THE PSYCHOLOGIST : UWS draws the line at mosque

UWS draws the line at mosque

"THE University of Western Sydney has knocked back a request that it build a mosque for its Muslim students.

"We said, 'We are a secular university, we don't do these kinds of things'," said Sev Ozdowski, UWS director of equity and diversity, and chairman of the first national conference on Muslim university students, held this week at UWS."
The item in The Australian drew quite a few comments. I just love this one:
Peter N of Sydney 8:31pm September 05, 2007
"I was born overseas and I came here 25 years ago as an orphaned refugee from a war-torn country in S/E Asia and became state ward. I 'd like to tell you all that how much I have come to appreciate the culture, the values, the tradition and the history of this country. This country has given me too much ! When I was at high school the taxpayers paid Austudy to live on, when I went to uni- actually, UWS-Nepean, the Australian taxpayers were generous again paying my Austudy; and when I came out and couldn't get a job for a while, the Australian taxpayers again paid unemployment benefits for me; in my own country I would have slept on the street and begged. And I say again, the Australian taxpayers through the Aust Govt granted us a 60 years lease to build our Buddhist temple for one dollar per year in Western Sydney. When our young kids in our community couldn't cope with school work, the Aust govt funded weekend classes for them to catch up. Then it was not the end, they even installed our language in the year 12 HSC system. The assistance we have received from you - the generous Australian people - can not be described. I can't thank you all enough until the day I die, and I say this on behalf of my own community of 20,000.

Currently, I run my own accounting practice and I don't complain a bit about paying tax back to this country. Thanks to the high education (BCom, MBA) which I got almost for free ! Tell me any other places on earth which I could do this ? Maybe not many ! UWS is part of my life. Even these days when I am not busy I would escape the sress by driving to the local campus in Penrith and sit for hours reading in the library.

And when I look around I have seen other ethnic communitites have their own worship places as well within their own communitites. Isn't that enough ? Please be reasonable. Greed is the cause of suffering. We have enough space to worship outside in the local communites, but save the uni campuses for employment training opportunies. No monks, no Sheiks, no pastors, no priests, no rabi on uni campuses. We have been given enough freedoms already to live here and be part of the Australian society. We must know that this is Australian society, not a Muslim, not Buddhist, nor Hindu society, but predominantly Christian Western society with its own values, traditon and history. The Australian system is too good to be wrecked. I say finally: if you don't subscribe to the values, just go back, including my own newly-arrived relatives !"
good on you, Peter N!

1 comment:

AnonymousSeptember 1, 2011 at 1:30 AM
I don't see how having a place of worship in a university is being greedy? Maybe asking the university to build a whole new structure is a big ask, but im sure that even the uni just gave the permission for one to be built, and then external sources are willing to fund the project.

Now im not asking for a big place of worship. A simple room will suffice. From my experience in my campus, there were several rooms that were unused. These were then allowed to be shared by muslim and christian students for places of worship and so on. Of course these have greatly contributed to the university experience, making it even more fulfilling.

Moreover most universities usually have alot of space free. So why cant it be used to make the university experience better? Personally i think his post is not empathetic, as it tries to force his values upon others. I say this because from what he writes it seems like his form or worship is not time specific.

For me as a muslim i must prayer 5 prayers, during specific times. While i can delay these for the sake of study, or pray virtually in any clear space if forced, id really rather have a small dedicated space! Hence you can clearly see how vision of university is really not at all thoughtful, or that multicultural.

So lastly, when the resources (one or two free rooms) are almost always available, why cant it be used to make the student university experience better?
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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

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Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

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Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights