Aussies are a pretty tolerant lot. People from all over the world have settled here and most have prospered.
We like to think that what Immigration Minister Chris Bowen calls ‘traditional Australian values’ hold sway in our country.
But when so-called ‘jihadi children’ are seen on the streets of Sydney holding placards calling for beheadings, it makes one wonder about the breadth of commitment to those values.
Perhaps the answer is to pour even more resources into education and add flag-raising ceremonies to the cultural enrichment activities of the school day.
Or perhaps we should support the call of NSW Upper House MP Shaoquett Moselmane for yet more restrictions on our freedom of speech.
Mr Moselmane wants to extend the NSW Anti-Discrimination Act to prohibit vilification on the grounds of religion. But although the jihadi placards were offensive, they hardly mounted to religious vilification.
For Moselmane appears to think the problem last Saturday was not the exercise of free speech in the form of the placards demanding beheadings but the violence.
‘Everybody has a right to protest, to express their views but no one has the right to act violently,’ Moselmane told ABC’s Adam Spencer.
The majority of Australian Muslims want to live here in peace, to raise their kids safely, and to enjoy the free lifestyle of this country.
But a sizeable minority has a darker purpose: to open and inflame what Uthman Badar, spokesman for the global Islamist movement Hizb ut-Tahrir, describes as ‘the deep-seated tensions between Muslims and the West.’
Perhaps Australian Muslims really do believe that the US government must bear reputational harm for a stupid film put up on YouTube by a private individual.
If this is the case, Muslim leaders should understand that, in a comparable way, reputational harm for the behaviour of the rioters last Saturday may come to rest on all members of their own communities.
That’s what happens when speech is free: people make up their minds about what they read, see and hear without any interference from government. It’s what living in a healthy democracy is all about.
If Moselmane wants to afford the rights of protest and free expression to Australian Muslims, he must afford that same freedom to every other Australian. And that must include the freedom to criticise religious belief.
The riots in Sydney have startled the leaders of the Muslim community in Sydney and across Australia. Some were quicker than others to condemn the violence.
But as we approach the tenth anniversary of the Bali bombings, almost all Muslim leaders recognise the possible damage done to the standing of Australian Muslims in the wider community.
So neither hoisting the flag nor clamping down on freedom of speech is going to address the serious issues facing multicultural Australia.
Commentator Waleed Aly has warned that a Muslim subculture based ‘almost exclusively on shared grievance’ would render Islamic identity hollow.
Faced with this kind of warning, Australian Muslims do not need new laws to restrict freedom further.
They need leaders with new vision who will openly oppose extremism, engage constructively with contemporary society, and fearlessly promote those famous traditional Australian values of freedom and tolerance in their communities.
If they fail to do that, life here in the long run may be less comfortable for us all.
Peter Kurti is a Research Fellow with the Religion and the Free Society Program at The Centre for Independent Studies.