Last week in the state of Victoria, Australia, two Christian ministers were hit with heavy fines and various forms of public humiliation in the first convictions under the state’s contemptible “Racial and Religious Tolerance Act”. Their offence: to read some of the racier passages of the Koran to a meeting of their sympathizers. The Judge was particularly offended that some present had laughed.

Note: no suggestion that violence was advocated.

The same week, reports the Oz Conservative blog

“ASIO [The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation]had raided the homes of several Melbourne Muslims in order to break up a terror cell which had conducted training camps in the countryside…

Then yesterday came the Herald Sun report “Muslim books of hate sold“. It seems that a bookshop attached to a Melbourne mosque has been selling literature which tells Muslims that they should “hate and take as enemies” non-Muslims, that they should learn to hate in order to properly love Allah, that they should learn military tactics and that if a person speaks ill of Islam it’s acceptable to kill them.”

Of course, this makes these Hate Speech laws look ridiculous. But they are not ridiculous: they are an evil attempt to rob citizens of rights traditional in English-speaking countries (and almost nowhere else) for centuries.

The theft is underway in the UK too

And don’t be too sure it can’t happen here: I can well remember when conservatives were confident Affirmative Action would be ruled unconstitutional. And of course just this week, the Kelo eminent domain decision is time-warping us back to pre Magna Carta days.

Mark Krikorian gets off some good shots at Ben Wattenberg in the Spring 2005 Claremont Review of Books. But who, pray tell, does he mean when he says ” As others have noted, this mass-immigration worldview echoes Bertolt Brecht’s suggestion that the East German government dissolve the people and elect a new one.“ Where might these others be found? Not, apparently, with the pages of the Claremont Review of Books.

Wattenberg’s solution, by contrast, is unambiguously undemocratic and coercive. He argues that pro-natalist policies like Longman’s have always proven ineffective, and that the magic solution is mass immigration. Unfortunately, his data refute his argument. The Census Bureau projects an increase in our population of about 140 million, including new immigrants, over the first half of this century, but “only” a 50 million increase if there were no immigration at all. How is it plausible to claim that America will be derailed, and the worldwide spread of human liberty jeopardized, if our population grows by an average of one million a year instead of three million?

Basically, Wattenberg is saying that since Americans have freely chosen to have smaller families, the state must import people to supply the bodies needed to fuel the global democratic revolution. As others have noted, this mass-immigration worldview echoes Bertolt Brecht’s suggestion that the East German government dissolve the people and elect a new one.Wattenberg never offers any specifics about how to “elect” this new people. What kind of actual immigration policy should we have? How many immigrants? What kind? How do we select and screen them? He offers nothing beyond the most vaporous generalities.

* * *

In the end, neither author has sufficient faith in the American people. Wattenberg sees his countrymen as not up to the task History has set before them, and so they must be supplemented by a huge, unending flow of outsiders. Longman, on the other hand, harbors the blue-state fear that those who feel commanded by nature and nature’s God to procreate are itching secretly to establish a theocracy. [The Claremont Institute: No Child Left Behind]

Diana Griego Erwin, recently fired by the Sacramento Bee for fabricating her sources, is more creative than anyone could have imagined.

Today, the Bee published the results of its investigation into Griego Erwin’s career as a fiction writer. Of 171 columns Griego Erwin wrote for the Bee since January 1st, 2004, 30 names “could not be verified.”

(“Bee Publishes Results of Griego Erwin Probe,” Dorthy Korber and John Hill, the Sacramento Bee, June 26, 2005)

And going back to the beginning of her 12-year career at the Bee, an additional 13 names “could not be found in voter registration rolls, property records, telephone books, identity databases or through scores of phone calls.”

I confess to a perverse pleasure in the Bee’s embarrassment over the Griego Erwin incident.

For several years, I did an on-going study for NumbersUSA to analyze media professionalism.

What I found in my dealings with the Bee was that, to a large extent, the staff consisted of self-important, arrogant and lazy journalists.

But what’s bad for the Bee and the rest of the MSM that have distorted the news like Newsweek, USA Today and the Detroit Free Press is good for VDARE.com and other Internet webzines that take pride in reporting the real story.

When I was first writing on the immigration issue over a decade ago, I was pleasantly surprised to realize a group of allies existed beyond the conservative orbit—environmentalists, who don’t want America entirely covered by subdivisions. Very nice people, but they frighten easily.

Now it appears that another group of objective allies is emerging….Gays.

Local Insurgents: ‘Islamic Thinkers’ Menace Gay N.Y. – Ben Smith and Jessica Bruder, New York Observer, June 25 2005,

discusses the increasing Gay alarm about a radical faction of Muslim activists called The Islamic Thinkers, who operate in Jackson Heights, Queens.

The Islamic Thinkers Society had become a regular feature at local gay-pride parades, where they’ve called for the castration and death of gay men, according to several witnesses who spoke to The Observer…to New York’s gays…the scene in Jackson Heights bears a worrying similarity to communal conflicts that are challenging the idea of tolerance across Europe, with particular flashpoints in Holland and Scandinavia. There, young immigrants and the children of immigrants have been drawn to a more radical Islamic ideology… On the extreme fringes, these young men have committed acts of violence against Jews and gays…in a case that shocked Europe, one… murdered the filmmaker Theo van Gogh in an Amsterdam street.

(Curiously, The Observer overlooks the late Pim Fortuyn, the charismatic gay Dutch political leader—also murdered—who made the threat to his community posed by Islamic immigration a centerpiece of his platform.)

Smith and Bruder report:

But the rise of gay bashing on European streets … has also opened up a heated debate within the gay community…over whether the proliferation of intolerant strains of Islam requires…a harder line on issues like immigration and assimilation.

The article is packed with US Islamic figures trying to deny that the sort of zealotry that has appeared in Muslim communities the world over will recur in America.

Anyone tempted by this delusion should read this chilling article, by a Muslim immigrant to Australia who has become a Christian Minister:

The Islamic worldview will ultimately present Western nations with a huge political problem. Muslims don’t send missionaries like the Christian church. They just send floods of people. And once their numbers grow, then they begin to exert political pressure…in recent years growing numbers of Muslims have maintained that it’s a universal religious obligation for all true Muslims to join the jihad to promote a global Islamic revolution…I cannot understand the ignorance of people in the West who say that Islam is a religion of peace.”

(Hat Tip, Aussie News and Views)

Poor Stephen Steinlight appears to have had little success convincing his fellow Jews that immigration might be bad for them.

The Gay community, facing more immediate physical threat, will hopefully be more alert.