It's easily forgotten that the Muslims in Spain promoted multiculturalism - they were happy to take (non-Muslim) slaves from sub-Saharan Africa, from the Balkans and the Baltic and from Ireland.

The fifty thousand or so slaves - multicultural - provided the bulk of the productive workforce in the remnants of late-Islamic Spain, after 1000-1100 AD.

Women were shipped and traded from all parts of the Islamic world (and its conquered environs) to and from Spain through the markets in Egypt and Asia Minor and places like Timbuktu and Ashkhabad.

It must have been a good time for a Muslim to be alive.

Joe

Thank you, Constance,

I also loved Father Samir's analysis.

Dear O Sung Wu,

I was under the impression that Australia carries character checks on all immigrants. If DEFAT knew about this family's criminality in Lebanon, but still allowed them in, then they betrayed their office of protecting Australians from crime.

This family should not have been accepted as refugees for at least two reasons: because their criminal activity would harm Australians; and because criminals are not refugees but perpetrators and are bound to have their karma bounce back at them sooner or later.

Even if accepted on humanitarian grounds, they should not have received Australian permanent residence or citizenship.

The most sensible thing to do now is to send them back to Lebanon, rather than keep feeding them in prison.

If Lebanese in general are statistically more suspected of crime, then there is nothing wrong with not granting them permanent residence until and unless they prove themselves benign.

As for the united nations, it's a criminal organisation and it's shameful that Australia still has anything to do with them, including that stupid seat on the security-council.

The following is a link given by the Australian
Institute of Criminology which although is quite
a long report is worth a read because it shows
just some of the complexities involved in this subject:

http://www.aic.gov.au/documents/E/1/E/E1E2943C-1FB7-40D6-B85E-DFB354BE751Aethnic.pdf

My apologies.

I gave you the wrong link.

I'm having computer problems.

Here's the link again:

http://www.aic.gov.au/documents/E/1/E/%7BE1E2943C-1FB7-40D6-B85E-DFB354BE751A%7Dethnic.pdf

Dearest Foxy,

I'm not sure what that demonstrated. Perhaps there are no cases in Australia of honor killings, or genital mutilations, or marrying fourteen-year-olds, or perhaps the 'law' doesn't know quite how to deal with such 'incidents', if they actually ARE happening.

Buddhists and Hindus and Muslims are as intelligent as anybody else, as capable of positive feelings and regarding their fellow-citizens as brothers. Maybe not all. Cultures and cultural practices vary in their support for women's rights, for the concept of human equality for all, no matter what group others are embedded in.

But there are nasty people in the world, Foxy - I don't really like to break the news to you: some people behead other people, some people enslave the women of other groups, and do unmentionable things to them as well beforehand. In some parts of the world, people are not as nice as you, or as you and I would like them to be.

And they may sometimes want to extend those awful practices to other parts of the world, even including here, in your city and mine. They may advise young idiots to do terrible things to random strangers, all supposedly in some ghastly religious cause.

Sorry, Foxy, but that's how the nasty, real world is. Like you, I wish such wickedness didn't happen, but it does. In this past week, hundreds of innocent people have been blown to bits in the Punjab, Afghanistan, Baghdad and other Iraqi cities, Nigeria, maybe Yemen. Coincidentally, all in pretty much the same cause. So terrible. So inconvenient.

Love,

Joe

Hi (again) YUYUTSU...

In the ideal world you'd be perfectly correct. And it is the function of DEFAT to examine much of the information furnished by these potential applicants for refugee status. However, given the clamour and tumult of what was going on over there, I think the Australian government wanted to be seen (by the world) to be overtly assisting many of these Lebanese refugees to escape the war ?

To be sure, a noble act, nevertheless in their haste, much of the more meticulous, more probing enquiries into their circumstances, their backgrounds and character, was found to be substantially wanting, with many not even remotely deserving of 'any' refugee status ? That's not to suggest that many proved to be legitimate refugees, and became good citizens once they settled and established themselves.

It's my view that I don't believe DEFAT were adequately trained or sufficiently equipped to 'tease out' many of the more important background factors in order to establish a true character summation ? In reality, we were importing a whole new class of criminal into our country, in order to exploit our collective naivety ? And frankly, we (the Oz coppers) were wilfully unprepared to deal with such a new and wholly strong criminal element, whereas we're confronted with a very different religion, that played such a vital roll in their overall criminality. This is only my opinion you understand YUYUTSU ? Still if you were to query any former detective of that era, I'm positive he'd agree with my assessment absolutely.