Dear Joe,

You wrote;

"And I don't think that Amish are burning young women in cages for refusing to be sex slaves, or even pedophilic Catholics are machine-gunning young children and older women."

No they are not but not that long ago Serbian Christians were mass raping Muslim women and ethnically cleansing entire villages.

This too will pass.

The strongest Muslim seat in Sydney is Blaxkland where the result was Labor 64% Liberal 24% Greens 4%. So Joe to answer your question "which Aussie political party would represent such people today?" Is it Labor first Liberal second.

Hi Paul,

Blaxland is my birth-electorate :)

No, I don't think that young Muslims there would be especially frustrated, unemployed, itching to do something and ready to blame the world for their issues. My point is: which party attracts frustrated, professionally-educated, young people ? You say Labor, I suggest respectfully the Greens.

Hi Steele,

It's interesting that you mention the fascist Serbs and their brutal oppression of Bosnian Muslims. I recall, during those terrible years, that the pseudo-Left here were very soft on the Serbs, pussy-footing around their extermination of Muslim men and rape of Muslim women.

In fact, although my links with it were withering rapidly by then, the pseudo-Left didn't, as far as I remember, ever criticise the fascists without somehow blaming the Yanks or NATO, quite an acrobatic feat.

When the fascists tried the same tactics against the people of Kosovo, all the pseudo-Left could manage was some feeble excuse that the people of Kosovo were not entitled to any sort of self-determination because the Yanks might get something out of it: bugger the Kosovars. Total opportunists.

I wonder where the Greens would have stood back then ?

Cheers,

Joe

No fascination, morbid or not, Paul, and you brought up the subject; what's your fascination?

Worse than killing a fellow human is making it impossible for innocent victims to defend themselves and then proposing to prosecute them if they successfully use a gun to save their life.

Such support for criminals and terrorists is a low to which only the Greens have sunk in this country.

Only cowards would propose such a law as

"7.That personal protection should never be regarded as a genuine reason for owning, possessing or USING a firearm".

Shame, Paul, shame!

Dear Joe,

You keep bandying around the term pseudo-Left.

I'm wondering what you mean by it?

If you think I fit into the category could you please explain why.

If you don't then why did you bring the term into the discussion with me?

Also why mention the Greens? I am not nor never have been a member of the Greens.

Perhaps also we could explore the notion of the pseudo-right, the ones who bellow loudly about freedoms with less government interference but are happy to see detention without trial, wholesale eavesdropping on all citizens, and the erasure of the right to silence without self incrimination.

Hi Steele,

No, I certainly don't mean you :) I'm trying to find a term for that gaggle of points of view which seem left-of-centre, but are more of a smoke-screen for anti-US blasts, no matter what the excuse - in other words, little more than opportunism. The Greens overlap with them. The Socialist Apologists for Fascism, for another. The SPA, if it still exists.

While we are on the subject, I was puzzled to see Anne Aly described as a 'Progressive Muslim'. People are welcome to call themselves whatever they like, and to worship however they like, but I would have thought that progressive politics and Islam really don't fit together easily: there is nothing progressive, per se, about standard, orthodox Islam, any more than, say, Pentecostal Christianity. People may put one aside in order to practice the other, and somehow square it all away. But strict Islam is surely the antithesis of progressive political views ? Perhaps I should ask a gay Iraqi.

Cheers,

Joe