Rainier:

Judging from your post you believe we have the right to bar people from entering Australia because they hold beliefs the majority of us profess to find unacceptable.

Does that mean we should also bar people who adhere to a faith that teaches:

--Homosexuals and adulterers should be stoned to death?

--Rape victims who dress "immodestly" are to blame for their own misfortune?

I'm just trying to get a sense of how far you would go.

You ask me to tell you "why you are not a racit or harbour racist beliefs?"

What have I written that could reasonably be construed as racist?

Just to set the record straight, I consider Holocaust deniers to be scumbags.

So now tell me:

---What beliefs justify exclusion from migration to Australia?

---How do you establish who holds those beliefs? (They aren't all going to make them public)

Perhaps instead of implying I am a racist you could have a go at answering these questions.

Stephany: "Is there ever a reason for denying people permission to enter Australia because of their beliefs?"

Of course not. As you imply in a subsequent comment, there is no reliable way for one person to establish what another believes unless the latter articulates their belief in some way. On the other hand, there might well be occasions when someone, who has expressed offensive, seditious or otherwise abhorrent ideas, may be denied an entry visa by the Australian government.

It might also depend upon why they wanted to enter Australia. If David Irving had applied for a tourist visa (and conformed to the conditions therein), then that would be quite a different situation than if he applied for a business visa in order to conduct a speaking tour. If there was some way of proving it, I'd be willing to wager that a substantial number of tourists to Australia over the years have been Holocaust deniers.

In short, people should be judged on what they do, rather than what they purportedly believe.

CJ Morgan
Actually its rather apt that David Irving & Holocaust deniers should be brought into the discussion,because there are more similarities between David Irving & Hilali than first meets the (uneducated) eye.

You see, Islam has more than its share of lesser & greater holocausts.( Sudan, Indonesia & Southern Thailand -& that’s only recent history)And people like Hilali are always either justifying them, or denying them.

And on a related theme:
Isn't it funny- one can criticise the Nazis -and make all sorts of wild claims about its former followers, ( though just on the law of averages it must have had its share of 'good people' too) yet no one labels them a Naziophobe.

But if one criticises Islam, -one frequently gets labelled a Islamophobe.The moral seems to be, if your get enough people following a particular creed, it becomes respectable

Stephany,

1, I did not imply you were racist, I simply asked if you thought you harboured racist beliefs, like everyone else at some stage of their lives, including me. From experience I found the most racist are those who deny they ever have or think racism is a superficial to human relationships and who deny society has bee historically organised racially and hierarchically.

2. Both of the beliefs you list can be found in the Christian bible and have been publicly espoused by people like Fred Nile and other lunatics. Fred Nile got elected and so did Pauline Hanson. My point is that the problem is much deeper than simply examining who comes here and who should stay.

3. Clearly beliefs that eminate from people or organisations incite violence and racism and sexism and other forms of hate should not be allow to enter. Read 2 again.

Is this good enough for you?

Or am I being unAustralian by being to lenient on Islam? I just find this hysteria and lynch mob mentality a bit rich from people who have yet to resolve their own legitimacy as immigrants with the original inhabitants of this land. The illegal acquisition and the unresolved status of Indigenous people is always the ‘elephant’ in tht room when I witness these types of discussions about nationalism and security.

What do you think?

Rainier,
Id like to know a bit about you? Are you Aboriginal?
Is this why you feel affiliation with refugees?
Is hating your country a way for you to feel your getting square with us whiteys?
Do you feel perhaps you were indoctrinated into hating your country because of a notion of victimhood?
Do you not agree that Australian Aboriginals have more per capita spent on thier wellbeing than any other aboriginals in the world?

Then do you accept that the poor bastard that this artcle was written about was a lot worse off than any aboriginal in this country considering the access to welfare and the hand out mentality that the gvment has?
Bleeting on about stolen land serves aboriginal peoples know good it just keeps them in aperpetual state of victimhood and hatred for the majority of people here. It only serves those who make money form the aboriginal industry to keep trying to strive to keep the divide.
Dont hate people for what was Rainy, this country wasnt stolen we got it fair and square.
But as long as your making a quid thats alright.
Its not John Rainbird is it from CAFNEC?

I will bother addressing the totally absurd parallel some have tried to make between David Irving and 'the majority of Muslims'. Apparently, today's reverse political correctness means we can assert all Muslims are our enemy and suggest we should keep them all out of Australia, but we can't say it's racist when people slander Muslims based on assertions with as much intellectual substance as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Apparently this is lefty moonbattery to say such things.

In regard to genuine questions about the rules surrounding whether people like David Irving can come into the country, such rules, which have been in place for some time, don't go to people's religious beliefs. People can be denied an entry visa for a range of reasons - usually it's because there is deemed to be an unacceptable risk of overstaying. However, there are also character provisions - such as if they belong to a proscribed terrorist organisation, or if the Minister believs they may be a threat to public order or safety. So technically David Irving wasn't kept out of Australia because he was a holocaust denier, but because it was felt his presence and actions here on a speaking tour could have threatened public order or were not in the public interest.

More recently, a former inmate of Guantanamo Bay was prevented from coming here to help promote the film "Road to Guantanamo", even though he had been to many western European countries without incident. There is also the US peace activist Scott Parkin, who was removed from Australia on the basis of an ASIO assessment which so far he has not been given any details of. Unclear where the threats to public order, safety or security are in these folks, but there you go. There's huge government discretion and subjectivity in these things of course, but that's the rationale.

All of which makes it all the more absurd that people of high integrity and proven worth like Ali Sarwari have suffering deliberately inflicted on them and are forced out of Australia.