Greg Sheridan on Multiculturalism

In The Australian recently, Greg Sheridan recently wrote an excellent long piece on how he abandoned his faith in multiculturalism.

It's a very honest and sensitive piece as Sheridan started out as a strong supporter of immigration and multiculturalism, a view that grew out of his desire to support South Vietnamese boat people after the Vietnam War (a view that I'm sure I would have had a lot of sympathy for at the time, just like him). 

Sheridan walked the walk too, living in Western Sydney for 15 years. But he observed up-close what happened to places like Lakemba in Sydney when they experienced wide-spread immigration, including some of the attendant social problems which he describes. (In related news, is there any serious doubt that Malcolm Fraser may be one of the worst Prime Ministers in Australian history? He'd even give Gough Whitlam a run for the money).

Sheridan raises the very valid question that the differences in success of immigration programs in Europe vs Australia, America and Canada may have less to do with particular multicultural policies practiced by the host country, and more to do simply with the composition of where the immigrants came from. 

The US, Canada and Australia have far smaller Muslim migrant communities as a percentage of their total populations than do most of the troubled nations of Europe. Could this be the explanation?

He doesn't assert this directly, but to ask the question is to know his implicit answer.  

And Sheridan is very sensitive in phrasing his argument. He goes through all the required recitations first:

Discussing these issues is very difficult. It goes without saying that most Muslims in Australia are perfectly fine, law-abiding citizens. The difficulty with discussing Muslim immigration problems is that you don't want to make people feel uncomfortable because of their religion.

It's only a small minority - check.

Muslims are not only individuals, wholly different from each other, but national Islamic cultures are very different from each other. The Saudi culture is different from the Turkish culture, which is different from the Afghan culture. So generalisations are dangerous.

Lots of diversity in Islam, generalisations bad - check.

Then there is the ever present risk of being labelled a racist. No matter how calmly the discussion is conducted, that is a big danger.

It is, but good on you for having the stones to not worry about it. But then he gets to the point he wanted to make all along:

But the only people who don't think there is a problem with Islam are those who live on some other planet. The reputation of Islam in the West is not poor because of prejudiced Western Islamophobia, still less because Western governments conduct some kind of anti-Islamic propaganda.

Instead, it is the behaviour of people claiming the justification of Islam for their actions that affects the reputation of Islam. ...

To have concerns about these matters is not racism or xenophobia. It is reasonable.

It may also be that when young men of Islamic background experience failure and alienation they are much more readily prone to entrepreneurs of identity who offer them purpose through the jihadi ideology, which has a large overlap with what they hear at the mosque and what they see on Arabic TV.

This is simply not true for Buddhists or Confucians or Sikhs or Jews or Christians, and to pretend so, to make all religions seem equal, is to simply deny reality.

Exactly so. One thing I never, never understood about the "New Atheists" (Richard Dawkins for sure, Christopher Hitchens less so) was the moral equivalence of how all religions were equally bad. In terms of their relative tolerance for womens' rights, homosexuality, separation of church and state, and all the other things that secular humanism apparently holds dear, there's simply no contest. In Utah, people may not like you if you practise abortion, open homosexuality, or start a different church, but the worst that happens is that you may not get invited to a dinner party. In Saudi Arabia, you'd be lucky to escape prison or worse for any one of these actions. All religions and societies may fall short of the humanist ideal, but they don't all fall short by the same amount.

On the other hand, the piece ends with what is, to me at least, significantly good news - at least privately, the government is far less clueless about these things than it seems in its public discussions:

And, finally, we simply should not place immigration officers in the countries with the greatest traditions of radicalism.

A few years ago there was an informal view across government that very few visas should be issued to people from Afghanistan, Pakistan or Iraq, as these were the three likeliest sources of extremism.

These sorts of discussions take place all the time among senior officials, politicians and others. But I have never encountered a policy area in which private and public positions are so different.

Phrases you do not hear often on this blog: the Australian government might be doing a significantly better job than I thought they were, and one which in some absolute sense amounts to 'acceptably sensible'!

In other news, The Australian remains my favourite newspaper in the world. Is there any US paper that would publish such a common sense article?

(Thanks to GS for the pointer).