National anthem is anathema to disciples of ‘diversity’

Sheikh Ismail al-Wahwah, known in the Islamic community as Abu Anas, is the spiritual leader of Hizb ut-Tahrir.

Is it authoritarian to expect kids at a public school to sing the national anthem? Yes, according to Hizb ut-Tahrir.

After anthemgate — when Muslim pupils at a Victorian primary school were allowed to leave assembly as the national anthem was being sung — a Hizb ut-Tahrir spokesman talked about shared national values as if they were some kind of tyranny. Making schoolkids sing the anthem was “forced assimilation”, he said.

Another spokesman said the anthem was “based upon a particular view [of] history”, and if you didn’t share that view, why sing it?

It’s not surprising that Hizb ut-Tahrir would view an innocent school ritual as some kind of Fatherland attempt to make every child bend their knee before a bloodstained national history.

After all, this group is a master at victim politics, so consumed by professional self-pity that it thinks even a legitimate statement such as “I don’t like the niqab” is Islamophobic, an expression of hatred for all Muslims.

Hizb ut-Tahrir always has its offence antennae switch to “high”, trawling for critical comments about Islam so that it can say: “Told you! We’re a victimised minor­ity.”

What is more striking is that there are many on the Left, in apparently progressive circles, who will have nodded in agreement with Hizb ut-Tahrir’s anthem-bashing.

Indeed, a writer for the Guardian Australia lashed out at those who criticised the Victorian school that let its Muslim charges dodge the anthem-singing, accusing them of “cooking up a panic”. He pointed out, as many have, that Shia Muslims, like those at the school, were marking the Mourning of Muharram, which forbade them from singing joyful songs. So that school was merely “grappling, in good faith, with cultural pluralism”.

What I found most telling about anthemgate and its aftermath was the similarity between comments made by Hizb ut-Tahrir and the stuff we often hear from the ­cosseted, relativistic chattering classes.

What Hizb ut-Tahrir effectively was saying was: it is a really heavy trip to expect people to have shared values. Instead, we should let every group live in its own self-reinforcing moral, religious bubble.

This echoes the identity politics of the modern Left. The Left has given up on the idea of uniting people around a common vision, and instead has become obsessed with celebrating diversity and protecting identity groups from the slights of what leftists increasingly view as the intolerant mainstream, especially its bogan elements.

Anthemgate is a product less of ascendant Islamism than of the relentless separatism of identity politics.

It’s now positively fashionable to cut yourself off from the mainstream; to eschew national narratives in favour of sticking with your own culture; to view society itself as oppressive and hurtful.

Indeed, if some Muslims think of themselves as “at risk”, that isn’t surprising. Influential media people and left-wing campaigners are forever flagging up the alleged Islamophobia of Oz and its burka-hating bogans.

Think back to the Martin Place siege, when the first instinct of progressives was to protect Muslims from the inevitable Islamophobic backlash: “I’ll ride with you.” Their fear of the white blob, of the lager-fuelled tabloid reader, was palpable. The backlash never came; it existed only in their prejudiced imaginations.

Because that’s the great irony of leftists’ fear of Islamophobia: it exposes their own phobia of the plebs, whom they view as a pogrom-in-waiting. Such an elitist, and ill-founded, concern with the allegedly Islamophobic mob no doubt affects how some Muslim groups think about themselves: as under siege, safest when in their own cultural sphere.

Some commentators think religious extremists are trying to do over Aussie values. But it’s more complicated than that.

The seeming reluctance of certain parts of the Muslim community to consider themselves fully Australian speaks more to the separatism of the trendy ideology of multiculturalism.

Multiculturalism poses as a caring, cosmopolitan creed but really it is glorified relativism. It’s about saying that no one way of life, no one set of values, is better than any other. All are equally valid, all deserve respect.

It is the creed that has arisen instinctively across Western societies in recent decades as a kind of Band-Aid for those societies’ inability to assert their own values, especially liberal-democratic ones.

It’s a risky business making a judgment between cultures these days. You think modern Australian culture, with its egalitarianism and democracy, is better than, say, Islam? Then you’re Islamophobic. And lest we forget, a phobia is an irrational fear. To stand up for Enlightenment values, for liberal public virtues, is to risk being branded mad.

So Islamists, leftists and others who think asking public-school kids to sing the national anthem is oppressive actually practise a cultural tyranny of their own: they write off as disordered anyone who thinks the Australian way of life may be better than other ways of life.

What a tragedy that the Left has sunk into the mire of identity separatism. The Left’s watchword used to be “common”, in the sense that it wanted common people to have political clout and that its key motivation was to convince people of all creeds, colours and sexes that they had a great deal in common: in particular a shared interest in fighting for a freer, wealthier society.

Now the Left’s buzzword is difference. It lectures us endlessly about what separates us, not what unites us. It tells Muslims they’re threatened by bogans; Aborigines they’re hated by football fans; women they’re despised by men, especially lower-class blokes.

What it calls “diversity” looks to me like fragmentation. The Left has come to embrace the thing it once fought against: the squeezing of human beings into biological and racial boxes.  Too many have forgotten what a brilliant idea citizenship is. Yes, people have different values, worship different gods, bring up their kids as they see fit. And yes, people can, and should, criticise their nation’s historical record.

But the idea of the citizen is that, for all these differences, in the public sphere we come together around important, inspiring virtues. We put aside skin colour and religious conviction and become glued together by something bigger than all that: a feeling of being part of a nation, an ongoing public, historical project, working together, and arguing with each other, over how that nation may be improved.

To be a citizen is a wonderful feeling. To be simply an identity, a cut-off cultural being, is isolating.

Today’s sanctification of diversity is really an assault on unity. It nurtures communalism where there should be common values, people pulling together regardless of what god they believe in or colour they are.