From John Bond, Canberra, Australia. (Letters).

In recent weeks Australians have gone through the agony of our worst peacetime disaster--the Bali bombing--in which 180 people died, half of them Australian, almost certainly at the hands of Muslim extremists.

It happened a year after an even greater tragedy--the death of 353 asylum seekers, drowned when their boat capsized on the way from Indonesia to Australia.

A series of asylum seeker boats arrived at that time and, according to opinion polls, 56 per cent of Australians said they should be pushed back out to sea. One reason for this hostility was that most of the asylum seekers were Muslim--fleeing from persecution in Afghanistan and Iraq.

As a small Western nation on the edge of Asia's billions, fear of alien cultures is a powerful force in Australia. Perhaps this is exacerbated by our unresolved relationship with our own indigenous people, whom we overran to establish ourselves here.

Terrorism fuels this fear. It is driving the Judeo-Christian and the Muslim world apart, and we could find ourselves in a new Cold War--except this time it would probably not be cold.

Yet the basic beliefs of our societies have much in common. We both proclaim that every person is equally important to God; that the death of an Australian in Bali is as painful to God as the death of a Muslim asylum seeker.

The more we make that belief practical, the more we will bridge the gulf which terror and fear have opened up.

That is why I have placed outside my house a sign saying `Asylum seekers welcome here'.