South Australian Liberal senator Cory Bernardi has linked violent scenes between Muslim protesters and police in Sydney to multiculturalism, just days ahead of a major speech by businessman and migrant Frank Lowy.

Mr Lowy is to deliver the inaugural Australian Multicultural Society lecture on the benefits of a multicultural society at Parliament House in Canberra on Wednesday.

"The naive cling to the romantic idealisation of the generations of migrants who have successfully settled in Australia, thinking things will continue just as they have in the past," Senator Bernardi said in a post on his website on Monday.

"They proclaim multiculturalism as a triumph of tolerance when in fact it undermines the cultural values and cohesiveness that brings a nation together."

Senator Bernardi said the events in Sydney should be a wake-up call and he had warned colleagues for years that the violence seen in Western Europe a decade ago could happen here.

"It should serve as a wake-up call to the naive and just plain foolish who are in denial that a significant problem is emerging in Australia," he wrote on his website.

"When are our political and community leaders going to wake up to the fact that what is going on here is exactly the same process that has caused such chaos in some comparable nations?"

Six police were injured, along with 17 others, during violent clashes on Saturday when a group of about 200 Muslims protested in Sydney over an anti-Islam film made in the US.

AAP, 17 September 2012

See also "Protests are a 'wake-up call' to Australians in denial: Bernardi", The Age, 17 September 2012

Media coverage of Saturday's clashes between Muslim protestors and police has unsurprisingly placed the blame exclusively on the protestors. For an alternative view see the eyewitness report from Green Left Weekly.

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Last weekend, the Dutch Islamphobic politician Geert Wilders spoke to a conservative conference hosted by a Christian university in Colorado. The anti-Muslim firebrand served up his usual fare: Islam is not a religion but a "totalitarian ideology," multiculturalism must be stopped, U.S. courts must end immigration from Muslim countries and mosque construction must be banned.

According to a report on the event in the Colorado Statesman, conservatives at the conference took Wilders's words to heart, as well as those of fellow anti-Muslim conspiracy theorist Frank Gaffney.

Former Republican State Senate president John Andrews, who heads up an institute at the university that held the event, told the crowd, "After you hear from Frank Gaffney and our friend from across the Atlantic, Geert Wilders, you'll know why I just say 'the threat of Islam'" – as opposed to "radical Islam" or "extremism."

Current Republican State Senator Kevin Grantham took on Wilders's message that the West "should forbid the construction of new mosques." Asked about the proposed ban, Grantham told the Statesman he was for considering it:

You know, we'd have to hear more on that, because, as he said, mosques are not churches like we would think of churches. They think of mosques more as a foothold into a society, as a foothold into a community, more in the cultural and in the nationalistic sense. Our churches – we don't feel that way, they're places of worship, and mosques are simply not that, and we need to take that into account when approving construction of those.

Think Progress, 6 July 2012

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