“Just how compatible with western societies can Islam be?” asks my colleague Christian Kerr in yesterday’s edition of The Reader. It’s a good question, particularly whith Canadian Muslim commentator Irshad Manji writing in The Australian on Tuesday: “Even moderate Muslims take the Koran as the final word of God: unfiltered, unchanged and unchangeable.”

Gosh, with this hard-core religion tightening its grip on our culture,
maybe it’s right to follow the lead of the shock jocks and Education
Ministers and demand their loyalty to our national ideals. But there
are fundamentalists all around us – and not all of them are
Muslim. Take this advice from the religious affairs reporter of
the Herald Sun: “Catholics are told to accept the Pope is
infallible and, if those who call themselves Catholics cannot accept
this, they should shut up, get out and let the real Catholics have the
church they want and love so dearly.”

This is the view in 1996 of Felicity Dargan, who went from her job as religious affairs reporter of the Hun
to become an advisor to workplace relations minister Kevin Andrews –
and is now chief of staff to Family First Senator Stephen Fielding.

Felicity was, it’s fair to say, a fan of the Pope and Catholic dogma:

“The trendies, the feminists, the theologians and
the liberals have tried their damndest to convince non-Catholics that
the Pope is out of touch,” she
wrote in her op-ed piece for the Hun.

“I love Pope John Paul II. I would do anything to
meet him. He is a man I love, respect and admire and a man who I,
being a
practising Roman Catholic, listen to and obey. All true Catholics
should.

“He is a leader so incredibly intelligent and
visionary, so compassionate and forgiving and so amazingly steadfast in
the face of so much opposition, particularly
from within his church’s own ranks.

“It is hard for me to describe how I feel about this
74-year-old man without sounding pathetically soppy and silly…I know
the stirring in my heart will become a
whirlpool of love and emotion when I see him in Australia.”

Even allowing for the stirrings of a young woman’s heart, it’s easy to
see that fanaticism is not the sole gift of extreme Muslims. And it
works both ways. Was it really so long ago that Catholics were told
that marriage outside the Church was verboten? And Catholics were
excluded from jobs and positions in society because of their religion?

“This supremacy complex inhibits us from asking hard questions about
what happens when faith becomes dogma,” writes our Canadian Muslim
expert Irshad Manji. “Such a path can lead only to a dead end of more
violence.”

Only if you’re a Muslim, it seems.