Amanda Vanstone’s Anzac Jihadis

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Amanda Vanstone is one of those people it is hard not to like for herself, if not her every stance and opinion. She’s jolly and good-humoured, blunt but non-threatening, and these attributes have defined a market niche she has grown to fill and dominate. At the ABC and Fairfax, they need a conservative from time to time to make some sort of pretense at  balance, and the former Minister for Immigration serves that purpose admirably. She’s the conservative you book — for Q&A, to host Counterpoint or pen columns for The Age and SMH — when what’s required is a Liberal who won’t scare the horses. This relieves the need to stack the audience with plants, shoe-throwers and class-strugglers, which Mark Scott should consider a boon to his budget in these hard times. Indeed, were it not for competition from John Hewson and Malcolm Fraser,  the ACCC would surely have investigated her for operating a monopoly.

Today’s airing of her latest insight, an exercise in multicultural outreach, could not have been better put had her words dripped from the oily lips of the late Al Grassby.

We must remember that Muslims are not the enemy, she writes, just radical Muslims, because Islam is the Religion of Peace and has done many favours for Australia over the years. Andrew Bolt deals with misguided notions of Turkish history and Kemal Ataturk’s place in it, perhaps not realising his critique can only endear Vanstone, elevate her worth and market value,  in the eyes of those who suspect they would not have to pinch their noses too hard if all conservatives were as amiable as she.

There is one element of her column, however, which plumbs a depth of error far beyond the plonk-plonk-plonk of predictable prose tumbling into the well of multi-culti wisdom.

“If your great or great-great grandfather returned from Gallipoli,” she writes, “he may well have had his life saved directly or indirectly by one of the Indian Muslims. Your own life may not have come about but for them.”

This is news indeed, as Britain’s war leaders were eager to keep their Muslims as far from the Hun’s Muslims as humanly possible, and for good reason.

Early in 1915, as whispers spread that Indian regiments would be sent to confront their fellow believers in the Middle East, the 5th Light Infantry mutinied in Singapore and spent the next five days burning, looting and butchering random Europeans. When the ring leaders had been subdued and executed, the entire forced moved to Egypt. There, as the Australian Sikh historian Pradeep Kanthan puts it

“…except for the Gurkha battalions, all other units had equal components of Muslim troops. As the Ottoman Empire at that time held sway over the Islamic world and Indian troops were subject to Turkish propaganda, units with Muslim troops were quickly moved away to France, leaving mainly the Gurkhas to fight it out in Gallipoli.”

There may have been a Muslim or two serving the Empire at Gallipoli, but it wouldn’t have been more than that.

So perhaps Vanstone is more correct than she knows. The fact that the mutineers and jihadis of the Singapore insurrection were packed off to the Western Front before they could get anywhere near Gallipoli may indeed have saved Australian lives.

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