Friday, December 10, 2004

BBC board 'are amateurs' : "The BBC's governors have been labelled a bunch of "amateurs" picked because they tick politically correct boxes. Labour MP Gerald Kaufman, chairman of the culture select committee, said: "They are largely there on tokenism, be it ethnic, social, class or territorial." He said their inexperience had caused the Hutton crisis and suggested an accountable "statutory remit" as with Channel 4".



Standing up to aggressive secularism

Some reverses for political correctness in Australia

Wogs-Are-Stealing-Christmas is the perennial festive season story, popping up on talkback radio in late November with enduring reliability. But this year - the year the ideology pendulum swung back towards reason - the story has finally been exposed as a myth and a smokescreen. As it turns out, multicultural Sydney just loves Christmas. Bankstown's Centro shopping centre, smack bang in one of the most multicultural areas of Australia, with more than 132 nationalities, 53 per cent of the population born overseas, and an abundance of young mums with headscarves, happens to boast one of the city's most lavish Christmas displays. "Despite Bankstown being one of Sydney's most ethnically and religiously diverse areas, Christmas and what it stands for is a huge celebration in my local area and we are proud of it," the Bankstown MP, Tony Stewart, told the NSW Parliament last month. So keen was Stewart to explode the old theft myth he even tabled a list of 226 Christmas songs played "every hour of shopping time at Centro Bankstown". They include Six White Boomers, The Spirit of Christmas, Santa Claus is Coming to Town and We Wish You a Merry Christmas.

"We love to see Christians celebrating Christmas," said Keysar Trad, the president of the Lakemba-based Lebanese Muslim Association. "We love Christ and Mary." After an outcry in December 2001, when the previous owner of the Bankstown shopping centre downgraded the decorations and ditched the big nativity scene, the new owner has installed almost $200,000 of Christmas baubles. There is a Santa Claus with a real beard, nativity scene, trees, elves, angels, bells and stars. A young woman who personalises coloured Christmas balls for shoppers is Muslim, wearing a headscarf, Trad said yesterday.

The decorations at multicultural Bankstown are far more elaborate than the desiccated version of Christmas in the city of Sydney, under the professed Catholic Lord Mayor Clover Moore. In contrast to her predecessor Frank Sartor's generous, even over-the-top, coloured lights and ornaments on the 19th-century sandstone Town Hall, Moore has provided a drab little tree above the portico and a bleak Seasons Greetings card. The excuse is always used by those such as Moore and the head of the Oporto chicken chain - who tried to ban Maltese Catholic franchisee Charlie Saliba from putting up a nativity scene in his Hornsby store - that keeping the Christianity in Christmas is offensive to minority groups. But there is no sign in this essentially easygoing country that Muslims, Jews, Buddhists or Hindus are trying to ban Christmas. As is often the case, self-appointed arbiters of public tolerance have simply co-opted a non-existent cause to serve their own ends, damaging those they profess to protect in the process.

"What purports to inspire tolerance instead inspires hostility and intolerance," Waleed Aly, a member of the executive of the Islamic Council of Victoria, wrote in The Australian newspaper this week. Jesus is a revered prophet to Muslims. Driving an "anti-Christmas campaign" is not Islam but "aggressive atheism". Others, such as American rabbi Daniel Lapin, have called it fundamentalist secularism, the umbrella under which new intolerances have gathered in the name of tolerance. "If Christmas decorations help bring people back to God, whether they are Christian or Muslim, that is a good thing," said Trad. "At the moment society is being told that religion is the cause of all conflict. But religion is in fact the cause of unity, harmony, respect and all the high principles."

Conservative Christians have much in common with moderate Muslims. Both are under attack by the zealots of secularism. They share a desire to stem the tide of the "I Am Charlotte Simmons" world created by intolerant anti-religious fundamentalist secularism. It is a world of empty materialism, patois and degrading hooking-up sex, which Tom Wolfe brings to life in his latest novel about university existence. It is a world in which a Bringelly father appears in Campbelltown Local Court, charged with common assault and stalking, for trying to stop his 14-year-old daughter from having an affair with a middle-aged man. It is a world in which a middle-aged married teacher has an affair with his 15-year-old student, shacks up with her, causing her to be permanently estranged from her family and then receives $28,000 in compensation from the NSW Government because he lost his job.

These topsy-turvy corrupted values are not the result of religion; they are the result of no religion. Aggressive secularists have had a free kick at religion and every other institution for the last 40 years, blaming them for all the ills of the world, while steadily dismantling the protections and respect for authority that kept them safe while they were growing up. And now their influence is waning, they are desperate to keep alive the old myths. A perfect recent example is an article in The Guardian newspaper about a coming movie, Kinsey, about the American sex researcher Dr Alfred Kinsey. Reprinted in these pages this week under the headline "Moral right tries to turn the flock back to dark ages of sexuality", it claims no one had a "guilt-and-fear-free orgasm" until Kinsey researched sex, Margaret Sanger launched bra-burning, and Hugh Hefner mass-marketed big-breasted nudes.

It is a ridiculous proposition, since, in most religions, orgasms between a husband and wife have always been as guilt-free as they come, especially if they produce lots of little believers. Guilt - for adherents - comes into the equation only if the sex occurs outside marriage or is harmful to one or other party, which is less a case of opposing sex than trying to harness desire for the sake, ultimately, of protecting families.

This year, despite attempts to resurrect the old myth, Christmas in Sydney is doing just fine, with or without the Town Hall's participation. We should really thank Moore for her grim Clayton's cards and her joyless approach to Christmas. She is an interesting reminder of a disintegrating world view, a lagging indicator, quite out of step with the spirit of the age.

From Miranda Devine

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