What is a wemon?

"The influx of Muslims poses serious problems." VK3AUU

The problem is not with the Muslims as such, but how Islam is interpreted and put into practice.

Unfortunately, orthodox Islam is strict, separatists, sexist, undemocratic, obeys only shariah law and totally rejects the secular law of the land.

The only way ahead for Muslims is to reform Islam so that Muslims have a choice of leaving Islam without being rejected by the Muslim community and called all sorts of names and threatened with death.

Islam, like communism, is a dying ideology. Almost all the Islamic countries in the world can't function as a modern state. Many Muslims are migrating to the West or economically viable countries.

Good question, jjplug.

>>What is a wemon?<<

Apparently, it is a 'lessor being'.

Someone who rents out their house, maybe?

Hi Pericles,

You ask why I mention Pakistan.

It is difficult sometimes to get your thoughts into 350 words.

I mentioned Pakistan, which initially included Bangladesh, precisely because it was created to give Muslims a safe haven, as they saw it, from Hindus. Pakistan was created because many Muslims feared for their safety in Hindu dominated India.

In other words, to put it in modern terminology, they feared for their safety in a multicultural society.

I don’t blame Muslims for their fears. The birth of India and Pakistan as independent nations was accompanied by incredible sectarian violence. We may never know the full death toll but it probably runs into hundreds of thousands.

Sorry that I did not make myself clearer.

However, all that being said, Pakistan itself is undergoing tremendous conflict along both tribal and religious lines. I would not like to be Shia, Ahamadya or Christian in Pakistan.

Abdus Salaam, the first Muslim to be awarded a Nobel Prize for physics, was unable to return to his native Pakistan because as a high-profile Ahmadya he would not be safe.

Pakistan is certainly no poster child for successful multiculturalism.

VK3AUU and Philip Tang

I have to disagree with you both.

There is NO problem with Muslim immigration or with the separatism that some Muslims want to practice.

The problem lies with trying to APPEASE Muslim demands or, to be more precise, the demands of certain Muslim religious leaders.

mac

I agree totally with your post of Tuesday, 22 February 2011 4:06:02 PM

If that’s all there is to multiculturalism then all multiculturalism amounts to is a statement of the rights enjoyed by all citizens of a secular liberal democracy.

But is that really what the multi-culti crowd have in mind?

Dr Eva Sallis in her article, "Australia's Dangerous Fantasy," (first published in The New York Times, December 2005, updated November 2006), tells us that:

"Newcomers, especially if they have come to Australia in linguistic or ethnically distinct groups have always had a hard time at first.
But past streams of migration gave Australia its reputation as a country of diverse peoples that is all the better for it."

Like the US, we have new anti-terrorism legislation, first passed in 2002, then significantly strengthened in 2003. This legislation inevitably validated broader community mistrust of Arab and Muslim
Australians. Dr Sallis points out, "Australians are fearful of terrorism and terrorists, and are fearful of the threat of invasion from the north, yet the governments have done nothing sustantive to allay these fears and to increase knowledge and appreciation of Australians of Middle-Eastern background. Dr Sallis points out that in the last five years there has been documented and anecdotal evidence of a mass increase in harassment, vilification, and violence towards Australians of Arab appearance in the media, talkback radio, and in popular imagination.

Prejudice creates what it fears. Dr Sallis says that, "through prejudice young people's prospects are curtailed. Young Arab Australians in Sydney struggle to get an education and jobs and are increasingly ghettoized in poorer suburbs. Their own families often live defensively and as a result are highly prejudiced about Australians. The increasing hostility of the broader community reinforces this inter-community racism, rather than challenging it."

Our politicians have benefited and continue to benefit from fear of
Muslims and Arabs rather than working to educate and lead Australians beyond it. Dr Sallis points out that:" A volatile part of our community is living in deep alienation, unable to belong and another volatile part seems to be living back in the irretrievable past with a fantasy of an all-white Australia." Sallis tells us that - " If contemporary Australians are to live at ease with themselves, they need more education, less fear mongering, and not least, greater honesty about the culture of racism that is so damaging to them."

As I suspected, stevenlmeyer, you are using the word "multiculturalism" in a somewhat cavalier manner.

>>In other words, to put it in modern terminology, they [Indian Muslims] feared for their safety in a multicultural society.<<

As the author of the article stated presciently in the first sentence:

"Multiculturalism is a term so broad that it can mean anything to anyone"

You have chosen the meaning "any place in the world where more than one culture/religion/ethnicity live together".

May I respectfully suggest that this is too broad to be of any use to anyone.

To illustrate this, try to imagine, define or describe a location that contained no trace of "multiculturalism". I suspect that the endpoint of this exploration would confine the answer to "just my own household, since my neighbours on one side are Nigerian, and on the other, Jewish".

Let's explore further.

>>Pakistan is certainly no poster child for successful multiculturalism<<

This rather confirms my suspicions about your definition. I doubt very much whether a country whose full title is the Islamic Republic of Pakistan would consider itself in any way, shape or form, multicultural.

The point is that none of these countries can be usefully employed as providing either examples of "multiculturalism at work", or lessons on how to avoid conflict in a "multicultural society".

A point with which, it would appear, you are in agreement.

>>The problem lies with trying to APPEASE Muslim demands or, to be more precise, the demands of certain Muslim religious leader<<

That would appear to be very much in line with the author's position.

"...critics of multiculturalism use the most aberrant examples of behaviour from migrants to discredit multiculturalism"

What is being said is, please try not to use the activities of a minority as justification to lash out at everyone.