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文章太长，这是第二部分。
The Australian Muslim population is still relatively small, perhaps 400,000 or just under 2 per cent of the population.
The US-based Pew Research Centre has recently completed a big study on Muslim demographics and migration trends. It predicts that for Australia the Muslim population will grow by 80 per cent between now and 2030, to about 715,000, growing about four times as fast as the rest of the population, and reaching about 3 per cent of all Australians.
Such forecasts are always rough estimates, but this is based on fertility, migration and mortality trends, and it's highly plausible.
It may be that by 2030 we will start to have a much more European-style, polarised society as a result.
Coming to these sombre conclusions marks a crisis of faith for me. All my life I have been, intellectually and as a matter of personal experience, strongly supportive of a big and completely racially non-discriminatory immigration program. This grew out of my convictions, my world view, and also my personal experience.
Mark Latham once remarked that the journalists and commentators who most vigorously support big immigration in Sydney live in the eastern suburbs, the inner city or the north shore. They don't live in the western suburbs where life is much more hard scrabble.
Latham has something of a point. It's easy to be completely relaxed about your society when you look down on it from a metaphorical penthouse. But his point never applied to me. I grew up in Lewisham, a modest little suburb about 7km west of the Sydney central business district. Its more affluent neighbours, Petersham and Stanmore, yearn to be seen as inner city. On the western side, Lewisham is flanked by Summer Hill and Ashfield, both a little more affluent. When I was a kid in Lewisham in the 1950s and 60s it was already racially diverse, surely as racially diverse as any suburb in Australia at the time. It was a bit of a religious ghetto: a big Catholic church with four priests, a Catholic hospital, two Christian Brothers high schools, a convent, a Catholic infants' school.
But because the church was racially universal, so was the suburb. For a time at school we were placed alphabetically: Saad, Scarfone, Sheridan, Taurian -- Lebanese, Italian, Irish, Italian.
In primary school I had one close Aboriginal friend, whom I now suspect may have been part of the Stolen Generations, and very close friends from Singapore, Papua New Guinea, Britain and Ireland. In primary school I didn't seek out diversity, it was just naturally all around me.
I was a happy kid, I liked my friends and I assumed that a multi-coloured classroom and playground were as natural as the air.
Like many children of that era, I was more than half in love with America and early on imbibed an American-style belief in growth and greatness. I wanted Australia to be big and strong, and that meant lots more people.
The politics of the time were all about the Cold War. I was deeply anti-communist. As a result I strongly supported the South Vietnamese in the Vietnam War, which meant I supported the Australian and American commitments in support of the South Vietnamese.
By the war's end in 1975 I was at university and this was an unusual position among student activists, but support for the alliance was the majority position among the wider population.
When the South Vietnamese lost the war in 1975 and were invaded by North Vietnam, I knew we had to help our former allies. When the South Vietnamese refugee outflow began, I became committed to refugees.
This also began a lifelong involvement with Asia.
My advocacy on behalf of the South Vietnamese refugees was passionate, almost monomaniacal, and I tried the patience of many editors with endless writing on the subject, even, or especially, when it wasn't in the news.
One politician I met way back then in the late 70s was Philip Ruddock, later immigration minister. We worked together on a number of Vietnamese refugee cases.
But between the late 70s, and today, the nature of people seeking to come to Australia as refugees has changed fundamentally. Ruddock recognised this before me, but I have caught up eventually.
For Ruddock, who had argued very strongly on behalf of the Vietnamese, there were two moments that told him things had changed.
One came in a coastal Vietnamese city, when he met a manufacturing boss, who was also a senior figure in the local Communist Party. He was looking after his grandchildren because his son and daughter-in-law had left as boatpeople, trying to win the prize of resettlement in the US, Canada or Australia. That certainly did not make them bad people, but neither did it make them genuine refugees. The outflow of real refugees had ended and the refugee system for the Vietnamese had become a channel for immigration.
The second epiphany for Ruddock came when members of the Vietnamese community asked him why the government was admitting so many former Viet Cong to Australia as refugees. Being a former Viet Cong doesn't make you a bad person, even in the eyes of a South Vietnam partisan like me. But neither does it mean logically that you are a refugee from your own political force.
Because of my passionate commitment to the refugee issue, it took me a long time to wake up to the routine scamming of refugee processes today.
The Vietnamese outflow ended before I faced up to the change, and when the Muslim boatpeople started to arrive in Australia I mistakenly applied my old paradigm to the new situation.
In 2009 I spent a month in Europe -- Britain, Germany, France and Belgium -- working on Muslim immigration issues.
I interviewed government ministers, immigration officials, non-government organisation advocates, immigrants themselves and almost anyone who would talk to me. What became clear was that uncontrolled Muslim immigration from North Africa (and from Pakistan in Britain's case) had presented itself as an asylum issue, and thereby disabled Europe's political response, and had been a disaster on the ground.
Christopher Caldwell's book, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, the best book of any kind on public policy I have read, establishes definitively that this has been overwhelmingly a determined illegal immigration, not a refugee question.
The same is happening in northern Australia now, and as the Gillard government loses control of the situation, the number of illegal immigrants, almost all Muslim, will increase, exactly replicating the dynamics of Europe's disaster, though of course on a much smaller scale.
So while I remain an advocate of a bigger immigration program, and would be happy to have the refugee quota enlarged, I am now a strong critic of lax borders and allowing illegal immigrants to turn up without papers and then settle permanently.
Caldwell's book, along with the evidence of my own eyes, also convinced me that many North Africans were not going to Europe to embrace European values but to continue their North African life, with its values, at a European living standard and at the expense of the European taxpayer.
Living next to Lakemba for nearly 15 years also gave me a different view of how immigration can go wrong. Our sons went initially to a state primary school that had a brilliant principal and did a fine job.
But as they approached secondary school a senior teacher told us that our boys had academic potential and it would be a tragedy to send them to the local high school. It was riven with violence and misogyny, drugs and gang and ethnic conflict.
If you find yourself unexpectedly in a war zone, your instinct is to evacuate the family, so the boys went to a private Catholic school, which was racially and even religiously diverse, though I don't believe there were any Muslim kids there. It was excellent.
Lakemba and surrounding areas such as Punchbowl had a large Lebanese Muslim population, many of whom had come when Malcolm Fraser crazily instituted a come-one, come-all admissions policy for those claiming to be refugees from the Lebanon conflicts of the 80s.
Replicating the European experience that the second generation had more trouble than the first, it was the sons of some of these immigrants who figured heavily in anti-social activities.
I was shocked to discover the growth of jihadi culture in Lakemba. We used to go to its main street for shopping and for food.
One day, waiting for a pizza order, I wandered into the Muslim bookshop. I was astounded to see titles such as The International Jew or The Truth about the Pope, amid a welter of anti-Semitic, anti-Christian and pro-extremist literature.
The revenge attacks on white Australians after the Cronulla riots originated out of Punchbowl. A number of media crews were attacked when they went to local mosques. A large number of those charged with terrorism offences in Australia stayed in or had associations with the area.
Due to the brilliant and fearless reporting of this paper's Richard Kerbaj, who spoke perfect Arabic, we found that at a number of the mosques in the area outright hatred was being preached: anti-Semitic, misogynist, conspiratorial. Most of the time, these sermons didn't advocate violence. The speakers were what Britain's David Cameron has called "non-violent extremists".
The advent of satellite television made it easier for these folks to live a life apart. Hezbollah's Al-Manar TV station was available on satellite packages. Most Arab homes you went into had Arabic TV playing in the background.
The anti-social behaviour became more acute.
One son was playing cricket with friends when they were challenged by a group of teenagers, whom they presumed to be Lebanese but may have been of other Middle Eastern origin, who objected to white boys playing cricket. A full-scale, if brief, fist fight ensued.
One son was challenged by a boy with a gun. Lakemba police station was shot up. Crime increased on the railway line.
I was in the habit of taking an evening constitutional, walking a long route from the station to home. At some point it became unwise to walk on Canterbury Road. A white guy in a suit was a natural target for abuse or a can of beer or something else hurled from a passing car.
Occasionally at the train station I was recognised and my pro-Israel articles were not popular, though nothing serious ever came of these incidents.
The worst thing I saw myself was two strong young men, of Middle Eastern appearance, waiting outside the train station.
A middle-aged white woman emerged from the station alone. She was rather oddly dressed, with a strange hair-do.
The two young men walked up beside her, began taunting her and then finished their effort by spitting in her face. They laughed riotously and walked away. She wiped the spittle off her face and hurried off home. It was all over in a few seconds.
These events in Lakemba and nearby are not unique. Lots of people from lots of different backgrounds commit violent crime in Australia. There is a good deal of unemployment, combined with a highly advanced informal culture of welfare exploitation, often freely discussed at the local schools, in the area. But Lakemba is different from most of Australia.
A senior policeman from nearby Bankstown once told me that policing in the Bankstown area was unlike working anywhere else in Australia, and he was amazed how much violent crime went unreported by the media.
Does Islam itself have a role in these problems? The answer is complex and nuanced but it must be a qualified, and deeply reluctant, yes.
This is the only explanation consistent with the fact other immigrant communities, which may have experienced difficult circumstances in the first generation, don't display the same characteristics in the second generation.
But there is a deeper reason as well. As the great scholar of Islam, Bernard Lewis, has written: "The community of Islam was church and state in one, with the two indistinguishably interwoven."
This isn't just a theoretical observation. It means that imams at mosques tend to be preaching about politics, and doing so from a cosmology deeply influenced by paranoia and conspiracy.
Many Australian Islamic institutions receive funding from Saudi Arabia, but I know from my work in Southeast Asia and Europe that the Saudis almost always fund an extremist interpretation of Islam.
To have concerns about these matters is not racism or xenophobia. It is reasonable.
It may also be that when young men of Islamic background experience failure and alienation they are much more readily prone to entrepreneurs of identity who offer them purpose through the jihadi ideology, which has a large overlap with what they hear at the mosque and what they see on Arabic TV.
This is simply not true for Buddhists or Confucians or Sikhs or Jews or Christians, and to pretend so, to make all religions seem equal, is to simply deny reality.
Islam is a deep sea with a tradition of much spiritual goodness and genuine insight.
However, the Koran itself contains numerous injunctions to violent jihad and suppression of infidels. It also contains passages against violence and against compulsion in religion.
These things are to a considerable extent matters of interpretation but it is undeniable that at the very least a sizeable minority of Muslims choose an extremist interpretation.
How can Australia sensibly take account of all this while maintaining a non-discriminatory immigration program? Three obvious courses suggest themselves.
In the formal immigration program, there should be a rigid adherence to skills qualifications so that the people who come here are well educated, easily employable and speak good English.
The inflow of illegal immigrants by boat in the north, almost all Muslim, mostly unskilled, should be stopped.
Within the formal refugee and humanitarian allocation of 13,500 places a year, a legitimate stress should be placed on need but also on the ability to integrate into Australian society.
And, finally, we simply should not place immigration officers in the countries with the greatest traditions of radicalism.
A few years ago there was an informal view across government that very few visas should be issued to people from Afghanistan, Pakistan or Iraq, as these were the three likeliest sources of extremism.
These sorts of discussions take place all the time among senior officials, politicians and others. But I have never encountered a policy area in which private and public positions are so different.
It is right to be sensitive and avoid needless offence.
It is wrong to avoid reality altogether in such an important area of national policy.
No one in Europe, 25 years ago, thought they would be in the mess they're in today.
Australia has been a successful immigration country. But the truth is not all immigrants are the same. And it may be much easier than people think to turn success into failure.
* * *
EUROPE TURNS AGAINST DIVIDED SOCIETY
IN France, recent polls put National Front leader Marine Le Pen ahead of all other contenders for the French presidency. The National Front is a traditionally far-right extreme group, with an inheritance of anti-Semitism.
It has recently ditched the anti-Semitism and now stands primarily against Muslim immigration and Islamic influence in France.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said recently Germany's attempt to create a multicultural society had failed completely.
Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron recently denounced European-style multiculturalism, saying: "We have encouraged different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and apart from the mainstream.
"We've failed to provide a vision of society to which they feel they want to belong. We've even tolerated these segregated communities behaving in ways that run completely counter to our values."
France's President Nicolas Sarkozy has agreed with Cameron and Merkel, that multiculturalism is a complete bust, as has Spain's former leader, Jose Maria Aznar.
Britain's former prime minister Gordon Brown said shortly before he lost office that 75 per cent of terror plots in Britain came from Pakistan or had a direct Pakistani connection. There are 800,000 Pakistanis living in Britain.
Across Europe, anti-Muslim parties are gaining electoral strength. They are often described as anti-immigration parties but in truth they have little complaint about immigrants other than Muslim immigrants. Switzerland has banned minarets. Even Sweden has an anti-Islam party.
All this is happening in Europe, the most liberal continent on earth, in the face of furious opposition from the liberal elite, who regard it as racist and, worse, incipient fascism, leftover colonialism and every other kind of -ism you can imagine.
Greg Sheridan
* * *
THERE ARE NO WORRIES
GREG Sheridan in The Australian, November 6, 1996: There is nothing in multiculturalism that could cause any worry to any normal person. Multiculturalism officially promotes an overriding loyalty to Australia, respect for other people's rights and Australian law, recognition of people's cultural origins, respect for diversity, the need to make maximum economic use of the skills people bring to Australia and equity in access to government services.
What mostly passes for "debate" about multiculturalism is really the psychology of paranoia as a political style. That is why opinion polls on these issues are often self-contradictory. People will say they think there should be fewer migrants from Asia, but that the policy should be non-discriminatory. Or people might say that everybody should speak English, but then denounce funding for multiculturalism when its chief expenditure is to teach migrants English. |
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澳洲常见鸟类图集 (2012-1-9) d200 
发表于 2011-4-2 22:34
