It's time we accepted the difficult truth: many of the Muslims we invite to live in Australia want to destroy us.
FOR four years, since the September 11 attacks, I've begged our Islamic leaders to drive extremists from their mosques. For four years I've also reassured you that most Muslims here are moderate.
I've even insisted they have some moderate Muslim leaders, and last week again endorsed Sheik Fehmi Naji El-Imam of Preston mosque as a man of peace.
How eager I was to praise. Heavens, I described as "moderate" the Melbourne-based Islamic Information Services Network of Australia (IISNA), which purged from its website articles I'd noted claiming democracy was a sin, Jews were behind September 11 and Western society was a pollution.
But was I just kidding myself? Isn't it becoming terribly clear that Islam -- at least the Islam of Australia's Arab sheiks and imams -- is hostile to our society?
Isn't it now obvious we should never have let into our country those imams who now preach hate?
Isn't the evidence that some cultures -- Muslim Arab ones -- pose more problems than their importation at this rate is worth? Isn't multiculturalism making these problems worse?
I know these are dangerous, hurtful questions. I also know many Muslims will feel deeply offended, loving this country and obeying its laws, and I wish only I heard from them far more often.
But the London bombings, perpetrated by home-grown Muslims, makes our silence on such issues not a sign of civility, but suicide.
So let me admit that the past few days have been terrible for those of us who thought we could count on Muslim leaders for real help against the Muslim extremists who threaten us.
Such setbacks we've had.
Only last week I'd praised Sheik Fehmi as a good man, who'd condemned the London bombings. But a day later he was asked about fellow Melbourne sheik Mohammed Omran, a friend of a suspected al-Qaida boss, who'd claimed September 11 was really the work of a US-based conspiracy.
"He is entitled to his own thinking," Fehmi replied meekly. Then, asked if Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida terrorists had committed those attacks, he added: "We cannot say. We do not know these things."
How can Muslim leaders fight terrorism, when the most moderate of them won't condemn even bin Laden, or admit that monster's self-confessed guilt?
Fehmi was not my only disappointment. I checked the IISNA site this week, and among the announcements of classes and prayers found this advice to a reader who'd asked if it was a sin to kill non-Muslims:
"In regard to non-Muslims who are at war with the Muslims and do not have a peace treaty with the Muslims or are not living under Muslim rule, then Muslims are commanded to kill them, because Allah says . . . 'Fight those of the disbelievers who are close to you, and let them find harshness in you.' "
If that's advice passed on by a "moderate" Islamic group, what must the radical ones here say?
Well, we know that, too. In a Melbourne bookshop run by Omran a Herald Sun reporter this month found books being sold that command Muslims to ready for war and to hate Jews.
In Sydney last week, the Islamic Bookshop, Australia's largest of the kind, was found (again) selling similar poison near the Lakemba mosque, including a book with tips on how to blow yourself up and kill plenty.
"The form this usually takes nowadays is to wire up one's body, or a vehicle or a suitcase with explosives and then to enter among a conglomeration of the enemy and to detonate," it says.
"There is no other technique which strikes as much terror into their hearts."
Again and again we're told such things aren't typical. Apologists, too often Muslim converts with little clout among ethnic groups, claim Islam means peace. But again and again we are left feeling like dupes.
The genuinely charming Waleed Aly, of the Islamic Council of Victoria, goes on 3AW to tell us the radical Mufti of Australia, Sheik Taj el-Din el-Hilaly, who has praised suicide bombers as "heroes" and called the September 11 attacks "God's work against oppressors", is not a big worry because he represents no one. Aly says he doesn't even know who made the man a mufti, our highest ranking Islamic cleric.
But the truth, Waleed, is that your own council voted to make Hilaly the Mufti in a decision of the Federation of Islamic Councils of Australia. Why won't you sack him?
Everywhere disappointment. Hilaly's spokesman, Keysar Trad, soothes us with false claims that the Mufti is misquoted and is a proud Australian, but he turns out himself to have been a translator for the Islamic Youth Movement, a pro-bin Laden group whose leader, Bilal Khazal, now faces terrorism-related charges in Sydney.
We also find Trad has written articles with lines such as: "The criminal dregs of white society colonised this country (Australia) and . . . the descendants of these criminal dregs tell us that they are better than us."
Faced with such evidence whichever way I turn, what else can I think about Islam -- or Arab Islam, at least -- but that it is an enemy of our culture, our society? And I ask: How did we come to let in the extremist preachers of such a hostile creed?
Why did we let in sheiks such as the Jordanian-born Omran, who declares Islam rejects democracy and instructs Muslims to go to Iraq to fight coalition troops? Why did we let in the Egyptian-born Hilaly?
But so much that we did in the name of multiculturalism was dangerously naive. Just think: only a few years ago the jihad-preaching Islamic Youth Movement, which met in Hilaly's mosque, was given three grants -- two state multicultural grants to run language classes and one work-for-the-dole grant to smarten up its offices.
Then there was all that other multicultural pampering to help Muslim ethnic groups here keep their distance, their "identity".
In March, the Victorian Multicultural Commission, whose grants budget the Bracks Government has tripled, even ran a football carnival for teenagers who were split into ethnic teams -- the Turks playing the Greeks, the Lebanese the Jews and so on.
Does this make any sense in a society where the urgent need now is not to reinforce old tribal loyalties, but dissolve them in a warm pool called "Australia"?
As you figure the answer, remember that Lebanese Australian children at the Muslim-dominated Moreland Secondary College, now closed after non-Muslim students fled, danced for joy at the September 11 attacks. Remember Lebanese ethnic gangs are strong in Sydney.
How hapless we've been, refusing to admit we were importing a problem that multiculturalism could only make worse.
For example, we have allowed into Australia Lebanese -- many of them Muslim -- who are often uneducated, unskilled and poor
in English. Their Islam was yet another barrier to their assimilation.
The results were as predictable as they were politely ignored -- a jobless rate and imprisonment rate double that of other Australians. Gangs. Poverty. A near ghetto in Lakemba.
What an unholy recipe: First we build a vulnerable underclass of unassimilated people with a religion of rejection. Then we let loose on them imported radicals preaching a hatred of our society; teachers who instruct them in the shame of our history; and multiculturalists who pay them to keep their distance and retain their much nicer ways.
A LL this always was foolish. Now we see it was dangerous as well, since British-born Muslims bred in a similar stew of multiculturalism, ethnic enclaves and Islamist extremism, have gone to war.
We need now to change ideas once thought sacred by our cultural elite.
First, we must be more wary about the dangers of importing cultures that clash with the one that has built this free, rich and democratic society.
As a former Chief Justice, the late Sir Harry Gibbs, said in 2002: "A state is entitled to prevent the immigration of persons whose culture is such that they are unlikely readily to integrate into society, or at least to ensure that persons of that kind do not enter the country in such numbers that they will be likely to form a distinct and alien section of society, with the resulting problems that we have seen in the UK."
Second, we must ban mosques from hiring imams from overseas, or at least those who preach race hate or damn democracy. If Islam does mean peace, let only peace be preached.
And, third, we must show more pride in this country, and switch our multicultural cash from funding division to building unity.
After all, the duty of government is to make one nation out of many tribes -- and not the deadly reverse.
