Yes indeed – can’t believe even the moderate left isn’t making the most of this:

Luckily, not all Christian leaders are appeasers of Islam. One of the intelligent ones comes from Australia, a country that has been fairly resistant to Political Correctness. They have taken serious steps towards actually enforcing their own borders, despite the predictable outcries from various NGOs and anti-racists, and Prime Minister John Howard has repeatedly proven to be one of the most sensible leaders in the Western world (p. 675).

Federal Treasurer Peter Costello said Australian Muslim leaders need to stand up and publicly denounce terrorism in all its forms. Mr. Costello has also backed calls by Prime Minister John Howard for Islamic migrants to adopt Australian values. Mr. Howard caused outrage in Australia’s Islamic community when he said Muslims needed to speak English and show respect to women (pp. 518-19).

Pity he didn’t catch up with the 2007 election, or he’d be quoting Tony Abbott.

George Cardinal Pell, Archbishop of Sydney, tells of how September 11 was a wakeup call for him personally: “I recognised that I had to know more about Islam.” “In my own reading of the Koran, I began to note down invocations to violence. There are so many of them, however, that I abandoned this exercise after 50 or 60 or 70 pages.” “The predominant grammatical form in which jihad is used in the Koran carries the sense of fighting or waging war.” “Considered strictly on its own terms, Islam is not a tolerant religion and its capacity for fear-reaching renovation is severely limited.” “I’d also say that Islam is a much more war-like culture than Christianity.” “I’ve had it asserted to me is that in the relationship between the Islamic and non-Islamic world, the normal thing is a situation of tension if not war, or outright hostility” (p. 675)

Left Flank also notes an approving quotation from the Windsock himself:

Australian writer Keith Windschuttle, a former Marxist, is tired of that anti-Western slant that permeates academia: “For the past three decades and more, many of the leading opinion makers in our universities, the media and the arts have regarded Western culture as, at best, something to be ashamed of, or at worst, something to be opposed. The scientific knowledge that the West has produced is simply one of many “ways of knowing.”

“Cultural relativism claims there are no absolute standards for assessing human culture. Hence all cultures should be regarded as equal, though different.” “The plea for acceptance and open-mindedness does not extend to Western culture itself, whose history is regarded as little more than a crime against the rest of humanity. The West cannot judge other cultures but must condemn its own.”

He urges us to remember how unique some elements of our culture are: “The concepts of free enquiry and free expression and the right to criticise entrenched beliefs are things we take so much for granted they are almost part of the air we breathe. We need to recognise them as distinctly Western phenomena. They were never produced by Confucian or Hindu culture.” “But without this concept, the world would not be as it is today. There would have been no Copernicus, Galileo, Newton or Darwin.”

(ht dg/ts)