The history of appeasement repeats itself.

Appeasement, the attempt to conciliate or bribe a potential aggressor by making concessions and sacrificing principles, became a highly damning charge against politicians and commentators in Britain and France who, prior to World War Two, believed that by satisfying Hitler's European territorial demands, they could avoid all-out war with Germany. The appeasers, in turn charged their accusers of belligerence and "warmongering". The war proved inevitable, however, and the appeasers were forced to join the war effort or in some cases betrayed themselves as pro-Nazi "fifth columnists".

These observations occurred to me after reading newspaper reports of the vicious bashing of members of an S.B.S. television news crew by a gang of Muslim youths, outside the Lakemba mosque in New South Wales on 16 August 2002, which left two of the crew hospitalised and another shocked and severely bruised.

The S.B.S. team were attempting to interview Lakemba Muslims, seeking their reactions to a severe gaol sentence handed out to a Muslim youth of Lebanese extraction charged with leading a gang of rapists who deliberately targeted young (non-Muslim) Australian women.

Evidence given in the court case made it clear that the rapes were motivated by the perpetrator's contempt for "Aussie women", and the accused declined to express any remorse for his crimes.

The severity of the gang-leader's sentence had feelings running high in Lakemba, home to Australia's largest Muslim community and site of Australia's principal mosque, presided over by the Grand Mufti Sheikh Taj Eldine El-Hilali.

As the Melbourne Herald Sun's Andrew Bolt, The Australian's David Leser and Greg Callaghan, and myself (National Observer, Summer 2002), have made clear, Australia's most senior Muslim cleric is on record as supporting Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, Muslim fundamentalist terrorist groups.

In earlier sermons he had preached hatred against Jews and Americans and "those who serve them", and previously allowed the pro-Al Qaeda Islamic Youth Movement to use his mosque's facilities to publish the Nidaiul ("Voice of Islam") newsletter, which printed respectful interviews with Osama bin Laden and broadcast his fatwas to kill "Americans, Jews and their allies". Is it therefore any wonder that deep feelings of antipathy towards Australian non-Muslims seem to run so deep amongst Lakemba's Muslim youth? And is it unreasonable to suggest that while Sheikh El-Hilali is allowed to continue preaching support for a Muslim fundamentalist jihad (holy war) against the West, at least some of his congregation remain susceptible to calls to join such a jihad in Australia? Are we allowing the phenomenon of a "fifth column" to take root in our country? If we consider the acts of appeasement on the part of sections of the media, carried out in the name of a version of multiculturalism which deliberately minimises, and sometimes even censors, instances of local Islamic fundamentalist hostility towards Australian society, the prognosis seems valid.

The attack on the S.B.S. television crew is a pertinent example of both the failure of appeasement and the threat of such a "fifth column". S.B.S. television, faithful to its multicultural philosophy, avoids portraying any "ethnic community" in a negative light, even to the point of self-censorship.

In 2001, S.B.S. filmed television footage of Sheikh El-Hilali delivering a sermon in which he praised Palestinian suicide bombers as "heroes" for killing Israeli civilians (Australian citizen Malki Roth died in one of the attacks, just prior to El-Hilali's sermon). The footage was filmed as part of an Insight report on "Terrorism in Australia", due to be broadcast on September 20. In the intervening period, the September 11 terrorist attack on the United States occurred, and S.B.S. decided not to run the incriminating footage.

Herald Sun journalist Andrew Bolt contacted Insight executive producer Lindy Magoffin who told him that she had decided not to screen the footage because it had been filmed before the September 11 attack and it would have been "misleading." How so? Sheikh El-Hilali is said to have "deplored" the September 11 attack, but has persistently refused to condemn the perpetrators. In later statements, he opted for the Islamic fundamentalist anti-Semitic fantasy that accuses "the Americans and the Jews" of being behind the outrage.

It apparently made no difference to the thugs who bashed the S.B.S. camera crew that they represented a media body largely sympathetic to their community and at pains not to put it in a negative light. Perhaps they simply believed that no kafirs (infidels), not even sympathetic ones, had a right to be on "their turf"? So much for appeasement. As so often happens, it can lead to "poetic justice".

There is a fine line of distinction between deliberate censorship and simply allowing a news item to die. On the midnight news service of 25 August 2002, the B.B.C. overnight news, relayed via the A.B.C.'s Parliamentary & News Network, reported a rally in London's Trafalgar Square of the Muslim fundamentalist Al-Muhajiroun, supporters of Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda, including Sheikh Abu Hamza al-Masri, accused by the British Government of recruiting fighters for the terrorist group, calling for a jihad in Britain.

Waking early next morning, I found the item missing from the P.N.N. news, and it was not mentioned on other A.B.C. stations. The three daily newspapers available in Melbourne--The Age, The Australian and The Herald Sun--also failed to mention it.

One would have thought that a bold manifestation of the birth of a Muslim fundamentalist "fifth column" in the streets of one of the West's great cities might be newsworthy. However political correctness apparently required a different view.

Most Australian newspaper editors seem more concerned with appearing to appease Muslim sensibilities than with openly discussing the threat of Muslim fundamentalism. They continue to give prominence to reports of vandalism against Muslim places of worship and call for tolerance towards Muslim citizens, but in a pronounced case of imbalance, news of attacks on synagogues and Jewish citizens receive far less coverage, despite the fact that no Jewish cleric or community leader has made any inflammatory statement, nor manifested any hostility to Australian society.

Not so with Sheikh El-Hilali. His inflammatory public statements and sermons are not confined to support for Muslim fundamentalist terrorism. Referring to the notorious gang-rape case, when it first became news, he blamed "Australian society" for the perpetrators' crimes. In October 2001, when an Indonesian "people-smugglers" boat sank and 350 Muslim asylum seekers drowned, he contrived to blame Prime Minister John Howard and vilified him in a statement to the Press: "All the sharks and the carnivorous fish who preyed on these innocent children are now thanking Mr Howard for his policies." (1)

This Muslim cleric, nominally the leader of Australia's Muslims, has a long history of antipathy toward the country that now tolerates his presence. In 1986, after protests from the Jewish community and many moderate Muslims opposed to his installation as Imam, the Federal Government instituted proceedings to deport him. He was in this country only on a temporary entry permit issued in 1982--which he violated by overstaying--on the understanding that he cease his violent sermonising and return to Egypt. However, after lobbying by some sections of the Sydney Muslim community and their supporters in the Labor Party, successive Immigration Ministers, fearing a backlash from his militant supporters, continued to extend El-Hilali's visa, until he was granted permanent residency by Immigration Minister Gerry Hand in 1990.

Thanks to this policy of appeasement, Australia has as its most senior Muslim cleric, a supporter of a worldwide Islamic jihad, whose aim is the destruction of the "infidel" West, and whose sermons and activities encourage the creation of a radical Muslim "fifth column".

In 1990, The Australian was calling for his deportation, but has since gone quiet. The Age does not seem to want to know about it. S.B.S. fails to provide television footage of his poisonous preaching.

To my knowledge, of the mainstream media, only the Herald Sun's Andrew Bolt is doggedly (and bravely) pursuing the issue of El-Hilali's role in the growth of Islamic fundamentalism in Sydney's Muslim community.

With the exception of Bolt and The Australian's Janet Albrechtsen, the mainstream Australian print media seems to be at pains to appease Muslim sensibilities, even to the extent of publishing seemingly obligatory reports of Muslim "disquiet" over the raising of issues such as the anniversary of the 11 September 2001 terrorist outrage. As Albrechtsen wrote, on 4 September 2002, this form of appeasement "sucks the life out of a rage we should maintain towards those militant Islamist terrorists".

Even in the very country where the 3,214 September 11 victims (including ten Australians) perished, appeasement also seems to be the order of the day. Much of the commentary on the Hollywood film, The Sum of All Fears, concerned trivial issues such as whether the leading actor, Ben Affleck, was suitably convincing, or the slightly less trivial issue of whether Tom Clancy, the author of the book on which the film is based, is the actual author of several books published in his name.

However whether Clancy employs "re-writers" or even "ghost-writers" is trivial when compared with his apparent willingness to allow a totally revised history of his book, in order for Hollywood to appease "Muslim sensibilities".

In his book, the plot involved Islamic extremists, helped by former East German communists, planning to detonate an atomic bomb in the United States. In the film, the terrorists have become aged German Nazis and an Austrian billionaire!

Craig Matheison, The Bulletin's critic, was highly critical of the film, but not for its revisionism. His only comment on the expurgated Islamic extremists and their replacement by ludicrous old Nazis was that "the film opted for a less divisive villain".

How did this revisionism of Clancy's original plot come about? Mace Neufeld, the film's producer, and director Phil Alden Robinson, apparently with Clancy's permission, opted for the changes after they were lobbied by the "Council on American-Islamic Relations", who were "concerned about negative images of Muslims or Arabs". Director Robinson wrote to the C.A.I.R., "I have no intention of promoting negative images of Muslims or Arabs, and I wish you the best in your continuing efforts to combat discrimination".

This is not the first time that Hollywood has rewritten history, of course, but given that the 1993 U.S. World Trade Center bombing, the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Zambia, the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen in 2000, and the 11 September 2001 terrorist carnage in the United States were all perpetrated by Muslim Arabs, "negative images" are not only unavoidable, they are historically accurate representations. This act of political and artistic cowardice is akin to blaming the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour on some other nationality.

In Australia too the appeasement of Muslim fundamentalism continues under the rubric of "multiculturalism". It would seem that a new word has entered Australian political discourse--"Islamophobia".

Adding to the already formidable nomenclature of the politically fashionable multiculturalists, it is, like the use of other negative terms such as "racism" and "xenophobia", freely and dishonestly used in an attempt to anathematise their opponents, particularly those concerned about the security, or indeed, the fate of their country.

Genuine racists exhibit "offensive or aggressive behaviour towards members of another race, stemming from a belief in their own race's superiority" (The Macquarie Dictionary), and xenophobes "fear or hate foreigners or things foreign" (ibid.), and Australia has its share of such people. "Islamophobia", however, is reserved for those who are concerned about the growth of religious fanaticism in a growing Muslim community, and are characterised as having an irrational fear ("phobia") of followers of the Muslim religion.

The use of this term was observed in two opinion columns by Melbourne author and academic Robert Manne, in The Age of the 16th and 25th of September 2002. In these, he moved beyond its dubious "psychological" nature to claim that it was simply a new form of "racism"--ignoring the fact that Muslims are of many different races, including Europeans and other Caucasians.

Though in this instance intellectually dishonest, the anathematising power of the term "racist" is so potent that the "Islamophobe-racist" nexus was simply too expedient for Manne to forgo.

He described concerns about the growth of radical Muslim fundamentalist tendencies in the Australian Muslim community, raised by such journalists as Bolt, Albrechtsen and The Age's own Pamela Bone, as an "ugly new phobia and a form of racism" and claimed they were "part of a rightward drift in Australian political culture", which he attributed to "the period of Hansonism, a response to Muslim asylum seekers after the Tampa crisis, and September 11".

Manne's radical transformation from leading conservative commentator and editor of the conservative journal Quadrant, to leading leftist critic of conservatism, has been dizzying to behold, but he seems to have lost his objectivity and part of his memory during the rapid transition. When editor of Quadrant, he published several articles criticising multiculturalism's divisive effect upon Australian national and social cohesion. He also published various letters warning of the possibility of Australian Muslim and Arab radicals siding with foreign powers and movements hostile to Western liberal democracy.

It is historical revisionism to claim these concerns are part of a new "rightward drift in Australian political culture" that has only occurred since 1996 and can somehow be blamed on the incumbent Federal Government and its policies. As far back as February 1989, during the furore over Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses--long before John Howard's Prime Ministership, Pauline Hanson or Middle Eastern "boat people" came on the scene, and long before 11 September 2001--there were many indications in both Quadrant and The Age warning of the phenomenon. But these were the days before Manne discovered Orwellian "memory holes" down which inconvenient historical details can be made to disappear.

In December 1990, while Australian forces were participating in the war to drive Iraqi forces out of Kuwait, Manne, as editor of Quadrant, published a page-length letter of mine, entitled "The Meaning of Multiculturalism" in which I commented upon Manne's defence of Australia's participation in that war and proceeded:

   "Manne writes, however, that `it is
   a conservative fantasy to argue that
   multiculturalism poses a danger to
   national security'. Yet his various
   examples of statements by Arab-Australian
   spokesmen seem to indicate
   that it is not at all fantastic to
   question multiculturalism's effect
   on the loyalty or otherwise of many
   Australian citizens, surely relevant
   to our national security at a time
   when Australian military forces are
   involved in the Gulf crisis. It is important
   here to make a distinction
   between people who oppose, for
   whatever reason, Australian involvement
   in the Gulf conflict, and
   those who are actively supporting
   Baghdad.

      I can understand many Arab-Australians'
   uneasiness about their
   adopted country going to war with
   an Arab country, but some Arab-Australians
   have moved beyond
   that reticence and are actively supporting
   Iraqi aggression and by
   implication Iraq's kidnapping of
   Australian citizens. One can only
   presume that in any military engagement
   these Arab-Australians
   will be working for the defeat of
   their own country's troops.

      Whatever else one might say
   about multiculturalism, in practice
   it has meant encouraging immigrant
   groups to maintain an allegiance
   to their former homelands,
   and despite the generally understood
   meaning of `culture', multiculturalism's
   maintenance of
   mother country influences includes
   politics and the establishment of political
   organisations based on
   mother country politics. For many
   Arab-Australians, it means pledging
   allegiance to a country whose
   aggression has led it to confront
   Australian military forces.

      It is worth noting that the most
   blatant example of this, the August
   demonstration in Melbourne's City
   Square, composed of many Arab-Australians
   and leftist, mostly
   Trotskyist, groups, involved not
   mere opposition to Australia's involvement
   in the Gulf, but support
   for Iraq's aggression and its results.
   This was made perfectly clear when
   some of the Arab-Australians set
   fire to an Australian flag and a Kuwaiti
   flag to the cheers of many in
   the demonstration's ranks. Some
   spokespersons from Arab-Australian
   organisations have dissociated
   themselves from the demonstration
   but no Arab-Australian publicly
   condemned the burning of the Australian
   flag. Burning the flag is a
   statement--`I forsake this country
   and its people.' Burning the flag of
   your own country is proof of disloyalty.

      That single incident of flag burning
   carried out with impunity and
   without an outcry of condemnation
   from loyal Arab-Australians could
   only be seen as a statement of hostility
   towards Australia. Multiculturalism
   has not been able to separate
   the maintenance of customs,
   traditions, and `culture' from the
   political and ideological concerns of
   foreign countries. It has removed
   from immigrants the onus to be
   Australians first and foremost.

      When the policy of multiculturalism
   can be even partly
   blamed for what used to be known
   as treachery, it does not strike me
   as fantastic to worry about our nation's
   fate."

Manne could not possibly have disagreed with my point about the radical difference between opposing the participation of one's country in a particular war, and actively supporting the enemy side.

After all, he had made the very same point in earlier Quadrant editorials regarding opponents of the Vietnam War. But the essential issue is that he allowed me a full-page letter to express them. In other words, he was prepared to disseminate views that he now. calls "Islamophobic".

Hence in the 1990s concerns about Muslims and Arabs interpreting multiculturalism as an opportunity to agitate in support of political movements or ideologies hostile to the liberal democratic values of the Western countries in which they live, were at least a legitimate subject of debate for Manne. In 2002, they are for him simply an "ugly new form of racism."

Further, Manne attempts to rewrite history to suggest that what he calls "Islamophobia" is a new phenomenon, directly attributable to "irrational fears" whipped up by the likes of Pauline Hanson and Phillip Ruddock, or as an "irrational" response to the September 11 terrorist attacks. But what has changed over the past ten years? Muslim fundamentalists may have forgotten the fatwa on Salman Rushdie. The jihad has simply moved on. Now we have massacres of innocent civilians by hijacked airliners and Al Qaeda video messages in which Australia is included as an "infidel" enemy target, and whose Muslim citizens are urged to join the jihad.

It may be true that the majority of Australia's Muslims desire to live in peace with their non-Muslim fellow citizens, a desire expressed one month after the September 11 massacre, by Melbourne's Sheikh Fehmi El-Imam, secretary of the Melbourne Board of Imams, who stated:

   "Melbourne's Muslims stand
   united against any form of holy war
   or terrorism. We have no room for
   anyone calling for a jihad or terrorist
   acts. Hatred of the United States
   will only bring havoc and misery to
   Muslims. Terrorism is un-Islamic
   and anathema to Muslim Australians.
   We are going to spread peace
   and have a peaceful relationship
   with whoever is living with us in
   this part of the world."

This welcome statement was notable, however, because it was the only one by a senior Australian Muslim leader which unequivocally condemned the September 11 massacre and its perpetrators, terrorism and calls for a jihad.

Many others, including Sheikh Taj Eldine El-Hilali, while "deploring" the deaths of the victims, took care not to condemn the perpetrators, and peddled the Muslim fundamentalist, anti-Semitic fantasy that "the Jews and the Americans were behind the attack".

In view of Osama Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda Islamic fundamentalists claiming responsibility for the September 11 massacre; the persistent refusal of many Australian Muslims and their community leaders to condemn it outright; the attempts to shift the blame onto its victims; their opposition to Australia's involvement in the counter-terrorist war, or any conflict with an Arab or Muslim power; and their depiction of these very criticisms as "anti-Islamic", it is not at all irrational to fear that this pan-Islamic solidarity will have ramifications for national security and social cohesion in a country with a growing, 300,000-strong Muslim population.

Critics of multiculturalism have published many articles critical of earlier instances of ethnic communalism and multiculturalism's ramifications for Australia's national cohesion and foreign policy formulation. Many of these addressed the issue of conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and the Greek-Macedonian hostilities in the early 1990s, and the ethnic strife these caused within Australia. Again, they predated Manne's alleged post-1996 "rightward political drift".

The issue was then, as it is now, the prospect of the policy of multiculturalism encouraging ethnic or religious communities here to maintain allegiances to their former homelands or to foreign political movements whose objectives are hostile towards Australia's political and social values.

A decade later, we have Alexander Kouttab, of the Australian Arabic Council, threatening much the same thing. (2) Kouttab claims to be concerned about the possibility of real bigotry (or "racism", as he puts it) towards Muslim Australians should the Australian Government commit troops to a Middle Eastern conflict. But rather than simply asserting the legal right of all Australians to dress, worship, act and think as they please without fear of harm or harassment, he goes on to suggest that the Australian Government ought to shape its foreign policy so as to appease what he claims are the "sentiments of Australian Arabs and Muslims".

And what are these sentiments? Opposition to the U.S. alliance and support for Saddam Hussein! Furthermore, failure to appease these "sentiments" will "reverberate and affect Australia's community relations" and "lead to racism".

Mr. Kouttab has been quick off the mark. He has already assimilated the message of Manne's use of the term "Islamophobia". His demand is nothing less than that the Australian Government must shape its foreign policy to suit the objectives of foreign Arab or Muslim states, or face the prospect of bogus claims of "racism" towards Australian Muslims, which will, in turn, increase the hostility of Muslim fundamentalists towards Australia. This is simply political blackmail.

Now that it is clear that Asian Muslim supporters of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda have, with the terrorist bombing in Bali, begun targeting Australian citizens, we have a clear case with which to test the loyalty of all Australians, including the leaders of the Australian Muslim and Arab communities.

It is not unreasonable to expect unequivocal opposition to this terrorist attack and unqualified sympathy for the victims, and it must surely betray a callous form of opportunism to use the occasion to force political demands. Indeed, to do so is to become an accomplice in the perpetrators' objective.

However, three days after the news of the Bali terror bombing, a spokesman for Dr. Ameer Ali, president of the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils, said Dr. Ali was to meet Prime Minister, John Howard.

At this meeting, said the spokesman, Dr Ali will tell him "he believes the Government needs to look at changing its policy in terms of its view on the war against terrorism and support of America". With few exceptions, the media appeasement of Muslim fundamentalist "sentiment" goes on, and the likes of Mr. Khouttab and Dr. Ali are not called to account for their thinly-veiled threats.

So in a seven-page, in-depth article, "Call of Islam" Diana Bagnell interviewed a wide range of Australian Muslim citizens and religious and community leaders. (3) Not one expressed condemnation of the Bali bombings, nor unequivocally opposed Muslim fundamentalist terrorism.

After a mere three weeks since scores of Australian civilians died in the Bali carnage, many Australians may have been disappointed, to say the least, to read that the country's leading national news magazine chose to publish seven pages about the "uneasiness" of those in whose name--rightly or wrongly--their fellow citizens were murdered. They may also be wondering why the country's Muslim leaders find it impossible to issue an unequivocal condemnation of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism, one that is not conditional upon the issuance of political demands.

One needs to recall Sheikh Fehmi El-Imam's positive declaration of opposition to the Muslim fundamentalist terrorist jihad, to remind oneself that there are indeed moderate and peaceable Muslims among us. One could easily believe otherwise, given the paucity of similar sentiments. And how much comfort can be taken from any statement by a Muslim leader while many practise al-taqiyya--what some call the "moral right" of Muslims to mislead and lie to non-Muslims? But a realistic acknowledgment of the possibilities of an appeased Muslim fundamentalist "fifth column" in this country is, by Robert Manne's definition, "Islamophobia".

Robert Manne was once a strong advocate of freedom of speech and truth-telling in the face of "politically correct" hostility. But in his new quest for legitimacy with the multicultural media elite, he seems to believe he has to atone for former "sins" and a mere mea culpa is not enough. His mandatory mea maxima culpa must involve the kind of moral vanity that not only presumes to detect subliminal "racism", but assumes the right to anathematise those who refuse to covert to the multicultural project, or who have valid concerns about its ramifications for the preservation of Western liberal democracy.

Manne writes that he is "disturbed by the ease" with which his "Islamophobes" talk about the superiority of Western culture to the culture of Islam. What he should be disturbed by is the ease with which Muslim fundamentalists talk about the "evils of the West". Are we not inviting the decline of our own culture's Western liberal democratic values by failing to defend them against a totalitarian, anti-democratic and anti-liberal movement that uses religious and cultural arguments to reject these values, and in many cases, manifests open hostility towards them?

Australians have indeed an obligation to defend their own culture against one that tolerates sexual inequality, hostility to "unbelievers", draconian punishments for non-violent crimes, death for adulterers, the resort to al-taqiyya and an allegiance to fellow believers abroad that is apparently stronger than their loyalty to their fellow Australian citizens.

(1.) The Melbourne Herald Sun, 19 November 2001.

(2.) The Melbourne Herald Sun, 25 September 2002.

(3.) The Bulletin, 5 November 2002.

MR. RAYMOND WATSON is a Melbourne commentator whose articles have appeared in Quadrant, Codex and News Weekly.