Australia: Keeping Appearances on Immigration

Another Sudanese beauty pageant, another brawl. This time, luckily, just two men hurt, one hit with a machete.

Even so, it took 12 police units and three dog squads two hours to stop the fighting at a hall in Clayton, in Melbourne’s southeast.

Last year, when the Sudanese pageant was held in Adelaide, the mayhem was even worse. Some 100 men fought that time, and four were stabbed.

At the 2007 pageant, in Melbourne, yet another man was stabbed. Add that to a long list of other stabbings and bashings and we see our real problem with race.

No, it’s not that we’re racist. It’s that we’re too scared to seem so. Result: we pretend culture doesn’t count. And we import refugees who always would struggle to fit in.

First it was the under-educated Lebanese Muslim refugees we took in from the Lebanese civil war. Then it was the often parentless Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees, many rejected by other countries. 

Later still it was refugees from poor Muslim nations — and Muslims and Christians fleeing Somalia and Sudan.

 

Consider now the consequences of our willful blindness to the culture of those we brought in.

Continue…

2011-05-01