Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Islamophobia = bullying and divisiveness

Sometimes, the Herald Sun's incarnation of Dutch Islamophobe Gert Wilders can fool Liberal Party bigots to spray venom at unsuspecting Australians. This is exactly what Bolt seems to have done in his monotonous hate-piece titled: Time to End Separatism which hit the net at midnight.

I don't know whether they were given an advance read or whether they were just jumping on the bandwagon of that other man caught in a medieval time warp, the UKs David Cameron whose full scale assault on multiculturalism, for a few minutes, distracted international headlines from the just demands for regime change by the courageous people of Egypt who have braved the bullets of the regime's thugs for two straight weeks. Cameron simply echoed his equally blinkered monoculturalist German host Merkel 's three month old comments preferring migrants to just be a silent workforce who see nothing, hear nothing and say nothing.

This brought the three stooges out of the Liberal Party to show that this time, we have fools in parliament who would go further than the embarrassing yester Howard-Costello years, and take us right back to the Spanish inquisition with homogenous one ideology states and all else can be driven into the sea.

Ironically, Cory Bernardi who is not a stranger to crying wolf about anything Islamic is undermining his very own 4th century Constantinian Christian doctrines by mocking Islam because the teachings of our faith were introduced in the seventh century (though he claims sixth).

Of course credit is to be given to The Victorian Minister for Multicultural Affairs Nicholas Kotsiras for defending Multiculturalism.

Then again, we would not be having this debate if any of the promoters of the monocultural nightmare had bothered to read the well reasoned arguments of Parliamentary Secretary for Multicultural Affairs, Kate Lundy which were presented in the Australian two months ago, they might have learned a thing or two about the benefits of multiculturalism.

Today, with mass communication, as we teeter on a new age that promises to advance society beyond the Information Revolution, we find these medieval dinosaurs calling for an insular world with clearly divided territories. Perhaps they miss those colonial days where they could just so easily demonise other countries before invading them. The attacks on Multiculturalism during the Howard Costello era created fear and then told the constituency that our bigoted fearless leader was the only one who can protect us whilst simultaneously playing war drums for invasions of two majority Muslim countries on false pretexts. Today's attacks, missing some of the earlier subtleties seem too ill-informed and ill-founded to be taken seriously, yet unfortunately, they will play into the paradigms of the most bigoted of rednecks out there and they will serve to recruit more people into the rednecks' cycle of unfounded fears. They will also hurt our reputation overseas and have a negative impact on some of our exports, especially in the field of education. Bernardi's ill considered attack on Halal food also threatens to undermine our Halal exports if he does not retract these comments very soon.

Do these people hate multiculturalism because of its promise to enlighten society, its ability to educate people, its potential to open the eyes of the general public that culture, any culture, is enriched by the injection of the collective experiences of other cultures. It seems that an open-minded society does not suit the naysayers who prefer a dog eat dog world where superiority is decided by technology and military might as was the case over the past couple of centuries.

Tony Abbott has some very real challenges on his hand. Unless he wants to be constantly embarrassed by these fools, he will really need to consider encouraging them to line up with Fred Nile instead of the Liberal Party. These bigots are telling the rest of the world that the oceans surrounding our great continent have passed through their ears and obscured their little minds to anything that is not European Christian.

It is time that both parties embraced the genuine interest of Australia and debated policies without creating chasms between Australians. Australia needs to come out of the dinosaur age.

Keysar