Multiculturalism was a wrong turn for a pluralist country

There is no genocide in Gaza, there is a war. What is being done by the Israeli Defence Forces does not amount to an attempt to exterminate a people or a culture. Gaza was one foot of a two-state solution in Palestine which Hamas has refused to accept. They broke a cease fire with the massacre and rape of innocent Israelis on a scale, having regard to the size of the population, larger than anything since the Holocaust.

This fictitious charge of genocide is being used to justify violence against not only Jews, but Western governments, and is just the latest in an ongoing, low-level campaign against Jewish and Christian societies by a determined Muslim minority.

It is only 22 years since another Islamist organisation, Jemaah Islamiyah, killed 202 people, including 88 Australians, in Bali. 9/11 was the year before that. Since those two events there have been frequent low-level terrorist attacks in the West, including in Australia the Lindt Café siege, and more recently the stabbing of Assyrian Christian Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel in Wakeley, Sydney.

There has also been a rise in anti-Semitism with attacks on Jewish synagogues and the offices of federal members of parliament who have Jewish heritage.

No doubt Payman will say she is not an Islamist, and I am not trying to hold her personally responsible for any of these, but along with a demand for Muslim separatism and exceptionalism goes the rise of grievance and of terrorist organisations.

This is a problem not just for mainstream Australians, but for the Islamic migrant communities themselves. With the current rise in Islamism ordinary Australians will be more likely to view them with suspicion and limit social and commercial interactions.

The rise of racial identity politics will also tempt others to play the same game.

This defeats the reason that most migrants come to countries like Australia. It is because we offer a wealthy and comfortable lifestyle unparalleled elsewhere, with opportunities for all, that the stream of migrants is basically one way.

That wealth and comfort does not happen by accident, but by nurturing an open society where things like ethnicity and class are descriptors, not limiters, and where every citizen is treated on the basis of themselves, rather than the groups from which they come.

It is not in the interests of Payman, or the group she claims to represent, that this culture be atomised into separate groups.