Jumping right into it—
Mr Trolley […] said there would be many locals who would not welcome the new arrivals.
“We don’t know what kind of people they are — African, Afghan, Vietnamese, Sri Lankan,” he said. “From what I can gather, there’s been very little consultation with the residents. It’s disappointing.”
(Mark Schliebs, Nicolas Perpitch, ‘Not everyone happy with the new neighbours’, The Australian, 19 October 2010, 1.)
I hadn’t realised that resolute racism was now front page news. As always, News Corp shows us the way.
More recently, today’s Commentary section — in addition to sporting a lovely rendition of NSW Premier Kristina Keneally as … some sort of zombie with a radiation sign for a face — contained Janet Albrechtsen’s weekly polemic.
This time, the rub is that apparently people in liberal democracies are more accommodating of Islam than moderate Muslims are of Western values. Her lament: ‘[w]hy does the accommodation always run one way?’ (Janet Albrechtsen, ‘The extremes of moderate Islam’, The Australian, 20 October 2010, 12.)
Golly gee, might it have anything to do with the whole ‘liberal democracy’ bit entailing enlightened ideals of tolerance and peaceful co-existence? Nah.
Her main case study is the ‘ground zero mosque’ that has been the subject of so much debate in New York.
Muslims demand the mosque be built. And their left-liberal supporters decry opponents of the mosque as bigots. They demonise and scold mainstream Americans who think otherwise.
Hear that? They’re demanding that a mosque be built! The nerve! And those elitist liberals want to let them. Time for a good old-fashioned witch-burning!
Albrechtsen leaves out unimportant little details, like the fact that the ‘mosque’ is actually just a prayer room within a planned multi-storey community centre, two blocks away from ground zero. As satirist Jon Stewart pointed out, there’s a strip club the same distance away from the site. But let’s not let negligible little details like this get in the way of arguing that Intolerant Islam is encroaching on inexplicably sacred ground.
To commentators like Albrechtsen, affirming and reaffirming bigoted opinions in the public with a glaze of intellectualism and moral righteousness, a pretence of being a much-needed maverick ‘telling it like it is’ — that’s what’s sacrosanct, it seems.
And so for a newspaper that claims it is ‘The heart of the nation’ (while weathering smug and seemingly endless barbs from the likes of the editorial staff at the ABC that they are the national broadsheet no more) to be apparently targeting an intellectual, educated audience but with this insidious angle that seems borrowed from the seediest of the London tabloids … that’s what sounds somewhat ‘extreme’ to me.
But that’s a complaint you’ve heard before.
