The current issue of the Australian Jewish News carries a letter from a Jewish academic who urges readers “to stand up and speak out vehemently against the current climate of fear and Islamophobia”. Her letter focuses upon two groups that “try to convince Australian voters that Muslims are a danger to society” and she claims that the fact that the newer of the two groups is to be launched later this year by Geert Wilders is “particularly disturbing”. The letter is signed by her in her capacity as co-founder of an organisation of which I have not previously heard, “Voices Against Bigotry”.
Upon googling that organisation I see that its agenda is clearly left-wing, viscerally opposed to the policies of the late Abbott government, and that the group’s other founder, also female, is a former Catholic who converted Islam upon marriage to a Muslim man. I also see that the organisation’s subtitle is “Stand up, speak out, stop Islamophobia” and that it appears to be concerned entirely with countering “the vilification of Muslims”. So much for speaking out against bigotry against any other societal group, then, including bigotry against Jews, women and gays.
The Jewish co-founder holds the chair of Human Rights at the Swinburne University of Technology and, incidentally, is also a member of the Australian Jewish Democratic Society, a body that does not have a warm and fuzzy regard for Israel. I don’t mention her name here because I don’t want to “play the woman” but rather the attitude she represents. Needless to say, consciousness of the Shoah and of the Jews’ experience of persecution and homelessness is at the base of many Jews’ empathy with today’s “refugees” and “asylum seekers” – but given the current migration crisis facing the Western world it’s inherently dangerous, not least for Jews themselves, as well as for the Western world of which Jews and Israel form a part.
The huge throng of Middle Eastern humanity now surging into Southern and Eastern Europe determined upon what media reports dub “a better life” obviously includes men, women and children in genuine fear of their lives, and Australia is pledged to take 12,000 of such people, following the careful screening mandated by prudence. But as Eurostat statistics suggest, just one in every five of the current migrants is from war-torn Syria. Opportunistic economic migrants are swarming into Europe in far greater numbers than those in genuine need of refuge. Moreover, women and girls make up a small percentage of the “migrants”. Most of the migrants are males, mainly young males, with all the negative effects that may portend for Europe, one way or another. We know that there are many aspects of the current crisis much of the mainstream media is withholding from the public – including footage that shows many of the migrants in a very bad light indeed – and we know that in many parts of Western Europe a number of Muslim men have behaved abominable not only to female members of their own families but to other girls and women, chiefly although not exclusively of the “kuffar” variety. And we know that despite the values of the European Enlightenment and despite the notion that all citizens of a state should be governed by the same law and standards of justice we know that certain judges and certain polities have “privileged” Muslim men – for instance, in a tougher sentence given to a Muslim paedophile in the UK for raping two young Asian sisters than if he had raped two white sisters, on the grounds that the Asian victims suffered more than white girls would have since in their culture the rapes devalue them on the marriage market; and in the tolerance of polygamy for Muslim men in several countries of Western Europe with good welfare systems, despite the implications for the status of women and for demography.
Precisely whose “human rights” are ascendant in modern Europe? When there’s a contest
between the human rights of females and the cultural entitlements of Muslim men, whose rights are to be upheld in Western democracies? (Do our left-wing female anti-“Islamophobes” ever lie awake at night worrying about that one?) Just as many Europeans today see Charles Martel and Don John of Austria as wiser than their contemporary progeny, so many must see the irony in Napoleon’s insistence on according Jews French citizenship only after satisfying himself that Jews had come to terms with modernity (“Do you practice polygamy?” was one of the questions that they of course truthfully answered in the negative!)
A typically astute article by the UK’s Professor Denis MacEoin – a true friend of Jews and Israel – (
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/6502/refugees-arab-states) makes these points: “Refugees arrive in some of Europe's poorest states, mainly Greece, Italy and Hungary, but insist that they have a right to head for more prosperous nations where welfare benefits are higher and healthcare freely available… It may also be that the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and elsewhere see the movement of Muslim refugees to Europe as a golden opportunity to increase their work in da'wa (Islamic proselytization). This crisis has exposed the abject failure of the EU, the UN, the OIC or anybody else to criticize the bloated nations of the Gulf with even a tiny fraction of the abuse they pour daily on the only democratic state in the Middle East, Israel. It is a repetition of the ongoing Palestinian refugee crisis, with the Arab states refusing to give jobs and citizenship to Palestinian Arabs over decades, keeping them in refugee camps and laying the blame on Israel. Is it surprising that the Arab world is still on the steady downward course it embarked on in 1948?” Europe, motivated by a politically correct obsession with multiculturalism, has used mass immigration to beef up its workforce and create a semblance of diversity, only to find that many of its immigrants -- above all Muslims from Turkey, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Somalia -- have remained averse to integration and assimilation into their host societies.”
Thursday, September 24, 2015
Elder of Ziyon
