Self-loathing is playing with fire

THE Islamists trying to destroy us are bad enough. Worse are the influential activists making Australia seem not worth saving. Police across Australia are now investigating about 70 terrorism plots, but so far we’ve been lucky.

We haven’t been hit as hard as Britain, which has suffered five serious terrorist attacks this year after last week’s bombing of a London train.

Yet just when an Islamist Right declares us too hateful to live, an activist Left agrees Australia is too hateful to defend.

Last week, for instance, Councillor Sue Bolton justified her Moreland council’s decision to scrap Australia Day ceremonies on January 26 by claiming that “celebrating that date would be like celebrating the Nazi Holocaust as Germany Day”.

She explained: “What happened to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people from that date was a holocaust.”

It beggars belief that a city councillor could seriously liken the Nazis’ efforts to physically wipe out all Jews — slaughtering six million — with the clumsy and sometimes brutal attempts by British colonialists to live side-by-side with Aborigines.

But Bolton’s idiocy is not the issue. It’s her irresponsibility.

Consider: what is she telling children from immigrant cultures prouder than our own? Surely, it must be that Australia deserves not their loyalty but contempt — and even hatred?

Sure, dismiss Bolton’s rantings as all you’d expect from the Victorian convener of Socialist Alliance.

But she is an elected councillor, and her fellow councillors agree our past is so shameful that, like two other Melbourne councils, they’ve banned celebrating Australia Day on the date of the first British settlement.

What’s more, they belong to a great wave of radical academics, journalists, teachers and Australian Human Rights Commission commissars dumping on Australia.

The AHRC, in its infamous Bringing Them Home report, even claimed white officials were so evil that they stole up to 100,000 children just because they were Aboriginal, in an act of “systematic racial discrimination and genocide”.

Never mind that “stolen generations” propagandists, such as Professor Robert Manne, cannot name even 10 truly “stolen” children and that our courts have found only one — Bruce Trevorrow, stolen from hospital by a social worker actually convinced he’d been abused and abandoned.

Such is the hunger to believe the worst of ourselves that truth does not matter.

Even top politicians, instead, invent fresh falsehoods about our evil. Labor leader Bill Shorten, for instance, this year told parliament “we poisoned the water holes; we distributed blankets infested with diseases we knew would kill”, and not one academic corrected his fake history.

Most bizarre of all, we now have an unprecedented day of national self-loathing — an annual Sorry Day — as if we were a nation of moral criminals. Meanwhile, in this frenzy to convict ourselves, journalists and activists attack our statues as monuments to racists and our flag as a rag of shame. We even appoint as Australians of the Year people who agree we’re terrible. Adam Goodes claimed we’d had “governments that have ... raped, killed and stolen”.

But when we make Australia seem so hateful, how can we make new arrivals from prouder cultures feel it’s not just worth joining but defending?

I’ve worried about this ever since I dropped in a decade ago on the then Moreland Secondary College to learn why its results were shocking and non-Muslim students were fleeing.

The new principal showed me a video the students had made of themselves, which she thought summed up the school spirit.

“I’m Lebanese,” declared one student in an Australian accent. “I’m Egyptian,” said the next.

“I’m Turkish.”

I, too, enjoy my Dutch background but there are dangers in preaching such division. I learnt later that some students had celebrated the September 11 attacks on the US.

So, to the Leftists who think it moral to vilify their country: you are playing with fire.

Listen to how your absurd hatespeech is being interpreted.

Here is Keysar Trad, former president of the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils, back when he was a translator for a pro-al Qaeda magazine: “The criminal dregs of white society colonised this country . . . and the descendants of these criminal dregs tell us that they are better than us.’’

Here is Wassim Douheiri, spokesman for Australia’s Hizb-utTahrir: “Even if a thousand bombs go off in this country, all it will prove is that Muslims are angry and have every right to be angry.”

Why tell such people the lie that Australia is a land of racism and genocide?

Might some not conclude it deserves destruction?