Malik is a good journalist and makes some acute observations, especially in his excoriation of the air heads’ fad of identity politics. But he uses complexity in much the same way that bomber crews use showers of aluminium filings to deflect ackack fire. His claim is that nothing bad is really Islam, and that decent societies owe Moslems a diversion from the temptation (to them) of evil.

Some of the thousands who went to the Middle East from decent countries to join ISIS to kill non-believers may well not have had loving homes. Others may not have been potty trained properly. Some may have been mentally ill. Or may have been petty criminals in Europe. Or have been deprived of proper schooling. Etc. etc.

But something in common with all of them: they are all Moslems. They are all enemies of liberty. They are all seeking to enslave people with a Moslem Caliphate. They are all traitors to their home countries in Europe and Britain. They are all Fifth Columnists. The same applies to those from Australia. That’s their deeds and their clear intentions, no matter what excuses appeasers, deflectors and deniers are scraping the bottom of the barrel to dig up for them.

Spend some time looking at the readers’ contributions to Malik’s article. Focus on letters that have attracted 8 or more plusses. They may well have been addressed direct to the appeasers and apologists to teach them something about the Enlightenment and our debt to it.

Suse,

I never denied that the British sent out missionaries to all the countries that you mention and some of them are still doing good work today, Mother Theresa's mob spring to mind, then there were the Medical Missionaries who did so much to improve health etc., etc.

But Britain didn't push religion, the major purpose of most of its colonization was trade or the protection of trade, one of the main reasons for the settlement at Botany Bay was timber for ships masts, which like a lot of their other assumptions was wrong.

However, Suse, why the instructions which are the legal basis for the Mabo decision, if the British Parliament intended to forcibly change the way of life of the native Australians and convert them to their view of Christianity?

david f,

Not all of them went to Holland and those that did, did so to escape persecution, it was no fun to be fined a substantial amount for refusing to attend the Church of England.

"The Separatists had long been controversial. Under the 1559 Act of Uniformity, it was illegal not to attend official Church of England services, with a fine of one shilling (£0.05; about £17 today) for each missed Sunday and holy day. The penalties for conducting unofficial services included imprisonment and larger fines. Under the policy of this time, Barrowe and Greenwood were executed for sedition in 1593."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilgrim_Fathers

Losing one's head on the block for one's beliefs is martyrdom and is also persecution.

I stand corrected on their colony being the first, Jamestowne beat them by some years.

Dear Is Mise,

You are right. Not all of them went to Holland. However, if all they wanted was religious freedom they could have all gone to Holland. The evidence of the behaviour of Massachusetts colony is that they did not go to North America for religious freedom. They went to set up a theocracy which would deny religious freedom to other people.

Massachusetts is the only English colony that killed 'witches'. The United States was founded with the idea of separation of church and state. Massachusetts was the last to get rid of its state church doing so in 1838 years after the 1789 ratification of the US Constitution. The religious liberty enjoyed in the US is primarily the heritage of the Virginia colony. James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, both from Virginia, were those primarily responsible.

The first American to use the expression, separation of church and church, was the Baptist minister, Roger Williams, who was expelled from Massachusetts colony because of his 'heretical' opinions.

History has been rewritten. Massachusetts is pictured as having the first Thanksgiving dinner. Actually the first Thanksgiving dinner was held in Virginia before the Pilgrims landed.

http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=10790 will direct you to my essay on the subject.

After watching 4 corners last night the way to defeat ISIS is to mount an army of women soldiers as to be killed by a woman means they go directly to hell instead of heaven with their 70 virgins.

Suzie, I ask who held the guns in the first settlement of Australia of the thugs you like to call them? Their crimes were stealing bread etc not murder.

Hi Suse,

Do you mean missionaries like Livingstone who helped to stop the thousand-years'-long Arab slave trade ? I suppose that might have deprived many people of their livelihoods, and plunged many towns into long-term depression.

Slightly off-topic, but as an atheist, I must defend the work of missionaries here in Australia. Of course they were fanatics, and thank Christ for that, otherwise Missions would never have been set up, and without Missions, God knows in what condition the Aboriginal population would have been. People survived at Missions, less so elsewhere. Missions schooled and fed their kids, for free, while they hunted or fished or worked.

At Pt McLeay here in SA, from Rev. Taplin's 600-page Journal, he certainly tried to convert people, preaching all day every Sunday (on top of his six-day working week), but he tended to people on their death-beds, regardless. He never mentioned once anything about beheading them for not converting. He lamented every death, regardless, as any decent person would have. In turn, he's buried up there with them now.

So where was any Left in those days ? In a sense, the missionaries WERE the only Left, the only ones caring about Aboriginal people. Yes, some unions were always welcoming, the AWU for example: one of their lifelong Aboriginal members, a gun shearer, is buried just along from Taplin.

BTT: In his latest book, Malik does go just a bit soft on Islam (although, thank goodness, he doesn't go on about the wonders of their architecture, the standard achievement of totalitarian regimes), but I would still highly recommend it as a history of the evolution of morality.

In the thirties, did anybody agonise over how and why anybody became a Nazi ? I don't think so. They happened. Islamo-fascists happen now. Surely the task is how to defeat them, bugger trying to understand why they go fascist, and hopefully over time, to engender some sort of widespread reform in Muslim thinking, some opening towards reason, free expression and respect for human rights, especially those of women and the 'Other': i.e., their morality.

Joe