It is unreasonable to reason with unreasonable people. Australia's leaders understand this. I wish they could make other Western leaders understand this. "You won't change the minds of people who are hardened fanatics and hardened extremists," Prime Minister John Howard explained last week. "You have to identify them and take measures to ensure that they don't become a problem." Those measures include, in extreme circumstances, deportation. The treasury minister echoed his boss. "If [Australian values] are not your values, if you want a country which has Sharia law or a theocratic state, then Australia is not for you." Ditto for the education minister, who suggested that Muslim radicals "clear off." Tolerance need not be a suicide pact.
Anybody want to chip in and get Norman Mineta a ticket to Australia so he can learn from John Howard? Perhaps Prime Minister Howard could help our erstwhile Sec. or Trans. figure out what these guys loook like!
The Australians are not bogged down with bull$hite. What you see is typically what you get and their total disregard for all things politically correct have made it so they are safer in their country than we are in ours.
Plus, they have Fosters Lager.
Must have something to do with living just across the water from the most populous Muslim country on the planet (Indonesia).
In Australia, we currently have a purge against multiculturalism being undertaken by our right-wing. However, our right-wing (along with a number in the left) forget a few things about multi-culturalism. Multi-culturalism was born largely out of Voltaire's work on tolerance. Anyone reading enough Voltaire will tell you that one has to be tolerant of everything but intolerance. Ergo, being intolerant of religious fundamentalists is not in violation of multiculturalism (or at least in my own construct of multiculturalism).
Something Dan should have pointed out, the Australian Labor Party has also opposed the imigration of hate-preeching fundamentalists (and has taken this stance for a while now).
Unfortunately, unlike as inferred in one of the respones above, what you see in Australian politics is not what you get (especially in our media coverage). There has been a serious effort by portions of our media to misrepresent our Muslim populace (I'll blog about this sometime because it's a big one).
BTW. If any of you like our Fosters, you can have it. It tastes like crap. A good Tasmanian beer like Boags, or a South Australian like Coopers is so much better.
I’m so sick of this p.c. term “multiculturalism”. The libs seem to enjoy using it so that they can label anybody who thinks that immigrants (legal or illegal) should adapt to the culture of the country they have chosen to live in are bigots and xenophobes.
There really is no such thing as a country being “multicultural”. People can retain remnants of the culture from their country of origin, but they must adapt and accept the culture of their new home.
Without adhering to a new culture, there can only be social chaos.
That said, it’s not whatever multiculturalism means that’s the problem. The problems develop when people use that term as an excuse to act badly.
In this country, politically correct interpretations of it have trumped common sense with regard to enforcing even basic laws. Never mind that when something as serious as racial and cultural profiling needs to be done to protect people, this is fought tooth and nail by leftists factions.
What it appears to be from the outside, is that the political powers in Australia are using common sense to protect the people of that continent with little regard for the reasons why certain groups are acting badly. It is recognized that they just are and they will be expelled as a result.
Sorry Bruce, love Fosters. In the marginally unimportant matters of beer and sports, everybody seems to have their own bias.
