Australian Notes

Wednesday, 5th May 2010

You do not bite the hand that slaps you on the back.

You do not bite the hand that slaps you on the back. So let me first congratulate the Institute of Public Affairs on its firecracker of a book, 100 Great Books of Liberty, from Plato’s Republic to Orwell’s Animal Farm and beyond. Published by Connor Court and edited by Chris Berg, John Roskam and Andrew Kemp, it includes in the Australian section — somewhat to my chagrin — my youthful history of Australian censorship, Obscenity Blasphemy Sedition. I wrote it more than 50 years ago as part of the general campaign to abolish censorship of any shape or form. The campaign succeeded, but I now believe its success helped coarsen society and undermine civility. So I have, if not renounced the book, expressed reservations about it. Or was the young man who wrote it wiser than the old fool who now deplores it? Chris Berg, who wrote the thoughtful and sympathetic IPA commentary on it, seems to think so. But don’t let me turn you off 100 Great Books of Liberty.

‘Look,’ Tony Abbott said in a television interview last week, ‘I think there are Muslims and there are Muslims, just as there are Christians and there are Christians, and the vast majority of Muslims coming to this country have become perfectly good Australians and that’s great.’ But he quickly added a qualification. We have troops in Afghanistan to combat the Islamist Taleban and al-Qa’eda. ‘So I suppose that version of Islam is something that is dangerous.’ We all hope he is right in his Aussie optimism. But we all understand his qualification. Most of us know very little about Islam or what it is like to be a Muslim. Few of us have read the Qur’an. Very few know what is taught in Islamic schools. But what we read about Sharia law — the Islamist oppression of women and girls, the harassment of apostates, the servitude of Christians, Jews and other non-Muslims under Islamic rule — is repugnant. Yet there is little sustained public debate on these matters. Secularists and humanists (and many Christians like Abbott) tend to the gradualist or assimilationist approach. Give the Muslims time and they will become good Australian citizens. But a few churchmen, well aware of the centuries-long and sometimes ferocious hostility between the faiths, warn of the dangers of appeasement.

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