Australia’s leftist Sydney Morning Herald has appointed itself the defender of radical Islam, running a series of exercises in whitewashing and moral equivalence like their absurd puff piece on the Dark Ages, Hizballah-supporting Sheik Taj al Din al Hilali.

Today they released the latest installment in their re-education campaign to make Australians stop worrying and love Islam, and it’s a doozy. Islam and its Catholic connection.

In Federal Parliament last year, Senator John Faulkner argued there was once a minority religion in Australia that threatened the fabric of our society, whose members bred faster than the rest of “us” and whose poor and uneducated were taught weird beliefs in their own schools. They were called Catholics.

Today, they seem to be everywhere, having taken over the joint.

Growing up, many were educated by women who wore hijabs and long black dresses down to their ankles and prayed to statues of another woman in a similar outfit. They were called nuns. Today, the dresses are shorter, the headdress has gone and you can tell them only by a cross on the blouse lapel.

In Sydney, Newcastle and Wollongong, there are churches where preaching regularly occurs in a Mediterranean language, and church schools insist on keeping this language alive. It’s called the Greek Orthodox Church.

And in Sydney there’s a religion which has a set of religious laws for its faithful, running parallel to state law, and encourages its young to do civil and military service in a Middle Eastern country. It’s called Judaism.

Many of the things thrown at Australian Muslims in the past five years - bundled together as “un-Australian” - are features of other religions in our multicultural society: they’re breeding “us” out; their women are oppressed; the imams speak in Arabic; their sharia law is weird; their links are to Middle Eastern lands.

Even Sheik Taj el-Din al Hilaly’s comments about women as meat, while silly and offensive, are not that different to the kind of comments you will hear from pulpits or law benches or sent up at the Ernie Awards once a year.

Wow.