October 21, 2006
For a muliticultural society such as Australia the profound alienation of many Muslims--especially the second and third generations of immigrant families, young men and women themselves born in Australia is a vexing problem facing the continent today. Most of them will be young; far too many will be poor, ill-educated, underemployed, alienated---feeling at home neither in the place they live nor in the lands from which their parents came--and tempted by drugs, crime, or political and religious extremism.
If things continue to go the way they are at the moment, this alienation, and the way it both feeds and is fed by the resentments of mainly white, Christian could eat away at the civic fabric of Australia's democracy. It has already given expression to populist anti-immigration and anti-refugee politics based on fear and loathing and a conservative hysterical oversimplification and representation of the left as spineless, anti-American and increasingly in thrall to Arab/Islamic domination.
The spectre of dystopia that haunts conservatism is one of Sydney becoming Baghdad, unrelenting social dislocation, fragmented social cohesion; an authoritarian government, and a repressive police force unable to contain the chaos etc etc .
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