OK, let’s try intolerance

(Reproduced, in full as a public courtesy, from “Opinion” article in the Cairns Post, dated 20 September 2012, by Melbourne-based journalist Andrew Bolt.)

The problem isn’t us.  It isn’t even some YouTube clip posted by a filmmaker no one has heard of.  No, the problem is them.

Islamists.  Extremists desperate to take offence.  Bigots who use violence to frighten us into giving up our free speech.

I mean, not just the people setting the Middle East ablaze, but the hundreds of Muslims who in Sydney on Saturday staged a violent riot, allegedly over a video that insults Islam.  Enough.

May I ask : who let in these people who now demand the right to say who may speak and who must tremble?

Who let in those who bashed police, flew the black flag of jihad and Hammas, and had children hold up signs exhorting “Behead all those who insult the Prophet”?

If this comes from opening our doors, then shut them.  If this comes from multiculturalism, then scrap it.  If this is the fruit of our tolerance, let’s try intolerance.

Let’s debate whether we must restrict Muslim immigration until we better integrate those here already.

But already we hear the same old voices telling us the fault for the riot lies with the rest of us for being racists.  Hear them tell us to understand the anger, and do more to appease it.

They warn us to remove from the internet not the scores of propaganda videos of jihadists beheading Jews, Christians and journalists, but one that merely makes Mohammed seem silly.  Reality check.  This protest was not caused by a YouTube clip.

If Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists and atheists were to attack police and demand beheading every time we found something horrible on the internet, this country would be a war zone.

No, it’s the wanting to take offence – and to threaten, attack and censor – that is the feature of these latest riots from Tunis to Sydney.

Take the most violent of those alleged “protests” – the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi that killed US ambassador Chris Stevens and three staff.  That, too, was sold in the media as rioting over an anti-Islamic film made in the US by an Israeli Jew.

In fact, that “film” was made by a Coptic Christian originally from Egypt, and so far exists only as a YouTube clip of cartoonish quality.  Moreover, the Libyan “protest” has been claimed by Al-Qaida as revenge for the killing of the group’s deputy leader.  The video was just an excuse.

The violent demonstrations at the US embassy in Cairo that same day may seem more easily portrayed as a “protest”.  Yet the US Government had no involvement with the video.

Moreover, the radical Muslim Brotherhood that now forms Egypt’s Government issued tweets and statements whipping up anger against the video and the US.

Since then, other extremists have murdered US soldiers in Afghanistan, burned a German embassy in Khartoum, stormed a US embassy compound in Yemen and torched a KFC outlet in Lebanon.  The targets seem irrelevant, and the YouTube video a pretext.

Some Sydney protesters confessed that they hadn’t even seen it.

So, no, these protests aren’t understandable reaction to Americans or Jews giving offence.

They are the work of Muslim extremists determined to jump at any chance to make us submit to their dictates.

The video is irrelevant. 

The violence is all.