"A big problem for Australian multiculturalism, according to historian Mark Lopez, is that it failed to anticipate that immigrants might one day be opposed to the central tenets of Western society.

Multiculturalism was not conceived in terms of minorities that are anti-Western. "The original policy was forged to accommodate southern Europeans who cooked lasagne, eastern Europeans who fled from communism and Jews," Lopez says. "That was the diversity and they were all pro-West."

Were successive waves of newcomers going to play the game? "It wasn't even thought about," he says

... Was it a failure on the part of the architects of multiculturalism to foresee minorities might be hostile to the West? "Of course it was," Lopez concludes.

One of those architects, George Zubrzycki, concedes he never imagined that his preference for a culturally diverse policy could welcome hardline isolationist groups antagonistic to Western values.

"We did not perceive that happening," he says.

"America lost its grasp of its own historic character, and embraced "diversity" as a national goal. In the name of equality and nondiscrimination, we invited mass immigration from every part of the globe, and made no demands on the newcomers to become Americans. In fact, we gave up our American core, adopted multiculturalism and declared all cultures equal. We invited the new groups to celebrate themselves, while we cravenly permitted libelous denigration of our own past.

Like fools, we prated that diversity is our strength, when common sense and all of history tell us that strength comes from unity.

Absolute nondiscrimination meant we no longer enforced standards, made judgments, distinguished between good and evil, friend and foe. We grew lazy, stupid and careless – about our borders, about national security, even about previous terrorist attacks against us. We worried over our "hate crimes" and our "racial profiling," while men resided in our midst who seethed with murderous fury even against our children, and plotted our destruction.

Now we have a fifth column, fear further assaults, and labor under a draconian security regime that is changing the nature of our lives." .

The lesson of the Muhammad cartoon controversy is: Multiculturalism between nations is inevitable, but multiculturalism within nations is disastrous.

Protests, many of them violent, have erupted across the world ... It's time for all of us to recognize that different cultures have different values.

For the West, broadly speaking, the highest value is freedom, including freedom of religious expression. But for the Muslim world, the highest value seems to be Islamic piety ... Not everyone thirsts for liberty. Plenty of people around the world, maybe most, thirst instead to restrict liberty.

.... In London, Muslims responding to the Danish cartoons chanted pro-jihad slogans and carried signs reading "7/7 is on its way" - a reference to the terror bombings last July 7 that killed 52 innocent Britons. That's not free speech; that's incitement to violence. A nation allowing such hostile populations to flourish in its midst is not defending liberty. It is enabling its own national suicide.

Like a pressure cooker or bottle of soda water waiting to explode, the simmering racial war will reach its inevitable climax later, if not sooner. Strong police tactics have contained the situation for now; however, ... we need a long-term solution. Multiculturalism is simply not working. The multicultural melting pot has turned into a pressure cooker and it’s now a case of assimilate or implode Australia.

... During my 31 years in Sri Lanka and two years in Saudi Arabia, multiculturalism was a word I never heard uttered - unusual considering both of these countries have people from many nations living there, especially Saudi Arabia.

... Since moving to Australia in 1997 I have travelled to more than 20 countries across the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Eastern and Western Europe and the US. What amazes me is that wherever there is a Western society, I hear the word "multiculturalism", but I never hear this word in other parts of the world.

... let's face reality. The truth is that countries founded on the Judeo-Christian heritage (Western democracies) are the best to live in. .

Radical Islam is an opportunistic infection, like AIDS: It's not the HIV that kills you, it's the pneumonia you get when your body's too weak to fight it off.

When the jihadists engage with the U.S. military, they lose--as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq. If this were like World War I with those fellows in one trench and us in ours facing them over some boggy piece of terrain, it would be over very quickly. Which the smarter Islamists have figured out. They know they can never win on the battlefield, but they figure there's an excellent chance they can drag things out until Western civilization collapses in on itself and Islam inherits by default.

That's what the war's about: our lack of civilizational confidence. As a famous Arnold Toynbee quote puts it: "Civilizations die from suicide, not murder"--as can be seen throughout much of "the Western world" right now. The progressive agenda--lavish social welfare, abortion, secularism, multiculturalism--is collectively the real suicide bomb.

Take multiculturalism. The great thing about multiculturalism is that it doesn't involve knowing anything about other cultures--the capital of Bhutan, the principal exports of Malawi, who cares? All it requires is feeling good about other cultures. It's fundamentally a fraud, and I would argue was subliminally accepted on that basis. Most adherents to the idea that all cultures are equal don't want to live in anything but an advanced Western society..

"A RADICAL Muslim thinker who inspired al-Qa'ida is being served up as subject matter for high school students in NSW.

Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian militant hanged in 1966 but still a powerful influence on violent Islamists, and the Pakistani fundamentalist Sayyid Maududi are the only two modern Muslim thinkers on a revised syllabus for studies of religion.

Experts this week condemned the prominence of political Islam in the new syllabus, and especially the inclusion of Qutb.

The Australian:

.... Multiculturalism seeks to inject an anti-Western dogma into today's curriculum....multiculturalism claims to offer a real value: a cosmopolitan, rather than provincial, understanding of the world beyond the student's immediate surroundings. But it is a peculiar kind of "broadening." Multiculturalists would rather have students admire the primitive patterns of Navajo blankets, say, than learn why Islam's medieval golden age of scientific progress was replaced by fervent piety and centuries of stagnation.

One text acclaims the inhabitants of West Africa in pre-Columbian times for having prosperous economies and for establishing a university in Timbuktu; but it ignores their brutal trade in slaves and the proliferation of far more consequential institutions of learning in Paris, Oxford and elsewhere in Europe. Some books routinely lionize the architecture of the Aztecs, but purposely overlook or underplay the fact that they practiced human sacrifices. A few textbooks seek to portray Islam as peaceful in part by distorting the concept of "jihad" ("sacred war") to mean an internal struggle to surmount temptation and evil. Islam's wars of religious conquest are played down.

...Multiculturalism is no boon to education, but an agent of anti-Western ideology.

... as Muslims enraged by cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed torched Danish diplomatic missions in Lebanon and Syria, Melbourne's artists rallied to defend free speech.

Their timing was perfect. After all, almost every paper in the country had just decided to censor themselves, refusing to publish 12 innocuous cartoons that had Muslim extremists from Jakarta to London threatening death and mayhem

... Daring Dave knew well the risk he was running by turning up on Sunday to defend free speech, but welcomed martyrdom: "I'd love to get locked up for doing this."

Locked up? Oh dear, I'm at the wrong protest, aren't I?

Dave and his artist friends weren't defending that right to free speech. No, they weren't defending that right against the very real threat of violence by Muslims. They were there to defend free speech instead from the completely imaginary threat of prosecution by the Howard Government, under sedition laws we've actually had for decades.

Here again was our cultural elite at play, pretending our greatest danger comes not from radical Islam, but those protecting us from it.

...This refusal to publish does not represent the success of multiculturalism but its failure. Habits of free speech good enough for generations of Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists and Jews are too much for Muslims whose anger scares even their leaders.

Not publishing is a gesture not of respect, but of fear.

I reluctantly support that decision, agreeing with the Herald Sun that the harm that may come to others is not worth the benefit. Yet I worry that we have all played into the hands of extremist Muslims and betrayed the moderates, such as the (now sacked) editor in Jordan, who published some of the cartoons, pleading with his readers to "be reasonable".

"the jihadists are for the most part doing no more than giving us a prod in the rear as we sleepwalk to the cliff.

When I say "sleepwalk," it's not because we're a blasé culture. On the contrary, one of the clearest signs of our decline is the way we expend so much energy worrying about the wrong things. If you've read Jared Diamond's bestselling book "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed," you'll know it goes into a lot of detail about Easter Island going belly up because they chopped down all their trees.

Apparently that's why they're not a G-8 member or on the U.N. Security Council. Same with the Greenlanders and the Mayans and Diamond's other curious choices of "societies." Indeed, as the author sees it, pretty much every society collapses because it chops down its trees. .

IT is so self-congratulatingly easy for the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission to accuse us of racism towards asylum seekers. But now HREOC admits that a good number of those asylum seekers - particularly Muslims - are themselves racist, persecuting others who don't share their faith.

It's a pity it doesn't then ask the obvious question in its new report, Last Resort?: Is it wise for a largely Christian land to let in people who hate Christians and other non-Muslims?

Let's be clear: Many Muslims in fact get along fine with Christians, Jews and others. Not all asylum seekers are racist.

But now let me quote from HREOC's report on its inquiry into children in our detention centres.

A Last Resort? cites many witnesses who confirm that Muslims in most detention centres have persecuted Christians and Sabian Mandaeans, people of a Middle Eastern faith that borrows from Christianity. In three centres, the persecution was so bad that non-Muslims had to be given protection. For instance,

A Last Resort? notes: "A Christian mother reported to the South Australian child protection agency that she was persecuted by Muslims in the detention centre because of her religious beliefs.

"They view her as unclean and she was assaulted by a Muslim detainee when she tried to pass food to him while she was working in the detention centre kitchen."

... In Woomera, one mother said she tried to fit in with Muslim families, but "she and her children felt so harassed that (the centre's staff) eventually moved them to a different compound for their own safety".

.. In Baxter, the Immigration Department had to move 12 families from "minority religions" to a separate compound.

"Some families stated that they felt safe for the first time,"

HREOC said. Meanwhile, the Lebanese Muslim Association, whose boss is the spokesman for the Grand Mufti of Australia, objected to Christian priests converting Muslims in detention centres. How dare Christians interfere with "the preservation of (Muslims') original religion and culture"?

After telling us this and much more, A Last Resort? suggests some solutions - perhaps "educational programs for children on the importance of tolerance" or "training for detainees and staff setting out how to treat people of different religions and the consequences of the failure to do so under Australian law".

Good Lord, is that all the protection we can hope for as we let in people with such intolerance of non-believers? Now that we're importing this hatred, can HREOC urgently investigate the rights of Australians to protect our open culture and easy-going ways?