Dear mhaze,

It appears my sabbatical from here happened not long after yours but was admittedly substantially shorter. I personally felt it was the Abbott era that changed this place with the equivalent of 3 word sloganeering becoming the norm and finding myself not immune from the attraction. Anyway who knows what the future will bring.

I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask why you think we are a divisive society? Of course we are diverse even disparate in some things but divisive? The old saying that we have more things that bind us rather than divide us would seem truer in this country than most.

You wrote;

“It seems to me what they really want is a unified front where everyone just agrees with them.”

Perhaps in some instances this would seem to be the aim, certainly the recent SJW issues at Yale would speak to that contention.

But I'm not sure it is is applicable on this issue for the following reason – the divisiveness is we are discussing here potentially extends all the way to the total exclusion of a race of people based primarily on religious grounds. Even in the last 30 years we have seen those fault lines, when unchecked, lead to Sri Lankan, Balkan and Rwandan tragedies. People are right to be wary of them, to strive to defuse, to expose and to stymie them.

You wrote;

“The only separation they're interested in a separating our heads from our torsos, or separating our men from their soon-to-be sex slaves.”

Well no, the real separation they are after is our bombs from their heads, and the rest right at this point in time is just floss. Australia is one of a very small group of nations bombing the hell out of ISIS and three of those nations have suffered major losses of civilian lives in the past 6 weeks.

Cont..

cont..
And it is here that I feel Waleed has wimped it. The Grand Mufti tried when he talked of “causative factors” but got quickly cut down by the government and the media. To borrow a line from Mr Gore as I have done in another place, this for the Australian government is an 'inconvenient truth' which to their shame they don't feel they can trust the Australian public with. Waleed would most certainly have copped some flak for raising it but I just feel a person of his profile, intelligence and articulation could have managed it. It was disappointing not to see him try.

You wrote;

“Taking Christians seems the prudent thing to do. Bringing in more potential suicide bombers, not so much.”

How would you think than then reflects on the Muslims already here? How would that sentiment play out in the trains and trams, in the school yards, in the work places? Particularly amongst those who have arrived with very little and are making the difficult journey of being able to make a go of it in this country?

My father-in-law immigrated from Germany in the early 50s. He speaks of very little prejudice even though his people had perpetrated arguably the greatest humanitarian crime of the century. I would hate to see a generation of refugees being hit with an environment that virtually guarantees a section of them will fail.

you really have to laugh steelee

what was it? Working Families Working Families Working Families .... ad nauseum... ?

Did you forget? Wasn't that in an election sometime ago? Who was ithat? Lol your mates Kevvey the revvy and julie dumbly?

Lol you really know how to make a man laugh. lol

But back to the future.

You gotta laugh at he medieval warriors from the medieval religion attacking with auto rifles and suicide vests.Don't they realise they are a bit overwhelmed compared to the impact of carpet bombing and the nukes possessed by their enemies who will have no compunction to use them when they need to.

You really gotta laugh at the inanity of it all.
se
What are you going to do about these bombings and nuke events to come?

Spin? ... like a kiddies top. They all peter out, just like religion is currently. Islam, like all religions, is in its death throes and the secular west will just keep growing and developing.

You need to commit to being aboard the western secular train.
It's moving more rapidly than ever before and you keep harking back to beliefs and ideologies that most people in the west abandoned... long ago.

If you do't you won't survive you'll become irrelevant and spend an inordinate of time arguing an irrelevance... change is occurring too fast to do that.

Steeledux,

"I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask why you think we are a divisive society?

The word 'divisive' is itself divisive having been expropriated to mean something bad....divisive = bad, diversity = good.

I was using the term in the context of it being an adjective derived from division. We are a divided society. We want to be a divided society because that's how democracy works. That's the reason for democracy - to arbitrate between the divisions. From its first iteration at Athens, democracy has engendered factions and division. A society without division is not democratic. Thus we encourage and need divisiveness.

" the divisiveness is we are discussing here potentially extends all the way to the total exclusion of a race of people based primarily on religious grounds."

Islam or mohammedanism isn't a race. The difference is both pedantic and essential. I don't want to banning of races. I want the discontinuation of the importing of muslimswherever they're from. But I don't want to ban the religion here. It'd be impossible and it would be highly undemocratic.
What I want is recognition that Islam is not compatible with our culture. We can live with that up to a point. What we see in Europe is that, once the religion gets to a certain threshold in terms of numbers, then the ability for a society to live with this incompatible culture is compromised. We aren't there yet and I don't want toget there.

"Australia is one of a very small group of nations bombing the hell out of ISIS and three of those nations have suffered major losses of civilian lives in the past 6 weeks."

Yes we are and I guess its arguable that that makes us more vulnerable although I'd point out that terrorists attacks here have pre-dated our assault on Daesh. Quesrtion....
The US and Aust basically stayed out of the ISIL issue (at least militarily) up until the Yazidi crisis arose where an entire culture was slated to be wiped out by having the men killed and the women raped, enslaved, on-sold, force-converted and

impregnated. (10 yr old girls cost a mere $124 and are, by the grace of Allah, of an age to be used).

So, was the West wrong to use military force to try to save these people?

"How would you think than then reflects on the Muslims here?"
I note that you don't deny that importing muslims means importing potential suicide bombers.
The muslims already here are a difficult problem but it in their hands to resolve it. I accept that pretty much all of those who come here are not immediately seeking to install sharia. But they do tend to create an atmosphere where the extremist can grow. Its primarily the second generation that is the problem. Given our multicultural fetishes, its not possible for us to approach that second generation and instill in them the belief that the new culture is preferable to the old. Its up to the first generation and their religious leaders. And here they are failing for want of trying. But that's built into the religion anyway.

"My father-in-law immigrated from Germany in the early 50s. "
I wonder what would have happened had they immigrated and then set up little German enclaves where a (small) number began to assert that Nazism was actually the better way to go and they intended to work toward that. I wonder how unprejudiced we would have been then, especially after it was found that some of them were stock-piling Zyklon B.

Australia has a pretty good record at taking people from diverse backgrounds and cultures and melding them into a society. I'm no fan of multiculturalism but I'm happy with s being multicultural. However, Islam is a different conundrum. We've taken people from places which were compatible with our culture (Europeans) or whose beliefs were not antithetical ours (south Asians). But this culture, this religion, at least in one reading of it, is supremacist, extremist and unamenable to joining the family of cultures we have here. We made a terrible mistake letting it in over the past quarter century. But we don't need to compound that mistake.

Dear mhaze,

Your descriptive use of divisive is perhaps one I might have not employed but I accept the context in which it is given.

You distinction of race and religion is also in practice a little fraught. For instance both Christian and Muslim girls are circumcised in Nigeria. If FGM is one of your concerns then religion is not the most accurate determination for their suitability as immigrants.

You asked;

“So, was the West wrong to use military force to try to save these people?”

No, just as it wasn't wrong when it used military force against Christians raping and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/bosnia-war-crimes-the-rapes-went-on-day-and-night-robert-fisk-in-mostar-gathers-detailed-evidence-of-1471656.html

This however was done under the auspices of the UN Secretary General and the Security Council and safe havens were attempted on the ground.

The current bombing is done by a small group of primarily Western nations without UN backing. Australia is one of those nations.

I do have concerns about Australia's capacity to meld substantive numbers into our society. We now have one of the highest percentage of our students attending private religious based schools in the world. These institutions have been the beneficiaries of enormous increases in government funding over the decades. The downside of course is the melting pot of the public school which was so formative in shaping young attitudes toward 'others' has been greatly diminished.

I disagree with the statement that Islam is incompatible with out culture because it patently isn't true I take issue with extreme forms of any religion. I wouldn't have a problem with a mosque being built in my town unless it was Wahhabi (or similar) funded and operated. If I had my way this country would have nothing to do with Saudi Arabia, a backward nation using petrodollars to fund terrorism and an evil form of Islamic extremism throughout the world.

Blanket stereotyping advances nothing. We need our own well thought out strategies for dealing with these issues that honour what we are as a nation and if they end up upsetting countries the US so be it.