Sonia Kruger, terrorism, and social cohesion

Banning Muslim immigration — as TV personality Sonia Kruger has urged — would cause more problems than it would solve. It would, at a minimum, violate the first rule of a successful non-discriminatory immigration program, which is that you cannot invite people into a country, insult them, and not expect to compromise social cohesion.

That said, Kruger does not deserve the abuse that has been doled out for thinking aloud about Islamist terrorism and throwing up the idea of a religion-based migration bar.

The idea that Kruger is a racist is absurd. What is more telling is that someone who is far from being a culture warrior dared to cross a cultural fault line and express such an un-PC opinion.

Kruger is a modern woman who, like most of us, takes the norms of western democratic societies for granted. Like most of us, as well, she finds it unfathomable that religious belief would motivate the kind of horrific acts of political violence that are proliferating in number and scale in countries with large Muslim populations.

Unlike her critics, at least Kruger is honest, and takes the religious origins of terrorism seriously — and doesn’t buy the myth that atrocities like Paris and Nice are ‘nothing to do with religion’.

There have, of course, been predictable claims made about hatred and ‘Islamophobia’ … lead by local Islamic leaders and organisations.

Once again, the Islamic community has failed to adopt a more constructive approach. Instead of denying that terrorism has anything to do with Islam, they should accept that the kind of concerns Kruger articulated about religiously-motivated terrorism are entirely legitimate.

Many Australians simply do not understand why the Islamic community cannot come out strongly and state plainly that they share their fellow citizens’ concerns about what a minority of their co-religionists do in the name of their religion.

If they did this, they would practise what I think is the second rule of a successful non-discriminatory immigration program: fears about social cohesion are best addressed not by migrant groups playing the perpetual victim, but by demonstrating that these groups fully share and believe in mainstream Australian values.