In this issue.

We lead with the second part of Mervyn Bendle's two-part article on Saudi funding in Australian universities. When the first part of this important study was published in National Observer (No. 72, Autumn 2007), it brought on its author's head the wrath of the authorities at Griffith University, a recipient of Saudi funding. Dr Bendle teaches courses there on terrorism and related topics, courses the university once tried to close down by indirect means, perhaps because they were seen to offend against political correctness (the "correct line" would have been to teach that "terrorism" is an invention of Western Islamophobes). In this second part, Dr Bendle opens with a look at the current situation at Griffith University "where this problem is well advanced", proceeds to examine the global nature of Saudi proselytisation via the principles of financial jihad, and goes on to consider "the behaviour of bureaucrats, academics and politicians who play the role of agents of influence or useful idiots, doing the bidding of totalitarian ideological movements, including Islamism".

In "Lights out on liberty", Mark Steyn, author of the acclaimed America Alone, examines the repression of free speech and print in formerly-free Western societies where an author of anything critical of Islam (someone like Steyn himself, who finds himself in just this situation in Canada) is liable to end up before the courts on a charge of criminality. As he points out, the one way in which Muslims in Western countries are "superbly assimilated" is "in their mastery of legalisms and the language of victimology". Absurdly, our "multicultural" societies tolerate the intolerant and punish anyone pointing out the intolerance. And yet, as he shows so clearly here, "ultimately our crisis is not about Islam. It's not about fire-breathing Imams or polygamists whooping it up on welfare. It's not about them. It's about us. And by us I mean the culture that shaped the modern world". It's our crisis of confidence in the values, preeminently freedom, that our culture has carried until very recently.

Warren Reed and Christopher J. Ward, authors of our third article, on Australian intelligence, are, respectively, a former spy and former spy-catcher. Here they address the betrayal-from-within syndrome that has crippled some of the most important work of our key security and intelligence organisation. They use the recently-declassified papers of the Hope Royal Commission to reveal how ASIO was penetrated, virtually from its inception, by the Soviet KGB. British and American intelligence agencies knew they could not trust ours, not for a minute. The shameful situation the authors uncover continued well into the 1990s. The rot goes back to the 1940s and External Affairs Minister Dr H.V. Evatt and his departmental head, Dr John Wear Burton, Jnr. The Hope Commission papers amply confirm what Dr Andrew Campbell, in his most recent article for this journal, wrote ...