Land of bigots? You must be crazy, Mike Baird

Land of bigots? You must be crazy, Mike Baird


Sunday Telegraph columnist Miranda Devine.

WHY Premier Mike Baird unfairly maligned Australians as incipient bigots on our national day is a total mystery.

“It’s not a crime to f... a white slut,” the mother of two of the rapists screamed in Arabic during their trial.


But that is what he did on Friday when he used an Australia Day address at Luna Park to extol the virtues of multiculturalism and express his fear that “we are potentially at risk of losing what makes Australia a great place to live”.

“To shut our doors to refugees, as many here and around the world are calling for, is to deny our history.”
Well, I haven’t noticed we are shutting our doors to refugees. Quite the opposite. Australia resettles more per capita than any other nation.

In response to the Syrian crisis, an increased humanitarian intake means we will be giving new homes to 18,750 refugees a year.

There is no political leader in Australia calling for a pause to Muslim immigration as Donald Trump is doing in the US.

There is no call for borders to be closed, as there is in Europe, because the Abbott government stopped the boats.

Thus far Australia is coping with its generous refugee intake with calm and equanimity, and that is because the public is reassured that now the boats have stopped, the migrant intake is orderly and the refugees are genuine.

In addition, the government has chosen to take refugees as families, not single men.

This is a sensible policy which avoids the catastrophe befalling Europe, where German chancellor Angela Merkel’s disastrous green light to mass migration has prompted an influx of over a million migrants from the Middle East and Africa.

The majority are young single Muslim men from cultures in which women have no rights.

Importing them en masse into Western nations where women are free to dress and behave as they please was always a recipe for disaster, but anyone who says so is branded Islamophobic.

It took the mass sexual assault in the centre of the German city of Cologne on New Year’s Eve to overwhelm this conspiracy of politically correct silence between the media and authorities frightened of fanning anti-migrant sentiment.

On Thursday, the North Rhine-Westphalia state government revealed the police log of offences. It makes for harrowing reading.

Mobs of men of Arab or North African appearance surrounded and sexually assaulted German women outside Cologne’s railway station in a collective frenzy known in the Arab world as “taharrush” or the “gang rape game”.

In total 1049 victims have come forward. Police were outnumbered and caught off guard by this hitherto unknown phenomenon.

But what is unforgivable is that the police tried to hush up its failure by issuing a press release describing NYE celebrations as “mostly peaceful”.

The media was just as bad, ignoring the story for several days. Again the threat of Islamophobia trumps the threat of actual crime.

We see here parallels to our own history. In Sydney 16 years ago the leftist establishment similarly was more concerned about the possibility of stigmatising Muslims than about keeping women safe from gang rape.

On the eve of the Olympics, gangs of young Lebanese Muslim men roamed Sydney hunting non-Muslim girls to rape because they were “Aussie pigs” and “sluts” who deserved it.

The Skaf gang chose as many as 70 victims on the basis of their ethnicity. Born in Australia, they had been raised to see non-Muslim women as fair game.

“It’s not a crime to f... a white slut,” the mother of two of the rapists screamed in Arabic during their trial.

But, just as in Germany today, accusations of Islamophobia were thrown at anyone who mentioned that the rapists were Muslims who targeted non-Muslim victims.

Well, I haven’t noticed we are shutting our doors to refugees. Quite the opposite. Australia resettles more per capita than any other nation

The NSW Anti-Discrimination Board even published a disgraceful pamphlet accusing the media of institutionalised “anti-Arab, anti-Muslim” bigotry to create “moral panic” in the community.

But the weight of evidence eventually could not be denied.

When District Court Judge Michael Finnane sentenced ringleader Bilal Skaf to a record 55 years in jail, he said: “By their own actions and their own words they have drawn this completely unique slur on their own culture, suggesting that in some way they are part of some separate group that isn’t really part of this community (and) they are wreaking revenge on the other group, the Australian group.”

Yes, we’ve already been through what Europe is experiencing today and we learned the lessons.

The difference is that we spoke about the problem openly, the police did their job, the crimes were harshly punished.
That is why today our generous refugee intake is possible, without causing community unrest. So far so good, no thanks to our sanctimonious Premier.

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/ne...d/news-story/8d909d434a07e86d8c875a6da514b89c