Anyone researching what Islam portends in Australia should read the Witness Statement by Mark John Durie tendered in October 2003 in defence of the Catch the Fire Ministries against a complaint by the Islamic Council of Victoria about alleged defaming of Islam. The Witness Statement is on the net at
http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/Witness%20Statement.pdf .

This gives detailed and expert answers to many questions about Islamic theology vis-a-vis non-believers, the nature and content of books sold by Islamic bookshops in Australia, and the views of prominent Islamic spokesmen such as Kaysar Trad on a range of matters.

To be fair, Turkish Muslims have not been the problem here. I do however find the growth of Arab cultural and religious imperialism deeply worrying. The mindset behind Abu Bakar Bashir (a Yemeni by origin), the spiritual leader of the Bali bombers, is making a bid to take over Islam altogether. Look at Pakistan, which is now trying to decide its future between the tolerant and inwardly spiritual Sufiism (historically the norm in the Punjab) and the fanatical, killjoy, misogynist, violent and obscurantist Taliban.

Even here in Brisbane you can go along to several mosques and get, free, a copy of the [King Fahd] Authorized Version of the Koran, full of "helpful" footnotes putting the extreme jihadist interpretations. Bankrolled by Saudi money, Islam is showing itself to be a vile, mediaeval, repressive and offensive religion. Wahhabi Islam is a boil on the bum of humanity, a perversion of mankind's search for spiritual values.

Mediaeval Christianity as a "total society" (term used by Paul Johnson in 'A History of Christianity') was forced to evolve out of repressiveness by the Reformation and then the Enlightenment. Unfortunately Islam is currently moving in the opposite direction.

Thomas Mann said very correctly "Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.” Westerners who bend over backward to be warm and fuzzy toward jihadist Islam need their heads read. Islam internationally needs to get its house in order and decide that it's prepared to SHARE the world, not just BE the world. Until that time ... NO MUSLIM SCHOOLS HERE.

"is scorned when it gives the minorities the right to maintain their specific ethnic, cultural and religious identity
...
And this leads to a tribal mindset based on Anglo-European-Christian identity in some suburbs where residents refuse to accommodate any difference"

"non-Anglo's" are permitted and actually have a "right" to maintain their identities, but whitey isn't.

Mac,
Multiculturalism is not what Australia is about. It is an ideology that is promoted and nothing more. It will only become a reality if immigration is increased and proprtions of immigrants from different cultures to our own are brought in. Multiculturalism is a fraud and is anti intellectual in nature, simialr to the silly idea called 'liberal democracy'. We in Australia have bi-cameral, multi-politrical party parliamentary democracy. The term 'liberal' is one of those things that those who believe in liberalism as a local political and/or worldview hold. Many people do not share this kind of politics. It should not be assumed.
Mac, you are wrong about your assumption to a "Catholic theocracy". I never called for one nor is anyone else. In fact no such kind of religious State exists nor has existed. Royalty eg Spain and other European nations had civil governments rightly influenced by the religion but it as not a rule as such by priests, hence no theocracy.
Devout believers do not believe in nor are taught to believe in theocracy. The Church's official Magisterium does not teach it and enver has. It teaches that legislation be derived from the ten commandments and other biblical injuctions not as the result of private interpretation but of interpreation rightly done by the Church's hierarchy in communion with the Pope.
Theocracies in 'reformation' times existed in Calvin's Geneva but that is another story as 'reformed' Christianity's doctrines have no valid lessons for Catholics except in the area of Catholic personal excesses and abuse with power ( as we all are prone to do regardless of if we be of any religion or of none).

In Peru it was not theocracy but civil govt influenced by harshness of the times and of course abuse. In any case there is no teaching in support of theocracy in the Catholic Faith at all.It is rather about the permeation of Christ's teachings to occur everywhere and not be privatised to home life but to exist as aderivative within our legal principles etc.

>>Mediaeval Christianity ... was forced to evolve out of repressiveness by the Reformation and then the Enlightenment. <<

"Reformation and Enlightenment" did not come from another planet (another civilisation or culture) to be forced upon Medieval Christianity, but arose from within the Judaeo-Christian heritage as a self-correction, as painful - and as desperately opposed by those holding the (cultural etc) reins of the "total society" - as it was.

I think similarly, instead of trying to "force" anything on the Medieval-like sections of the Muslim community, one should emphasize what their basic tenets have in common with Christian world-views, and encourage them to go the same way of "Reformation and Enlightenment" arising from their own heritage.

Unfortunately, the Muslims are right to point our that this way led too many in the West to the loss of their religious identity, of their links to even those (“metaphysical)” aspects of Christianity, Medieval or not, that are compatible, even might enhance, the contribution of "Reformation and Enlightenment".

I think we Westerners - Christians or post-Christians - should try to argue that in their case this does not have to be necessarily so (for various historical reasons), and even if, that the loss in quantity (number of traditional believers) might be outweighed by gains in quality (Islam-based world-views able to rationally coexist with, and be respected by Christianity and science- (and other) based world views).

I think this was also the message of the Pope’s Regensburg lecture, ill-famed through the clumsy Medieval quote obscuring this message.

<<Aren’t Islam and Christianity sister religions that originate from the Middle East...>>
Hey, you forgot the Jews. Was that a Freudian slip?
* Take neither the Jews nor the Christians for your friends (Sura 5:51, 60:13).
Just another sisterly quote from the Koran.

<< or are they rival religions a bit like Coles and Woolworths?>>
* Strike off the heads of infidels in battle (Sura 47:4).
When was the last time you heard of Coles terrorists abducting Woolworths employees and beheading them on the internet?

* Infidels are your sworn enemies (Sura 4:101).
* Be ruthless to the infidels (Sura 48:29).
* Make war on the infidels who dwell around you (Sura 9:123, 66:9).
* Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day (Sura 9:29).
* If someone stops believing in Allah, kill him (al-Bukhari 9:84:57).
* Never be a helper to the disbelievers (Sura 28:86).
* Kill the disbelievers wherever we find them (Sura 2:191).
* No Muslim should be killed for killing an infidel (al-Bukhari 1:3:111).
* The only reward of those who make war upon Allah and His messenger will be that they will be killed or crucified, or have their hands and feet on alternate sides cut off, or will be expelled out of the land (Sura 5:33).

One could go on but there isn't room for the entire Koran here.

Why is it that Buddhists, Hindus and Jews have no trouble fitting into Australia (or insert any other country here) but the followers of Mohammed do?
Must be those racist Australians (or insert any other nationality here).

The fact is that Islam is a supremacist ideology that admits no other belief system.

People rightly fear the encroaching Islamization of Australia but it isn't Islamophobia because a phobia is irrational and fear of Islam is totally rational based on the 1400 year history of Islamic bloodletting which continues to this day and knows no national boundaries, just as Islam acknowledges no national boundaries.
There is only Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb.
The house of Islam and the house of war.

Two reasons why Anglo Christians oppose Islam and diversity:

1 - Anyone still claiming that Islam is a religion of peace needs Dr Andrew Bostom's book dropped in their lap. Review by Alyssa A. Lappen:

"The leaders of the free world have taken pains since late 2001 to explain that Islam is a religion of peace. But in this far-ranging, 759-page collection of Muslim and non-Muslim eyewitness accounts, scholarly Muslim theological treatises and superb historical surveys, it appears that Islam has actually practiced a grisly jihad campaign against non-Muslims from its earliest days, in the hope of satisfying the Prophet Mohammed's end goal: forcing the “one true faith” upon the entire world...

After viewing these accounts, histories and art works, it is hard to continue to believe that radical Islamists are in fact all that radical. Rather, in the most logical way, this collection shows that September 11 was not an aberration, but that Islam at its core seems a faith bent upon the conquest and subjugation of non-Muslims...

Beginning in the time of Mohammed himself, Bostom refers readers to the early 20th century work of the late Columbia University professor Arthur Jeffrey, who belittled as “the sheerest sophistry” attempts in some modern circles “to explain away all the Prophet's warlike expeditions as defensive wars or to interpret the doctrine of Jihad as merely a bloodless striving in missionary zeal for the spread of Islam.... The early Arabic sources quite plainly and frankly describe the expeditions as military expeditions, and it would never have occurred to anyone at that day to interpret them as anything else....”."

http://frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=7334

2 - Ethnocentrism is a universal fact of life, not particular only to Anglo Christians.

Lawrence Auster: "By taking away our historic society based on a common culture, ethnicity and race, a place which is ours and where we feel at home, by imposing these unassimilable foreigners on us, you are not enhancing our humanity, you are robbing us of the most basic human values."

http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/004784.html [continued...]