Last drinks in Lakemba: Tim Blair takes a look inside Sydney’s Muslim Land

THE Lakemba Hotel is one of the last Anglo holdouts in Sydney’s otherwise Middle-Eastern south-western suburb. Frankly, the old joint — it opened in 1928 — isn’t putting up much resistance. Most nights the bar is closed by 8.30pm or so, because by then what few customers it attracts are insufficient to cover running costs.

Lakemba may be only 30 minutes from the centre of Sydney, yet it is remarkably distinct from the rest of the city. You can walk the length of crowded Haldon St and not hear a single phrase in English. On this main shopping strip the ethnic mix seems similar to what you’d find in any Arabic city. Australia may be multicultural, but Haldon St is a monoculture.

A few weeks ago a large crowd of mostly young men assembled outside the Lakemba Hotel. Waving black flags, the men chanted: “Palestine is Muslim land. The solution is jihad.”

Mix this level of ignorance and loathing with the Islamic community’s high rate of unemployment, and conflict is inevitable. The Islamic riots of 2012 ended up in central Sydney but began here in Lakemba and surrounding suburbs, where seething young Muslims formed their plans, including printing signs reading “Behead all those who insult the prophet”.

I honestly do believe the majority of Muslims in Australia want no truck with violence and terrorism. But these communities which are, as the article says, 'monocultures' are a big potential problem. They are where the minority who are violent and dangerous can easily find fellow travellers.

New immigrant groups to Australia have often tended to cluster in particular suburbs, and give those suburbs an ethnic flavour - but the Chinese, and the Greeks, and the Vietnamese in their turn, never contained significant minorities who wanted to damage the country they had come to. If this was about language, and food, and clothing, it wouldn't matter. But it's about more than that.

I did like the photo of Maldon Street in the article - which shows a shop flying flags and with the Australian flag flying above all the others. I don't know the shop owners reasons for doing that, but symbolically it's right and we'd be in a much better situation if all immigrants thought that way - their adoptive country first above all, and where they came from secondary to that - the problem is the ones who come here, and want to change us into where they came from - even when they are fleeing what they came from, which has never made much sense to me.

The cancer, once introduced, has begun to metastasize.

Nations and regions DO get a form of cancer, and it is alien ideology. An ideology rooted in the absolute suppression of the yearning for freedom and dignity of the individual, and it matters not if the doctrines were written by a failed poet turned atheist (Karl Marx), or a sun-crazed old sand hermit who wrote his own religion (Mohammed Ali, the “Prophet”). At the heart of the matter are attempts to construct a form of religion that twists and deforms the natural yearning for belief in a deity, into a deliberate means to subjugate and harness the minds of a multitude to some goal that benefits only a few at the top of the hierarchy that must be created to maintain the façade of legitimacy. Neither Communism nor militant Islamic jihad can long exist without forcing compliance at the point of a gun, or other means of intimidation. Death is a very large part of the doctrines that drive these foreign ideologies, and its theme is frequently asserted when there may be attempts to correct the basic errors and misconceptions that formed these foreign ideologies in the first place.

Human beings are not, and cannot long be compelled to be, ants living in a colony, forced to take structured roles, without hope or aspirations, and given no opportunity to exercise free will. Eventually, one or more of the human “ants” will look up, and see that there has to be something more than this dreary existence. The results will be at least partially predictable, in that MANY of the “ants” will die, but the ultimate issue shall remain in doubt, unless the insurrection has a direction and objective, which is to free the minds of all from the numbing conformity of the anthill as it existed. But sometimes, the hierarchy wins, and the revolutions collapse upon themselves. The flame of freedom is extinguished for yet another indeterminate length of time, a cycle that has been repeated endlessly over much of the history of mankind.

Sometimes, though, the stars are aligned, and a revolution succeeds, not merely to throw off the old yokes of subjugation, but to create a new paradigm, in which the true nature of divinity shines through, and great wisdom blossoms upon the land. Given the incentives to succeed (and also to fail, if that is what it takes), the permission to reap the rewards of personal effort sparks what is regarded as a golden age of growth and inspiration, that showers down upon almost everybody that is standing in its domain.

A few, either unable to stand the prospect of prosperity, or emotionally unequipped to accept its promises, sometimes become its worst critics, and plot in various ways to restore the old cycle of establishing a hierarchy in which a certain few are well provided for, and the vast majority are again reduced to the status of human “ants”.

The basic struggle between “good” and “evil” continues, with varying outcomes, but with the generally acknowledged belief that “good” will somehow triumph over “evil”. But the definition of “good” and “evil” continues to change, sometimes subtly, sometimes with overwhelming force.

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