Does Islam pose a threat to the West?

Controversial Dutch politician Geert Wilders speaking this week at Craigieburn in Melbourne, where he received standing ovations from the audience. Source: Getty Images

On the walls hung pictures of blonde girls in traditional Dutch headgear. Beyond the dark wooden beams and lead-lined windows of the main reception room, a windmill towered absurdly into an overcast sky. The setting immediately posed a question that has nagged Wilders and his supporters throughout this visit: whether his anti-Islamic message is an ill fit with the reality of modern Australian society.

In the press conference that followed, Wilders spoke about the threat he sees Islam posing to Australia, along with every Western democracy founded on Judaeo-Christian, humanist traditions. Asked why Australia should feel threatened, given fewer than 500,000 Muslims live here among a population of more than 22 million and the nation’s 200-year history of absorbing immigrants of all religions and races into a stable liberal democracy, Wilders was emphatic.

His best line came in response to Victorian Premier Ted Baillieu urging Australians to ignore Wilders. “You can ignore it and sing Kumbaya all day long, but the voters will correct him in due time, I am sure.”

Wilders’s message here is a marginally embellished version of the stump speech he has delivered in the Dutch parliament, across Europe and in the US, Israel and Canada for the past eight years. His evocation of Passchendaele and Gallipoli in calling for Australians to demonstrate the Anzac spirit in standing firm against the threat of Islam was clearly a locally crafted pitch. But, as Dutch journalist Rob van der Wardt tells Inquirer, Wilders said from the outset he did not plan to say anything new in Australia.

Wilders is, in parliamentary terms at least, a politician on the wane. Nearly a million people voted for him in last September’s Dutch elections, yet he suffered a 5.4 per cent swing against his Party for Freedom, which lost nine seats. He was able to influence policy in the last parliament as an official supporter of the government. Now he is just another Dutch MP, albeit one whose choice of platforms ensures he remains a formidable political figure.

In Australia, Wilders has been cast as a lone voice determined to tackle a subject shunned by mainstream politicians other than Liberal senator Cory Bernardi, who for two years has been encouraging Wilders to visit. With his cartoonish bouffant of peroxide hair and commanding stage presence, Wilders has a charisma lacking in Australian politics. Is there a politician in Canberra who could have drawn more than 500 people to the outer Melbourne suburb of Craigieburn to pay for the privilege of hearing them speak on a bleak Tuesday night?

The crowd was mostly old and white. There were plenty of Dutch expats and a disproportionate number of Jews. The loudest cheer was reserved for his call to stand with Israel, a country “in jihad’s frontline”. Many had been jostled by protesters on their way in. They shook their heads at Wilders’s stories of Islamic-controlled no-go zones in European cities, of Muslims armed with Kalashnikovs firing on Belgian police, of lawless Moroccan youths terrorising The Netherlands. “I am not exaggerating,” he insisted. “I tell it like it is.” He described Islamic immigration as a tool of jihad, Islam as a ruthless political ideology that aimed to impose sharia on everyone. Moderate Muslims, he said, were “captives of Islam”. The crowd gave Wilders a standing ovation when he walked to the stage and again when he left.

Yet what, if anything, should Australia take from Wilders’s message and his policy prescription to turn back the tide of Islamisation? He calls for three things: an end to immigration from Islamic countries; an end to the construction of new mosques; and deportation of immigrants who commit crimes. The construction of mosques, although an occasionally emotive issue, is not a matter for commonwealth law. Halting immigration from Islamic countries assumes there is a lot of it. Deporting immigrants who commit crimes assumes Muslims are over-represented in crime.

The Australian experience, according to the most recent, comprehensive figures from the Department of Immigration and Citizenship, is immigrants from Islamic countries represent only 11 per cent of new settlers. In 2010-11, more than half our 127,458 arrivals came from New Zealand, China, Britain, India and South Africa. The only Islamic countries (defined as those where the official religion is Islam or legislation is based on sharia law) in Australia’s top 10 were Iraq, with 2988 arrivals, and Malaysia, with 2737. Altogether 13,910 people arrived from Islamic countries, including 1027 Afghans, 271 Iranians and 190 Somalis who came as refugees. Wilders provides an exemption for refugees from Islamic countries, as many belong to minorities that don’t follow Islam.

So now they are here, whom should we send home? Useful crime statistics in this context are difficult to obtain. The NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics says police data is too unreliable. In Victoria, accurate reporting of the violence against Indian students in 2009-10 was hampered by police arrest records that made no distinction between victims and perpetrators of “South Asian appearance”.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics offers something of a guide in its Prisoners in Australia report, which records jail populations according to country of origin. According to the latest one, published in December, Indonesians, Lebanese, Iraqis, Sudanese and Nigerians are overrepresented in our jails. So are Vietnamese, Samoans, Papua New Guineans, Romanians and Tongans. All of them, including the 791 New Zealanders and 741 Britons jailed at the time of the survey, would be deported under Wilders’s policy.

The most overrepresented group in Australian jails is Aborigines – the only lot here when Wilders’s early ancestors first sailed down the West Australian coast nearly 400 years ago.

Yet even if the numbers don’t add up for him, there is agreement among Muslims and non-Muslims that the issues he raises should be debated in Australia. Conservative economist Des Moore says Wilders has “brought into the public arena an issue that has not hitherto been seriously addressed at a political level. Amazingly, it has taken a leading Dutch politician … to do this.”

Islamic Council of Victoria spokesman Mohamad Tabbaa says: “Absolutely, it is a discussion which needs to be had on a proper level.” He is concerned, though, that Wilders is too offensive to Muslims to lead the debate, while our federal politicians are not capable of carrying it on. “Unfortunately politics in this country is not at a standard where we can have such discussions,” he says.

The Q Society, which worked to bring Wilders here, believes an Australian politician will emerge who is willing to join the Dutchman’s crusade. “I think we have started a discussion,” says spokesman Andrew Horwood. “It will happen, it is just a matter of when. We are not the only people who are concerned.”

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/features/does-islam-pose-a-threat-to-the-west/story-e6frg6z6-1226583659219