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Harrumph! We can’t be outdone by the “Krauts”, if our esteemed German friends and allies will pardon that rude expression. I say bring in a million Syrian refugees tout de suite. What’s this measly 10, 12, 20, or 40,000 all about? Where is our compassion? Richard Di Natale and Sarah Hanson-Young, you should be ashamed to low-ball our duty in these tragic circumstances.
My circumstances are not what they were. Marital difficulties, which I prefer to avoid detailing, have severely dented my prosperity. I now live in what the real estate guys call a one-bedder. Nevertheless, I am willing to take in two Syrian families. We can sleep in shifts. I would of course require (fairly) modest compensation from the government. Even better, I will move out entirely and allow three families their living space, slightly cramped though they will be. Of course, the compensation would need to be somewhat higher and it would be only reasonable if I were provided with spacious accommodation in the Hilton during the time of, shall we call it, my sacrifice for the benefit of humanity.
Would my immediate neighbours object to living in close proximity to three families of Syrian Muslim refugees? Surely they would not. For example, I am confident that the lady next door would not object to dressing modestly and donning a hijab to avoid upsetting her new neighbours. Though, I admit to not having broached the subject with her. In the unlikely event she was beset with any troubling doubt or discomfort about it, I would advise her to ask herself what the aforementioned Sarah would do?
As it stands, we are stuck with Mr Abbott’s mean-spirited policy. He only wants to bring in 12,000 refugees (only slightly edging out Bill Shorten who gets the wooded spoon in the compassion stakes). To boot, he wants to only take women and children and families from persecuted communities living in refugee camps. Come on, Mr Abbott, we know that means mainly Christians, with the odd few Yazidis and the like, thrown in to make it look even-handed.
Professor Bob Bowker, former ambassador to Syria, nailed it on the ABC’s 7.30 on Wednesday evening. “This is an approach which is both unwise and unfair. It’s unwise because we cannot talk about Team Australia and at the same time tell Sunni Muslims that they should stay on the bus until other players have had their chance to bat. And it’s unfair because Sunni Muslim Syrians are suffering in exactly the same way as minorities are suffering.”
Abbott is without shame. He has the absolute temerity to act in Australia’s interests. Look at this shockingly revelatory comment: “It’s important that we act with our head as well as with our heart here … It is important that we don’t bring in anyone from this troubled region who might ultimately be a problem for the Australian community as far as we humanly can.”
In these circumstances, the ABC provides a valuable public service in finding any number of truly compassionate people — global citizens, as it were — who can set things straight. I would say that the ABC is as good as the BBC in finding such people and giving them airtime so that we can properly deplore any hint of national self-interest.
Angela Merkel used to think like Mr Abbott.”Of course the tendency had been to say, let’s adopt the multicultural concept and live happily side by side, and be happy to be living with each other. But this concept has failed, and failed utterly,” she said in October 2010. Now, miraculously, she believes an additional 800,000 Sunni Muslims (just this year) can, after all, live happily side-by-side with indigenous Germans. To digress, miracles are, apparently, the stock-in-trade of global citizens. Mr Bowker, for example, while understandably lamenting the irreplaceable loss of life of people he knew, believes that the Syrian relics and monuments blown to smithereens by ISIS “can be rebuilt.” Reproduction relics and monuments don’t cut it for me but what do I know?
Back to my theme, I suspect, secretly, that Mr Abbott makes common cause with conservatives such as the UK’s Daily Express columnist Leo McKinstry (September 3). Have a read of this and be outraged:
We are always told by the ideologues about the joys of mass immigration, how much it improves our economy and enriches our society. But if migrants are so wonderful why they stay and improve their own countries?…The reason so many people from Africa, the Middle east and Asia are coming here is because their countries are hellholes, riddled with corruption, superstition, conflict , tribalism, poverty and extremism. Through mass immigration our rulers are importing the same problems into Europe on a huge scale.
Just because many in Muslim communities despise our way of life, seek to replace parliamentary law with Sharia, are intolerant, wall women off from the world of fashion, freedom and equality, regularly throw up the occasional terrorist who wants to behead us, and owe their first duty to the Ummah, rather than to the adopted country which has given them sanctuary, safety and prosperity, is no reason at all to be wary of inviting many more in.
Only Mr Abbott and his ilk think otherwise. Global citizens have to stand up and be counted. More candlelight vigils must be held for the needy — whatever they believe, whoever they are, wherever they are (provided, of course, they are not the needy at home).
The media is complicit and compliant with the human rights industry and the left. Today on the “Bolt Report” Piers Ackerman showed pictures of ‘refugees’ throwing faecies at Hungarian officials, rioting, refusing to eat food and shouting “God is Great” on a train. He correctly surmises that the vast majority are being denied all this material by a media which is effectively an arm of the politburo, disseminating images as and when it suits their specific agenda.
Honestly, I don’t know which is more frightening – the 70% of able-bodied male Muslims arriving en mass from war-torn areas or the disturbing, left-wing thought-police which passes for the media today. All refusing to learn the lessons of history and to see the parallels between what they’re doing and the old Soviet empire.
The Chancellor of Austria has now jumped on the band-wagon; calling out the Hungarian government – referring to them as reminiscent of Nazis – who shipped refugees to places they didn’t want to go. These modern ‘refugees’ are one and the same trenchantly refusing to be either fingerprinted or processsed in Hungary. Meanwhile, Chancellor Fehrmann isn’t intelligent enough to realize his Nazi trope can be equally applicable today to Austria itself. Those eager crowds, waving and cheering their new German ‘invaders’ post-Anschluss – without question or qualification – in 1938, only to be extremely sorry about what they wished for.
Sehr gut Herr Jody!
My comment at Quadrant Online at: https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2015/09/sentiment-swamps-sound-policy/ is worth repeating here.
The Lebanese Muslim Association of Australia strongly condemned this preference for the oppressed as discrimination – and had lots of air time on the ABC in Canberra this past week.
Also, the Grand Mufti of Australia has condemned the acceptance of 12,000 non-muslim refugees (fleeing islam) as ‘provocative’.
There were 300 noisy protestors outside my hotel last Tuesday night. One 1960’s geriatric pensioner with a stupid fixed smile on his face was holding a placard saying “50,000 is not Enough. Australia is Mean not to share its Bounty”
I said to him “I agree with you.” He positively glowed. “Yes, we should bring in 50,000 Copts and 50,000 Ameraic Christians.”
He appeared to be dumbstruck, but for unfathomable reasons the smile left his face. I presume he did not know what a Copt or Ameraic Christian is, though there are other possibilities … Anyway, I never found out why he did not support my generosity towards the displaced.
I have to say that I did not enjoy taunting him as much as I should have, but apparently my preferred approach of poking him in the eye with a burnt stick is not allowed. The nanny state is taking away all of life’s simple pleasures.
Finally, I noted the ABC could still not unequivocally support the government’s gross over-generosity and caving in to ‘populism’. So, Tony ‘Thought Bubble’ Abbott had to add that there would be muslims in the mix, with the preference given to ‘families’. Well, how did that work out at West Ryde Hospital where two parts of a M.E. family went to visit a relative and all it took was the Riot Police to calm things down with only one nurse, one security guard and one policeman injured?
Yet there appears to be one curious anomaly in all of this: a charity coordinator briefly appeared on the ABC to lament that there are 100,000 homeless people in Oz (which I thought sounded to be an exceptionally high number) and then Tim Costello appeared to lament that there are starving displaced people in the M.E. requiring resettlement. Now pure logic tells me that if we bring in 12,000 people they will all be homeless and if we have enough homes to house 12,000 people they will go to homeless people already here. Something tells me this is not so, but I cannot find the flaw in my logic, so someone out there: please explain the answer of this puzzle to me in comprehensible terms.
So, did T’TB’A cave in to populism? Well, No, actually, because a poll I voted in asking how many traumatised troublemakers and Centrelink clients should we let in had the following result from 55,000 voters. It had 66% voting for zero. That is true populism as we know ‘activists’ and anarchists are far more active in these sort of polls.
With responses of some 55,000 as of Friday morning:
No Refugees – 66%
50,000 – 11%
20,000 – 9%
10,000 – 14%
Just wait until the populist minority get their way – ‘democracy’ in action
The new Liberal ‘vote for us’ slogan must be: “No principles, no policies, no promises, no hope and no vision for a sovereign Australia” and if said with a compassionate look I think this is an election winner … Well, it is better than Labor and the Greens, but will the voters recognise that?
As for Dutton’s comment: the only sad part is that he did not fight back by pointing out there is no threat to the beggar micro-island states from rising sea levels. His appeasing apology to the bullies and the stupid subtracted more primary votes from the Liberals and transferred them to the Minor parties, who are no longer so minor
I’m glad to be over 60 and not having to live in this kind of world that much longer. Truly!!
Jody, Homer Sapien and en passant
I gotta admit, I enjoyed all your comments rather more than the comments I got from a recent piece on The Drum. It makes you realise that polarisation is acute. There is quite simply no meeting ground. I don’t know what it means except that it means something disquieting. Peter
I don’t read “The Drum” or watch the program, dominated as it is by inner-urban Green lefties and teenager with lots of education, narcissism and entitlement. Do I want to have fingers pointed at me at my age and be on the receiving end of lectures from those who haven’t got a clue, save what they learned from “Marxist readings” at university? The answer is my standard one: “I’d rather have my head drilled open and filled with litres of concrete”.
Can’t disagree. It must be the masochist in me.
I am amazed that Peter Smith missed the most critical point in his article. Surely, Ms Merkel’s feminist ‘friends’ will be delighted that finally they will have an Islamist female head of state in Germany. Whether Ms Merkel remains in that exalted state for long may be questionable given the propensity for supporters of Sharia Law to lop heads.
Ending up in a one-bedder is the fate of all men here in Australia or western country who go through divorce or marital difficulties as you put it. Which is the result of law guaranteeing that men are the losers and women the winners in those circumstances.Or for that matter any circumstance that is man-woman issue. Which itself is because men and women are treated with absolute equality (“absolute equality” is the phrase you used several months ago in one of your articles). Right!
I really wonder what you mean when you use term “misogyny”? Do you really think men in the Middle East hate women? Hating their wives, mothers, sisters, daughters? Men of a nation hating the women of the nation? Are you kidding? You think women over there spend their entire lives in hospital recovering from injuries inflicted by their men, because after all they are hated by their men, and no other men to help them either, since they hate women, too?
Mohsen, Only just caught your comment. For the record men hating women in the ME is a straw man of your making. I did not say that. It would be silly to say that. However, it seems clear enough that Islamic societies do not accord women equal status with men. That is a problem. Men and women are one in Christ. They are without doubt equal before God. And that is good enough for me.
Peter
You’re right about the Islamic societies.
But being wrong and/or mistaken about the perception about treatment of women, and at the same time being confident about correctness of that perception (obviously wrongly and misguidedly, as is the case in the Islamic societies) is different from actually and consciously hating women (misogyny, the term you use. [ Unless my understanding of meaning of misogyny is inexact).
Misogyny is the wrong description and word.
One can criticize and condemn the treatment of women in the Islamic societies, but one cannot attribute it to misogyny.
I did not use the word misogyny.
My mistake, then.
I sincerely apologize.
By the way, no straw man at all! I’ve got no issues with the content and intent of your essay. Or any you have posted so far about Islam, democracy, western civilization, or freedom.
Doesn’t mean I will not post contrary comments in future, though.
Thank you.
Mohsen
Isn’t that candle-light vigil stuff just so twee, so precious, so tawdry, so affected. When I look at the utter jerks and their faux-piety wallowing in their self-righteousness I am instantly reminded of the passage from the Gospel of Mathew:
“And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.”
There’s an epidemic of the cultural masochists standing in the synagoguesand on the street corners across the western world and, on behalf of us all, they cry “Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa” and like the four-star clowns they are, they’re giving the whole circus away.
Germany is not acting as altruistically as many like to think. German governments (Federal and Land) are evicting long standing poor and elderly tenants of state owned housing to make way for immigrants who will be put to work in German factories, cleaning the streets and other menial tasks and who will support the aging German population. As Germany accepts the largest intake of the current wave she will be able to browbeat countries such as Denmark, Hungary, Slovakia and Britain to accept quotas laid down by the EU thus further strengthening the role of the German dominated supra-national EU as the true government of EU states and further subjugate national democratically elected parliaments to rule by an unaccountable foreign collective.
Of course once accepted as refugees the migrants will receive an EU passport, as required by the UN Convention on Refugees, entitling them to travel and reside in any EU state of their choosing.
Since the vast majority of the migrants are travelling from safe havens, such as Turkey, and a great many are not from Syria at all but countries as far apart as the Congo, Pakistan and Kosovo, they are not technically refugees in accordance with the UN Convention and EU states have no obligation to them. The migrants should apply for entry while in such safe havens. Furthermore any who go back into their country in which they claim to be persecuted etc., as the father of Aylan Kurdi did, are no longer protected by the UN Convention.
David Cameron and Tony Abbott are quite right to take refugees only from the camps. It would be wonderful to see Cameron follow Abbott’s example and give preference to those truly persecuted: the Christians. But it is too much to expect that from a man who wants to see a Muslim Prime Minister of Britain.
I should add that were proper controls in place it would be far easier to identify and protect the truly persecuted. Australia, unlike EU member states, still has its sovereignty. Use it wisely to maintain this outpost of Western civilisation as a part of that civilisation and do not hand the country over to Islam.
I add one final comment to the rest of these; none of these scenarios currently being played out in Europe and the western world would be possible for one minute without the aggressive interventions of well-fed, cashed-up, educated and organized lawyers – all of whom enjoy the benefits of cultures with absolutely no existential threats through war. For the moment.