate-filled fanatics to flourish.

In celebrating the maintenance of different race, religious and cultural practices, critics are asking: Does multiculturalism allow intolerance and beliefs that justify the slaughter of innocents? And is the same trust in diversity and free speech allowing some Islamic bookshops in Australia to sell books that spread hate for Christianity and promote or justify suicide bombings?

Commentators from across the political spectrum have expressed fears in recent days that multiculturalism is the problem, not the solution, for a safer Australia in an environment of Islamic terrorism. Concerns are also being voiced by academics such as Bob Birrell, director of Monash University's Centre for Population and Urban Research, who sees trouble in the push for a multiculturalism that promotes diversity and plays down integration and Australian history.

"Where you have the highly flexible, open, permissive, even encouraging form of multiculturalism, you are setting the scene for the maintenance and even flourishing of doctrines [that] from the mainstream point of view are not healthy," Birrell says.

But a leading Islamic spokesman says the lack of retaliatory attacks against Muslims in Australia since the London bombings is proof that multiculturalism is working. "In Britain, the US and even New Zealand there's been a backlash," says Waleed Aly, a lawyer from the Islamic Council of Victoria, home to about 80,000 Muslims. "I think Australia has somehow escaped that and part of the reason for that is we have a society that is truly multicultural."

Yet while Australia has been immune from Islamic terrorist bombers, there have been extreme examples of racial crime from within some ethnic groups. In western Sydney in 2000, gangs of Lebanese Muslim men and youths targeted and raped white girls. One girl was called an "Aussie pig" and told: "I'm going to f--- you Leb style."

Critics say this is evidence of multiculturalism's failure to bring harmony and a national sense of unity, and ask whether such racially motivated violence will lead to home-grown terrorism.

But Aly says the gang rapes were a "very different phenomenon" from the terrorist attacks launched on Western targets by Islamist extremists. "I think it's loose to say it's not so far from a terrorist attack," Aly says. "There are different forms of criminality. You'd be arguing anyone who commits rape could be a terrorist as well." But doesn't it suggest that multiculturalism has not succeeded, that these young men didn't feel part of Australian society? "There may be some sociopathic behaviour in certain communities," he concedes, but denies it is a failure of multiculturalism.

Aly says some extremists within the Muslim faith, including the Wahabbism practised in Saudi Arabia, are deeply intolerant. Few of Australia's 300,000-plus Muslims follow those extremist teachings, he says. But intolerance is a constant in all human society. "It's not inherently a function of multiculturalism," he says. "You can fight it, and we should do that together, but to blame it on the bogeyman of multiculturalism is loose intellectually."

Murder by intolerant fanatics is not the preserve of suicide bombers, Aly adds. In South Australia, the horrific Snowtown murders "stemmed from an incredible intolerance not only of pedophiles but of homosexuals and that was bred from within".

Andrew Parkin, professor of politics and international studies at Flinders University in South Australia, says multiculturalism isn't "a recipe for separateness, for multiple loyalties". He points to the Howard Government's update of the framework document for multicultural policy. It says that while one of Australia's great strengths is cultural diversity, Australians must be "united by a shared future, an overriding commitment to our nation and its democratic institutions and values, and support for the rule of law with English as a common language".

Ameer Ali, head of the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils, admits there are Muslim fundamentalists in Australia, just as there are Christian fundamentalists. "You get the small violent group and you have to confront them," he says. "We have to re-educate them. And when the majority bring pressure on the minority groups they have to change, and if they don't fit in the best thing to do is send them back.

"That doesn't mean multiculturalism has failed. Multiculturalism has progressed in this country more than anywhere else these last few years."

He also denies that Muslims are less likely than any other group to assimilate. "The Chinese, the Greeks, Italians had it, and the Muslims are going through the same process."

Islam is a tolerant religion, Ali says. But Osama bin Laden has used it to justify attacks on non-believers and to lure suicide bombers on the basis that they will be rewarded in paradise.

"Where there are groups advocating hatred, we have to bring them to justice," Ali says. "We are telling the young kids, 'Look, this is our country, we have to participate on equal terms, there's no special concession.' Unless we share the values of this country, we have no place in this society."

The Islamic Council's Aly says the splinter groups are best described as cults. "The responsibility of mainstream Muslims now is to create an alternative to fill the spiritual void," he says. "When you have people preaching a religion that's indelibly hate-filled, it will only thrive when there's nothing else there for people to latch on to."

Stepan Kerkyasharian, president of the NSW Anti-Discrimination Board, says multiculturalism has made Australia safer, not more dangerous. He says it's vital to have some kind of ethnic policy, whatever it is called. With half the country born overseas or to migrant parents, "we need a management plan", he says. "You can change the labels -- you might not call it multicultural policy, ethnic policy -- but we need a policy that ensures Australians live in harmony, accept each other and respect each other."

Kerkyasharian insists the policy is not about different streams within Australian cultural life, but a "peaceful and harmonious transition of different cultural background to a unified Australia, into being Australians".

He agrees Islamic bookshops selling inflammatory books about Christianity and suicide attacks is hardly unified or peaceful. But the reason the books are on sale has more to do with freedoms inherent in a democracy than multiculturalism. "Those books, I don't want to see them on shelves of the bookstore, in anyone's house, I don't want to see those books exist anywhere. But they don't exist because of multiculturalism; they exist because someone overseas has got this intense hatred of Western civilisation."

The notion that ethnic groups are no longer assimilating into Australia but defiantly maintaining nationalistic identities leading to violent confrontations is also not supported by the facts, Kerkyasharian says.

"If you compare the last Census with the previous one, you see a continuing trend of ethnic minorities decreasing," he says. "The first wave maintained to a great extent their language and culture, but subsequent generations just assimilate and disappear. They become part of Australian society. The numbers invariably diminish, without exception."

Yet the Lebanese gang rapists appeared to proudly embrace their nationality as a weapon against their victims. Isn't that evidence of a worrying failure in multicultural policy? "I think what one has to look at is whether the system is breeding the people," he says. At the same time, it is difficult to measure multiculturalism's success. "If we didn't have a policy [that] was accepting, creating an environment to allow people to feel secure enough to lower their barriers and integrate into society, how many more problems would we have?" he asks.

And while the Lebanese rapists targeted white Australian women, they had not sought to fight on this soil the wars that have claimed so many in their native land. "A lot of the success is due to the fact that Australians for the last 30 years have been secure in the knowledge they will not be persecuted or feel alienated because of their parentage or where you've come from," says Kerkyasharian. "The minute you start alienating people, instilling insecurity, that's when your problem starts."