Hi Imacentristmoderate,

Perhaps you're right, but I'm an optimist - I'm confident that many Muslims, living as they do one way of life while their book speaks to another, will find ways to 're-interpret' what it prescribes for them in the 21st century.

They live and work in a pragmatic world which, willy-nilly, has few parallels in their metaphysical one, a world in which they, like all of us, have to make practical, realistic choices, judgements and decisions about issues, day to day, for which their book offers little sensible guidance.

As well, whether in Australia or Paris or anywhere else in the West, the spirit of enquiry - really, the imperatives of the modern, post-enlightenment world - must surely encourage people to think for themselves in so many ways. Every day, they are relating to people as people, who reciprocate, people who don't seem particularly concerned about burning in hell-fire while they get on with their lives.

And in an inclusive-multicultural society like Australia's, people not only come from a multitude of national, ethnic and religious backgrounds, but work together, learn from each other, share experiences, develop similar aspirations, socialise and inter-marry.

Certainly there are enclaves, but apart from the outward signs of difference such as dress, relatively trivial differences ultimately, the influences of the surrounding society must influence how people view the world in all sorts of subtle ways. Kids go to school together, people get the bus and train together, shop at the same shops, watch and play similar sports together.

Yes, maybe I'm an optimist. But wait and see :)

Cheers,

Joe

Joshef Wakin is racist, who made a racist slur against white people in this article. He said that "white people assume that black people feel less pain." That is a racist slander aimed squarely at white people. As a white person, I am "offended, humiliated and insulted" by his racist slander, and I think he should be prosecuted under 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act.

As a racist, my premise is that every race, creed and culture on planet Earth is equal in this respect. Every race, creed and culture are more concerned with the welfare of those with whom they share a common genetic bond, or with whom they feel a cultural kinship, than with those who do not. If this were not so, then how come there are so many racist ethnic and religious organisations in Australia which clearly and unashamedly are only concerned with the welfare of their own race, religion, or culture? Is Joseph going to criticise the aboriginal, Iranian, and Chinese associations in Australia who lobby exclusively for "their" own people? Of course not. Minorities always get judged to a different standard to white people.

Which is racist.

Joseph wrote this article to appeal to the racist prejudices of his own ethnicity. He also wrote it for those in the western world who are always ready to sneer at their own people as some sort of fashion statement. You can almost hear the self loathing trendies crying "Forgive us for our people's racism, Joseph!" All of them are so busy sneering at white people that they are unable to even see the clear contradiction in Joseph's article. They already take it for granted that white people are the world's only racists and that everybody else is the victim of white racism. The idea that anyone but a white person could be racist is an idea which is unable to cause any of their vestigial neurones to synapse.

when Joseph shows as much concern about Jews being killed daily by terrorist we will know that he is concerned about racism. Me thinks his flawed ideology blinds him.

Compassion in these tragedies is inextricably linked with anger at the perps, by which I mean those who actually do it, not just some ideological substitute deemed to have financed it or provoked it (which often goes donkety donk donk all the way back to Adam). It is about the construction of the actual incident in your mind – especially the victim’s perspective. Those outrages that invoke the most horror in me are the deliberate downing of civil airliners and upfront anti-human EXECUTIONS of humans in temporary captivity, like those in Paris, or the machine-gunning of Iraqi and foreign civilians from a helicopter, or the executions of shoppers in a Nairobi supermarket or a Bombay hotel who couldn’t show themselves to be Moslems, or the hunting down and execution of Watutsis by Wahutus in Ruanda, or the Bosnians mass-executed by Serb racists, or the Resistance heroes or Jews or other “Untermenschen” and rounded-up civilians deliberately and personally murdered by the Axis aggressors in Europe and Asia.

Lebanon? Bali? Yes the victims are just as dead as in Paris or in Warsaw but they weren’t captives. It’s the deliberate executions, like the capture and execution of Jean-Charles de Menezes in a railway carriage by British "specials", that add that extra “hang the bastards” revulsion, not race. What a shame the bastards so rarely ARE hanged.