>> I look forward to a stoush between him and Jewish school providers when young Ali or Ahmed, newly arrived jihadists from Pakistan, apply for gardening jobs at Jewish schools.>>

LOL,

I'm even more interested to see what happens when Chabadnik Yossi, complete with black hat, tsitsit (fringes) sticking out from under his shirt and long sideburns applies for a job as maths teacher at a Muslim school.

Or how about atheist Marxist radical feminist and evolutionist Christobelle applying for a job as biology teacher?

This could be great fun.

Good work Babette; have you tried to get this article published at that repository of dhimmitude, the abc?

Anyway, the msm in this country is at best schizophrenic about islam; I was listening to Laws the other day and he was blowing up about the latest muslim outrage, 4 men beating the tar out of some recent convert who had got on the grog, and 5 minutes later he was in default position extoling the 'moderate muslims' who would never do such a thing.

The concept of the 'moderate muslim' should be in the same category as other mythical beasts.

I think that it's time to take this business seriously. We already have fairly draconian laws on libel and slander that seriously impair robust political debate. We don't need any more laws against people voicing criticism of government or non-government bodies. Democracy depends upon people being able to speak their minds no matter how unwelcome their contributions may be to certain people.

The right to criticise or insult should not be infringed on. No religion, idea or act should be free from criticism. One should have the freedom to question, criticise, deride or condemn the Bible, the Koran and other scriptures that one has to do the same for any other writing.

david f:

...obviously Islam is roundly criticized on OLO along with all "isms". There is huge and open objection to many aspects of Islam in the public space.

...Since Bush, Howard and all, declared war on Islamist's following 911, the hysteria directed towards Muslims is pathetic.

Diver Dan wrote:

>>...Since Bush, Howard and all, declared war on Islamist's following 911, the hysteria directed towards Muslims is pathetic.>>

You may consider the critique directed against Islam to be "pathetic" and that's fine. You are entitled to your opinion.

But Diver Dan's opinions are not the issue here.

The issue is should critique, analysis, satire and scorn directed against Islam or any other belief system be made illegal or subject to civil sanction?

And if Islam is to be protected which other belief systems are deserving of protection?

How about Catholicism, Scientology, Zionism or the ideology of the Liberal Party? Are they also worthy of protection? What are the criteria?

There are sincere Nazis, Marxists, Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, atheists and Zoroastrians. Do they too have a right not to be offended? If not, why not?

And if we all have a right not to be offended how is political discourse possible?

If I am offended when you characterise my belief that Islam is a dangerous load of codswallop as "pathetic" can I sue you?

Dhimmi Dummies in the Nanny State. We must stop this madness.

Thanks for the article, Babette.

New federal Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus would be well advised to quietly shelve his predecessor's controversial human rights revocation bill.

Dreyfus's 10.4% margin may appear to make his seat of Isaacs safe for Labor, but if voter rage against this bill continues undhimminished, even 10.4% may not protect him.

cohenite

"The concept of the 'moderate muslim' should be in the same category as other mythical beasts."

Agreed, they appear somewhat rare, if not endangered. I've often asked this question of Moslems and their apologists--
"If the majority of Moslems are "moderate, why are majority Moslem societies such as they are, backward, brutal and usually ruled by tyrants?"

The Americans have the solution, Constitutional protection for free speech including "hate speech."

...I believe that forty lashes for drinking alcohol is an excellent penalty, unfortunately only applicable to Muslims at present. And "Dhimmitude": Not altogether a bad concept to apply for social improvement either, particularly if it assists the spread of Islam.I believe Islam will fill the moral void left by the failure of Christianity, and apparently sooner than later.

I suppose if there are moderate muslims then people like dan are moderate traitors. Same point.

cohenite:

..."Beware; the other reality"!

...And I would just "love" to see the garbage bins returned to railway stations. And...I would be highly amused to witness the end to the debauchery of the gay mardi gras...Islamist style...bring it on!

I get a lot of stories about this or that outrage. Most of them are urban legends so I always check with snopes.com or factcheck.org. The one below is true:

Repaid Kindnes:

http://www.snopes.com/politics/israel/eldad.asp

Excerpts:

>>From: Dr. Arieh Eldad:

I was instrumental in establishing the Israeli National Skin Bank, which is the largest in the world. The National Skin Bank stores skin for every day needs as well as for war time or mass casualty situations.

This skin bank is hosted at the Hadassah Ein Kerem University hospital in Jerusalem where I was the Chairman of plastic surgery. This is how I was asked to supply skin for an Arab woman from Gaza, who was hospitalized in Soroka Hospital in Beersheva, after her family burned her...

We supplied all the needed Homografts for her treatment. She was successfully treated by my friend and colleague, Prof. Lior Rosenberg and discharged to return to Gaza. She was invited for regular follow-up visits to the outpatient clinic in Beersheva.

One day she was caught at a border crossing wearing a suicide belt. She meant to explode herself in the outpatient clinic of the hospital where they saved her life. It seems that her family promised her that if she did that, they would forgive her...>>

(Continued)

Excerpt from From Snopes:

>>Everything up to and including "a war between civilization & barbarism" in the piece quoted above is a direct excerpt from an interview given by Dr. Eldad to New English Review in November 2008. The line "Bibi (Netanyahu) gets it, Obama does not" and everything beyond it is not; that section was added by some unknown person.

As to the veracity of Eldad's story about a burn patient turned suicide bomber, it is indeed an account of an actual incident, except for the small detail of how the aspiring terrorist came by her burns. (She was injured by a gas tank explosion rather than deliberately by her family in retaliation for a suspected affair.)

On 20 June 2005, twenty-one-year-old Wafa Samir Ibrahim al-Biss was detained at a crossing into Israel when something about her gait struck the guards on duty at that post as somewhat amiss. This Palestinian woman was arrested after a search revealed she had been carrying 22 lbs. of explosives strapped to her body. While al-Biss had ostensibly been attempting to enter Israel to attend a follow-up appointment at the Soroka Medical Center in Beersheva, questioning revealed that it had been her intent to detonate the payload she'd been carrying at that institution. The would-be bomber had been treated there five months previous for severe burns received after a gas canister exploded on a fire while she was cooking at her refugee camp home in the Gaza Strip.>

Wafa Samir Ibrahim al-Biss was sentenced to 12 years in prison. She was released in 2012 as part of a contingent of 1,000 Palestinian Prisoners who were swapped for Gilad Shalit.

Here is a clip of an interview she gave after her release:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=DE9ynOkxK0Q

She wants to try again as have urged others to have a go.

This is exactly right; there are many instances where Islam as expressed in its believers' behaviour can only be regarded as a pathology which is free of reason and rationality.

The West, based on reason and rationality, cannot deal with a 'force' like islam where many of its adherents act like lunatics.

The issue is, does islam attract the mentally disturbed or make people mentally deranged?

Until we can have that conversation where people such as the woman in steven's example are regarded as insane, and the role and nature of religion in both shaping and being a product of peoples' view of reality then islam will have its way in the West.

The statements of the invitees to the so-called Islamic "Peace Conference" in Melbourne are on the public record. Nary a whisper. Wilders points these Islamic doctrines out - harassed and vilified by the extreme, narrow-minded secularist press.

Prof. Patrick Deneen yesterday on our political 'order'.
http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2013/03/9458/

"I am profoundly dissatisfied with the extant order—...the nation is in a very bad pass. We seem to be a **civilization intent on suicide**, whether in the form of passing on unconscionable debt to our children and grandchildren, or literally the suicide that comes of an unwillingness even to have children, or to discard them when inconvenient.

While the nation’s elites cry out over the injustice of limiting marriage to man and woman (indicting the whole history of humanity), they turn a blind eye to the destruction of millions of fellow citizens in the womb and somehow fail to notice that a third of the nation’s children are growing up in fatherless households. While they decry the devastation of the “environment” (not “nature”—that would be too normative), they consume no less, and likely far more than the average, and cannot spare a word of concern about the consumption of the future to finance the present.

**The entire political class—reflecting the infantilization of the citizenry, no doubt connected to a debased popular culture—is incapable of articulating the true extent of, and demands required by, the extraordinary challenges we face.**"