DUTCH politician Geert Wilders is creating waves – and he has yet to hold a single public meeting in Australia.
http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/piersakerman/
http://www.qsociety.org.au/
The taxpayer-funded multicultural channel SBS gave what it would think was a lengthy interview with Wilders last night and the taxpayer-funded ABC provided a shorter and very slanted interview with anti-Wilders protesters.
But his message cut through strongly - Islamists make poor migrants in Western liberal democracies.
We need to hear his message and think about what our misguided multicultural policy has wrought here.
Coincidentally, almost exactly a year ago The Economist magazine examined the effect of Islamic migration in the Nordic nations and the picture was not pretty.
In Sweden, it found that despite the best efforts of the Swedish state, the city of Malmo is a no-go zone with a 62 per cent rate of unemployment.
Angry (Muslim) youths have taken to rioting, torching bicycle sheds and recycling centres as well as cars.
Mass immigration, the magazine said, is posing serious problems for the region. For the Nordic countries to be able to afford their welfare states they need to have 80% of their adults in the workforce, but labour-force participation among non-European immigrants is much lower than that.
In Sweden only 51% of non-Europeans have a job, compared with over 84% of native Swedes. The Nordic countries need to persuade their citizens that they are getting a good return on their taxes, but mass immigration is creating a class of people who are permanently dependent on the state.
In the mid-1990s immigrants in their 40s—the age group that generally contributes most to the public budget—paid only marginally more in taxes than they received in benefits.
In Sweden 26 per cent of all prisoners, and 50 per cent of prisoners serving more than five years, are foreigners.
Some 46 per cent of the jobless are non-Europeans, and 40 per cent of non-Europeans are classified as poor, compared with only 10 per cent of native Swedes.
High immigration is threatening the principle of redistribution that is at the heart of the welfare state.
Income inequalities in the Nordic countries are generally lower than elsewhere, but Matz Dahlberg, of Uppsala University, reckons that immigration is making people less willing to support redistribution.
Immigration is also causing culture clashes.
Nordics fervently believe in liberal values, especially sexual equality and freedom of speech, but many of the immigrants come from countries where men and women are segregated and criticising the prophet Muhammad is a serious offence.
Peaceful Denmark found itself on the front-line of the culture wars when Jyllands-Posten, a newspaper, published cartoons making fun of Muhammad.
Immigration has divided the Nordics.
The Economist said the Swedes regard their open-armed approach to asylum-seekers as an expression of what is best in their culture.
The Danes revisited their immigration policies in 1999, spurred by the rise of the anti-immigrant Danish People’s Party.
They tightened the rules for family reunification, made it more difficult for newcomers to claim benefits and set up an integration ministry.
Today Denmark receives more non-European immigrants than ever, but it has radically reduced the number of refugees while increasing the number of people on student and work visas.
Liberals are increasingly on the defensive.
The number of immigration-related attacks is rising.
In 2010 Taimour Abdulwahab al-Abdaly blew himself up in the middle of a crowd of Christmas shoppers in central Stockholm; remarkably, he managed to injure only a couple of people.
Wilders has seen the problems arise in his native Netherlands and is here to warn Australians of the failure of multiculturalism.
He has travelled extensively in the Middle East and was invited by US politicians to address them.
Political correctness is so rife in Australia that former Immigration Minister Bowen stalled attempts to bring him here last year though Islamist hate speech imams appear to enter Australia and hold rallies at will.
What is good for hate-filled Islamists should be good enough for a Dutch MP and leader of the third largest political party in the Netherlands.
Wilders deserves support, his message needs to be heard – debate on this issue is more urgent than ever.
Yet the Q Society http://www.qsociety.org.au/ which brought him to Australia has had difficulty finding a venue and locations for his addresses must be kept secret until the last moment to make it more difficult for the protesters to disrupt those who wish to hear him. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_Society_of_Australia
This is what multiculturalism has reduced our once liberal democracy to.
Where once we used to pride ourselves on free speech we now need to hide champions of freedom from the bullies and thugs who don’t want or cannot debate its virtues.
Shame upon the nation.
