Boazy: "YES.. of course we must make allowances for whackos etc.. "

Indeed - but of course Boazy would have to say that, wouldn't he? Otherwise he'd be hoisting himself on his own whacko petard.

CJ.. thanx for allowing my 'whacko'ness a bit of a go :)

This makes interesting reading:

WREXHAM RIOTS. WALES

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/north_east/3016678.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/north_east/3014210.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/north_east/3028490.stm

Here is the BNP take on the same events. Note what the Kurd 'refugees' did.. attacking a pub with knives and iron bars.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDOJaOAmJFQ

You can post all you like Boazy, but I just don't see anything of interest here beyond, as others have pointed out, scaremongering and bulldust.

I don't know why you put refugees in quote marks. Do you think refugees from Iraq aren't real refugees? No one is suggesting that all refos are innocents abroad, peaceful people in search of a safe haven where they will immediately learn perfect English and start watching Dancing with the Stars and understand the Hare-Clark voting system. Refugees emerge from war zones with scars intact. When they get here, they stick fast to their old traditions - the things that kept them sane through their years of hell. They watch insurgencies in their countries of origin, and think about the relatives they left behind. And they can create conflict and sometimes violence in Australia. That's how it works.

How do we improve it? Not your way. Fear and loathing do nothing. They do nothing to help the enormous worldwide refugee crisis. Australia takes few refugess - even per capita - while Iran and Pakistan and Chad take millions each year. They live in desperate, squalid conditions and hope to lose a few less of their children than they would otherwise have done in Afghanistan or Iraq. Then, for the teensy proportion who are lucky enough to make it to Australia, people like Boazy freak out that it takes them a *whole generation* to fit into a western country, and how his cultural rights are being trampled on because he has to see women in Burkhas at the beach. For shame!

I don't believe in religious vilification laws and want them removed. But I could not campaign alongside you Boaz, because your values are petty and paranoid and mean-spirited. Your patronising, Jesus-was-a-bigot-too attitude, in which you *understand* the machinations of society and can prove this through the liberal application of capital letters and ellipses, convinces no one.

Keep blahing on, by all means, but don't imagine that anyone here with a brain in their head is taking your seriously.

Vanilla, your my hero. That was very well put.

R0bert

Aw shucks R0bert. You're only saying that because we're secretly the same person.

Boaz

Crude attempts to manufacture fear by manipulative disinformation and specious argument won't do.

Consider e.g. your statement that you "simply don't understand why the Communist party was not successfully banned when it came to Parliament in 1951 as a referendum".

(a) The Australian people disagreed with Menzies that the Communist Party of Australia was a threat to our way of life. Democracy - freedom of political belief - won out. It's possible that banning the Communist Party would have strengthened its subversive activity.

(b) The Communist Party operated freely in Australia - for the next half century. The outcome? Some lively public meetings. A handful of excellent articles (and a great many more boring ones) in a few low-budget journals which have since gone broke. A plethora of ASIO files now proved to be risible. Some sporadic distraction from mainstream politics. No inroads into mainstream politics. In time the Communist Party faded into relative obscurity.

BOAZ, you certainly don't let the facts get in the way of your confected doomsday scenarios, do you?

Australia has had Islamic schools for many years without civil disturbance. Many more new Christian schools have come into existence in Australia in the past twenty years and show no signs of causing trouble except to their students' welfare.

Australia's immigration program does not allow 'uncontrolled' numbers of people from alien [sic] cultures or uncontrolled numbers from whatever is the opposite of alien cultures. (By definition, immigrants are all 'alien' at at the point-of-entry.) Our immigration program is tightly controlled and subject to ongoing review, as Minister Andrews demonstrated last year.

You're scraping the bottom of the barrel of fear when you claim that Lambing Flat and Cronulla are evidence that "existing culture and identity could be diluted to the point of violent reaction". Your argument might have been better had you cited evidence from e.g. the Eumerella War or the massacres at Murdering Gully, Myall Creek or the Convincing Ground.

Last month Australia was about to be ruined by Sikh Kerpans, but the Test cricket fiasco was far more damaging.