Dan,

To the extent that I can understand what you are trying to say, no, I don't 'equate' happy marriage with multiculturalism, but I certainly don't think they are incompatible.

And I certainly don't think that a white Australia is either desirable or worth fighting for. Australia has been multi-national from Day One - I don't mean just Aboriginal and British, but Aboriginal, Anglos, Jewish, African, and Irish, for a start, right from 26.1.1788.

Javanese and Macassarese and Timorese have been inter-'relating' with Aboriginal people across the North for centuries. We've always been multicultural in that sense.

There have been Chinese here since around the 1820s, 'Afghans' (i.e. what we now would call South Asians) since the 1840s if not earlier. African-Americans have been migrating here, as gold-miners, as workers, as Minstrels, since before the 1850s. And so on.

White Australia was a sh!t policy, which didn't even work from the beginning. It certainly wouldn't work now. An as long as all Australians, Aboriginal, British-originated and otherwise, adhere to the notions of equality, standard freedoms and the rule of law, then we'll all get along fine.

And if you don't like it, find somewhere else :)

Cheers,

Joe

Dr. Colin Rubenstein is proving the credentials of what the Israeli lobby are best at - using personal attack, false accusations, distortions and lies, when bankrupt and having no argument. This is nothing new, the ABC television Media Watch accused Dr. Rubenstein on 6 May 2002 of “spreading misleading information” of his own.
While I avoided mentioning any personal things against the officers of this Israeli lobby and provided evidence of their long years of concentrated activities aiming to damage Arabs and Muslims image and reputation through invited experts in this field, they attacked me personally giving lies and half-truths.
Dr. Rubenstein claimed that I “promoted rejectionism, extremism, conspiracy theories and engaged in apologetics for terrorism”, and that my “behaviour” while PLO representative made me “unwelcome in many quarters in Canberra.” All these are not true. Unfortunately On Line Opinion’s roles does not allow any more discussion and my reply giving all the evidence is longer than this space would allow.
For years AIJAC tried to discredit me to the extent of making up stories, but they miserably failed.
As for AIJAC’s trio leaders engagements in Religious Dialogue, Reconciliation and Multicultural Australia, this is simply nothing but a convenient division of roles for gaining respectability and cover-up of their uncritical support to Israel, a state guilty of ethnic cleansing, colonisation, oppression and racial discrimination against its non-Jewish population, whom I am one of its victims. It is a clever public relations exercise to serve Israel’s interests and use inside influence. What AIJAC has to do, for example, with Religious Dialogue, when it is not a religious organisation nor represent the Jewish community? Mr. Johnny Barker, former Mount Scopus Memorial College was reported in the AJN on 25.6.2004 as saying “The involvement of private organisations such as the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council had weakened communal roof bodies”, and Liz Wise wrote in the same newspaper on 2.7.2004, “Dr. Rubenstein is unelected [yet] claims to speak on behalf of all Australian Jews…I challenge him to step outside his neo-conservative rhetoric to discover the opinion held by other Jews..

This article from Open Democracy sums up the issues and problems pretty well:

http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/rumy-hasan/tensions-between-muslim-identity-and-western-citizenship

It certainly gives those of us on the Left something to think about.

Joe