By Daphne Anson
In the wake of the recent Australian General Election that has seen Malcolm Fraser’s Liberal Party limp to victory, just avoiding a hung Parliament, and excluding from his Cabinet conservatives such as Tony Abbott (the prime minister Turnbull toppled in grubby coup some months ago), the latest issue of the Australian Jewish News carries an editorial that observes, inter alia:
“The moderate brand that Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has identified with has seen the PM wedged between Labor on the one hand and conservatives within his own party on the other.
In an age of doctrinaire political certitudes on the right and the left, steering the middle course may not be the most fashionable option, but it is the most responsible.
Australians have historically voted for governments of the political centre, and voters have shunned voices closer to the fringes.
In a world that flirts with Donald Trump and embraces Brexit, we hope common sense will prevail in Australia.”
With those words the paper insults not only the millions of decent Australians with views that mirror Mr Abbott’s and conservative columnist Andrew Bolt, but the many many millions of decent Britons who voted for their country to leave the squalid bureaucratic tyranny that is the EU.
Going on to deplore the re-election to the Senate of a proven racist fringe party leader who demands a ban on Muslim immigration to Australia, the editorial observes “[A]s Jews, we know what it is like being on the receiving end of such policies in bygone eras.”
Anda report in the paper quotes a statement by a prominent communal figure that “vilification of Islam … must be repudiated”.
Such a view threatens to place in the “racist bigot” box women who deplore Islam’s misogyny as well as the writings of Australia’s leading scholar of Islam, Anglican priest Dr Mark Durie.
It is untenable that the faults of Islam cannot be discussed without the discussant suffering obloquy.
The paper, which to my certain knowledge once summarily rejected an article (a perfectly reasonable one) by a regular columnist on the grounds that it was “an Islamophobic rant” (the paper has long since adopted “Islamophobia” into its lexicon), has become rather too left-leaning for many readers. These are people who resent being cast as extremists and lumped in with racists merely because they have the temerity to express disquiet about large-scale Muslim immigration into Australia and its likely effect on government policy towards Israel (we see this trend already in sections of the Labor Party).
As a London reader wrote to the paper in response to a foolish, ignorant and in some ways quite despicable article in the paper by the British principal of an Australian Jewish day school who thundered that Brexit makes him ashamed of his native land,
“Those who voted for Brexit felt this was no longer their country. Their national identity was denigrated by the EU and their cultural heritage was threatened …. He does not fully understand what is happening here …. If he despairs of us, he is no loss to Britain….”
One man from outside Europe who completely understands what is happening there and elsewhere in Europe is Dr Daniel Pipes, who in this latest Gatestone Institute/The Rebel.com video outlines three possible scenarios for the future of Europe.
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