Brian Ross wrote on Jan 10
th, 2018 at 6:17pm:
To criticise an ideology? No, as long as your criticism does not concentrate on religion.
As for Australia? Let it rip is what I say. Americans talk a very dim view of criticism of their nation and it's policies for some reason and automatically label it, "anti-Americanism". Australians look at criticism and either answer it or ignore it, for the most part.
Why not criticise religious ideologies like Islam? What is sso delicate or sacred about Islam that it must not be criticised as a religion or as an ideology or both?
And why don't Muslims in Australia assimilate enough to answer their critics?
If there were no Muslims in Australia nobody would talk about them so much. But because they are here, terrorism is committed in Islam's name and it';s devotees go around blaming their host countries for marking them apart from them and for attracting Islamic terrorism.
Absurd.
The great lie of terrorism is to present murderous rage as an expression of a legitimate grievance. Previous Islamic extremist atrocities have been highly symbolic, such as the World Trade Centre and Pentagon attacks, directed at so-called Western decadence, as with the Bali massacre or the tourist attacks in Africa, specifically targeted towards transport infrastructure as in London and Madrid, or framed as a response against a perceived offence, as were the Charlie Hebdo killings.
It is all a grotesque lie, as the weekend has shown: People killed randomly at a restaurant or a concert or a football game. People killed for no other reason than that they were there. That they dared to exist.
Yet were this not sickening enough, we now have to deal with the suggestion that we ourselves, Western society, are the true cause of such atrocities, a nauseating argument that has once more been rolled out before the mourners have even buried their dead.
The usual excuses for terrorism are made. That it’s the West’s fault for invading Iraq, even though 9/11 took place a year and a half before the invasion. That it’s the West’s fault for supporting Israel, even though less than a year ago France infuriated Israel by voting to recognise the Palestinian state. That it’s caused by Islamophobia, even though the same people tell us that terrorism has nothing to do with Islam.