(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.
