A month ago, the Australian ran an extract of a speech delivered at a Quadrant dinner by John Stone, the former treasury secretary and National Party senator. According to Stone, “the core” of what he called “the Muslim problem” was to be located in the anti-Western hatred created by five hundred years of Muslim cultural failure. Stone did not distinguish between different ethnicities, or different kinds of Islam. All Muslims were religious and political extremists. They could not make a separation between church and state. They demeaned women. They believed in the use of the most extreme violence to achieve Islamic ends. Muslim women who wanted to marry out were threatened with ostracism, violence, even death.
Unlike all previous migrant groups – Stone, who was once an anti-Asian Hansonite, now sang hymns of praise to his “nice” Chinese neighbours – Muslims did not disperse from the enclaves they formed. “Muslims do not so much move out as move in.” After they have driven non-Muslims out of what would soon become “no-go” areas, “Muslim gangs flourish on the proceeds of drugs, extortion, robbery and so on.” In these “no-go” areas they create “small states within the state” from which public officials are excluded. These small states are governed according to sharia law.
Stone’s speech, which was aimed at casting suspicion on some 300,000 fellow citizens, lacked anything that looked like evidence. How many honour killings have occurred in Australia in the past thirty years? Where are Stone’s “no-go” areas? Where is sharia law practised in Australia or, for that matter, in any part of the Western world?
The implication, however, was clear. At the very least, all further Muslim migration to Australia should cease.
In 1984, Geoffrey Blainey proposed that the rate of Asian migration needed to be slowed. His suggestion ignited a vast national debate. What has happened that allows a speech as wild and extreme as Stone’s to be published in one of Australia’s leading newspapers without, so far as I am aware, one word of censure, or even one word of public controversy? If today a prominent figure spoke of Jews as Stone spoke of Muslims he would instantly become a national pariah. There is a real question about whether or not it is appropriate to call Stone’s fantasies about Islam and Muslims “racism”, or whether his kind of thinking, for which in the 1990s the name Islamophobia was invented, belongs more accurately to another contiguous species of prejudice spanning religion, culture and ethnicity: namely, anti-Semitism.