Some Muslims pose a problem

[Proud Aussie]

Some Muslims pose a problem, says PM
http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=87659

Our prime minister must have been listening to public opinion for a change! Now if we can get him recognise that it is all muslims not just a fragment we will get somewhere.

Prime Minister John Howard says a fragment of Muslims are utterly antagonistic to Australian culture, posing a problem for the country's immigration program.

Mr Howard said the overwhelming majority of Muslims would successfully integrate.

But he said a commi
tment to jihad and extreme attitudes towards women were two problems unique to Muslims that previous intakes of migrants from Europe and Asia did not have.

"I do think there is this particular complication because there is a fragment which is utterly antagonistic to our kind
of society, and that is a difficulty, Mr Howard told The Australian.

"You can't find any equivalent in Italian, or Greek, or Lebanese, or Chinese or Baltic immigration to Australia.

"There is no equivalent of raving on about jihad but that is the major problem."

The Prime Minister also expressed concern about Muslim attitudes to women.

"I think some of the associated attitudes towards women (are) a problem," he said.

"For all the conservatism towards women and so forth within some of the Mediterranean cultures, it's nothing compared with some of the more extreme attitudes.

"The seco
nd one of those things is a broader problem, but to be fair to them, it's an attitude that is changing with the younger ones."

Mr Howard's comments are contained in The Howard Factor, a new book to mark the 10th anniversary of his rise to power written by journalists and commentators from The Australian.[/b]

 

[Proud Aussie]

Muslim fury at Howard
http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/st...255E662,00.html

As expected the fragile muslim sensibilities are offended. Despite the PM carefully refering to a muslim fragment or a minority of the muslim community all muslims have taken offence. As usual the muslim non-leaders issue a warning that when whitey exercises freedom of speech "something bad" might happen....

AUSTRALIA'S Islamic leaders have warned that comments by Prime Minister John Howard risk inflaming tensions and reinforcing negative stereotypes.

Mr Howard yesterday criticised a Muslim minority promoting jihadist views and conservative attitudes to women -- beli
efs he said that were not detected in other migrant groups.
But Muslim leaders said it was unfair to single out their community because all groups contain
ed undesirable and extremist elements. [Of course other communities don't have suicicde bombers or sharia law]

Mr Howard's original remarks came in interviews he conducted days before the Cronulla riots for a new book, The Howard Factor.

He repeated them yesterday, arguing greater integration into mainstream Australia was expected.

"There is a small section of the Islamic population in Australia because of its remarks about jihad, remarks which indicate an extremist view -- that is a problem," he said.

"It needs to be dealt with by the broader community, including Islamic Australians.

"These attitudes are not typical of all Muslims but they do represent the attitudes of a
small section of the Islamic population and there's no point in not saying so.

"It's not a problem that we ever faced with other immigrant communities who became easily absorbed into the mainstream."

Australian Federation of Islamic Councils president Ameer Ali said Mr Howard was "dead
right" about the presence of an arch-conservative Islamic minority -- but he argued that the problem of antagonism was not confined to one section of the population.

"In Australia, there is a tiny minority of white supremacists but they do not have the influence to change the rest of the community," Dr Ali said.

Rather than highlight extremist minorities, Dr Ali said it was better to sideline them.

"They will disappear in the course of time because their own children will not share their views," he said. [Unfortunately muslim children are brainwashed to share
their parents views]

Islamic Friendship Association head Keysar Trad said that Mr Howard was reinforcing incorrect stereotypes.

"To single out the Muslim community like this, the Prime Minister is unfortunately playing on pre-existing Islamaphobia," Mr Trad said.

Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer backed the Prime Minister's remarks, saying only a small minority of the Islamic community was in quest
ion.

"(Those) who have shown sympathy for, or enthusiasm for, the jihadism movement and obviously . . . they have been a preoccupation and a concern for us," Mr Downer said. [/b]

 

[Proud Aussie]

PM accused over jihad remark
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/commo...55E2702,00.html

More words of wisdom from the muslim non-leaders. Some are surprisingly accurate!

THE spiritual leader of the nation's 300,000 Muslims yesterday accused John Howard of inflaming public hatred towards the Islamic community.

Sheik Taj Din al-Hilali said the Prime Minister's criticism of the extremist views held by a fragment of the Muslim Australian population had been "childish, irresponsible and uninformed".

"His comments will only magnify the wave of antagonism and ha
te towards Muslims," the Mufti told The Australian in an interview conducted in Arabic. [The actions of muslims are responsible for this.]

Sheik Hilali said Mr Howard should take a crash course in Islam "because if a prime minister
does not understand the true meaning of jihad, then how can we blame the general public for not understanding it?" [Its real simple. Jihad = killing non-muslims]

But Mr Howard was supported yesterday by both the Labor Opposition and a moderate Muslim leader who said those who advocated terrorism had no place in Australian society.

The debate was ignited by the publication yesterday of Mr Howard's long-held concerns that "raving on about jihad" by a minority of the Islamic community and the conservative attitudes towards women were two problems that Australia had not faced with previous imm
igrant groups.

Mr Howard revealed his thoughts in an interview with The Australian for The Howard Factor, a book to be published next week to mark the 10th anniversary of his rise to power.

"I stand by those comments," Mr Howard told reporters in Sydney yesterday.

"These attitudes are not typical of all Muslims but they do represent the attitudes of a small section of the Islamic population and theres no point in not saying so.

"I hope it will encourage the broader Islamic community to understand that it is an issue."

Prominent Melbourne cleric Sheik Fehmi Naji El-Imam conceded that there was a radical minority who should probably leave the country. [!!!!!!!!!!!]

"These (extremists) can be found, but the mainstream are not extremists," the imam of Preston Mosque
, in Melbourne's north, said.

"But we should ask why the extremist have such views. In the case of Palestine and the double standards of the West, what do you expect?" [Whitey's fault again]

Sheik Fehmi, who is regarded as a moderate, said he understood why Muslims would fight overseas. But he said Muslim Australians had no business preaching and pursuing violence here.

"It's not wrong to fight the invasion in Iraq, it's not wrong to assist the Palestinians but here (in Australia), we cannot go ahead to do some terrorist (attack)
to help the people over there," Sheik Fehmi said.

"If you live here, you have to keep (extremist views) to yourself. If you cannot keep it to yourself, then leave."

Opposition immigration
spokesman Tony Burke welcomed Mr Howard's statement, but said it was long overdue: "Finally, he's recognised that the Department of Immigration is one of the departments that's relevant to national security."

Mr Burke said the deportation of Australian citizen Vivian Alvarez Solon and the detention of Cornelia Rau showed that the minister, Amanda Vanstone, had betrayed the national interest.

"If you don't know who you are kicking out of the country, you don't know who you are letting in," Mr Burke said.

Sheik Hilali, head of Lakemba mosque in Sydney's southwest, said Mr Howard did not know what he was talking about.

"His views on both jihad and the treatment of women in Islam are reflective of a primary school student's views," he said.

He accused Mr Howard of playing politics with Muslim
Australians. "The easiest way to claim public votes these days is to attack Islam and Muslims,"
the Mufti said.

"By making such statement about Muslims, he is telling the Australian public that Muslims are different, not human beings." [You said it, not me][/b]

 

[Proud Aussie]

John Howard, cultural warrior
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,18213276-2,00.html

Excellent reference article.

YESTERDAY two political leaders responded to the big issue of our time. In Australia, Prime Minister John Howard observed that radical Islam is "utterly antagonistic to our kind of society".

In India, the Minister of Minority Welfare of Uttar Pradesh, Yaqoob Qureshi, offered a $14 million reward to anyone who beheaded one of the Danish cartoonists who drew images of Mohammed.
In their own distinct ways, both may contribute to Western countries recognising how serious, and how long-standing, is the challenge of radical Islam to the core of their culture. <
br />
For the past three decades, most members of our political class have been ensconced within the cultural relativism of multiculturalism. If there has b
een a problem within an ethnic community, few political leaders have ever blamed its members. Instead, they have told the rest of us it is unacceptable to censure social groups except one - mainstream Australia.

As the debate about the Cronulla riots on Channel Nine's 60 Minutes on Sunday night demonstrated, the spokesmen for the Muslim community share this perspective.

Australians don't give them a fair go, they claim, and politicians are only too ready to play the race card by appealing to the worst xenophobic instincts of the majority.

Around the Western world, the response to the Danish cartoons demonstrated that even when Muslims go on violent rampages, burn down embassies and, in Britain, march with placards threatening death to their fellow citizens, many people regard this as somehow understandable,
even acceptable, since we have no right to judge another religion and culture.
In Australia, Attorney-General Philip Ruddock urged newspaper editors to treat the cartoons with caution, ask
ing them not to act "gratuitously with a view to try [to] provoke a response". In New Zealand, Prime Minister Helen Clark accused the newspapers who reproduced them of "bad manners".

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said: "The republication of these cartoons has been unnecessary, it has been insensitive, it has been disrespectful and it has been wrong."

However, the causes of the violence are now fairly clear. The riots, arson and death threats were not spontaneous outbursts from passionate religious believers but carefully stage-managed devices by Muslim leaders some five months after the cartoons were published.

Danish imams travelled to the Middle East where they generated support for a campaign targeted quite deliberately at Western culture.

Since September 11 and Bali, most commentators have seen the objectives of radical Islam as focused largely on change within Islamic counties: to force the West out of Saudi Arabia, to shut down decadent Western tourist attractions in Muslim countr
ies and, in its most utopian dreams, to re-establish the medieval Islamic empire that stretched from Spain to the East Indies.

The uproar over the Danish cartoons should remind us that another long-standing goal has been cultural change in the West. Radical Islam wants to accord Muslims in western societies privileges not available to the faithful of other religions. Instead of them changing to integrate into our way of life, they want to force us to change to accept their way of life.

Their ideal within the West is to establish sharia law in areas where Muslims congregate. As London's Sunday Telegraph survey revealed yesterday, four out of 10 British Muslims now want sharia law introduced in Muslim-dominated parts of the country.
This is an objective that long predates the rise of al-Q'aida.

As no one should need reminding, the first target in the contemporary rise of Islamic radicalism was the novelist Salman Rushdie. In 1989 he was the subject of a death edict by Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini
for satirising Mohammed in his novel The Satanic Verses. A number of Muslims living in the West declared they were willing to carry out the death sentence on behalf of their religion.

Many writers gave Rushdie vocal support and pointed out how such a fatwa offended the very core of Western culture, its right to free expression. But prominent politicians took a different line. President George Bush Sr adopted the moral equivalence of the political class, declaring both the death edict and the novel equally "offensive". Former president Jimmy Carter responded with a call for Americans to be "sensitive to the concern and anger" of Muslims. Rushdie had to spend the next decade in disguise, living in
secret locations, under police protection. No one else followed him by writing a novel critical of Mohammed.

In 1995, when a Pakistani writer living in the West decided to write a book, Why I Am Not a Muslim, rejecting Islam and praising Western culture, he knew he had to adopt the pseudonym, Ibn Warraq, and
keep his identity secret.

In the Netherlands, the former Somali woman, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, wrote a book, The Son Factory, about the Muslim oppression of women. The book generated a spate of death threats. Although she subsequently became a member of parliament, the threats to her life mean she still lives under permanent armed guard in a secret government safe house. Police later found she was at the top of a Muslim hit list of Dutch public figures.

The assassin Mohammed Bouyeri had her as his preferred victim but, when he couldn't reach her, he went to the name second on the hit list, the film-maker Theo van Gogh. Bouyeri shot, stabbed and almost beheaded van Gogh, wh
ose offence had been to collaborate with Hirsi Ali on a film entitled Submission critical of Muslim violence towards women.

The tactic of targeting individuals who criticise Islam has been very effective in the Netherlands. In 2005, for instance, the Dutch law professor and newspaper columnist Paul Cliteur announced he would no longe
r write or speak in public because of death threats to his wife and children.

This personal terrorism affects not just those directly under threat, but all writers and intellectuals. Most are unable to afford the security costs and the state cannot protect them all. The result is that they are silenced by self-censorship. Until now, the Western response has consistently been to raise one more white flag in the surrender of Western cultural values that we have been making since Khomeini's fatwa against Rushdie in 1989.

That is why Howard's statement yesterday is so remarkable. In Europe, comments like that have seen government ministers i
n several countries condemned by their colleagues. Some have lost their jobs. Howard's comments may signify that a line has finally been drawn in the Western political mentality.


Keith Windschuttle's most recent book is The White Australia Policy (Macleay Press, 2004). His website is sydneyline.com [/b]

 

[Proud Aussie]

Some home truths
http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/st...5E24218,00.html

Herald Sun Editorial gets it right. However, the muslim non-leaders had no choice but to react negatively. The insecure, zealot muslim mind cannot function in any way resembling rationality. Any comment, even positive, made by a non-muslim is met with condemnation, violence, jihad, fatwah or all of the above.

IT IS of considerable regret that Muslim leaders here have reacted negatively to Prime Minister John Howard's views on extremists in their midst.

But Mr Howard had the right ' ev
en an obligation as PM ' to lay on the line a few home truths.
What he said was neither "childish, irresponsible nor uninformed", as his critics alleged.

Instead of rejecting his views, Muslim leaders shoul
d have endorsed them.

Mr Howard levelled criticisms at a Muslim minority that promotes jihadist views and has a conservative attitude to women.

There can be no argument with the PM's view that the small number of Muslim extremists is a problem.

Nor is he wrong in his view that this should be dealt with by the broader community ' including Muslims.

Mr Howard rightly made the point that the current problem with Muslim extremists was not one that Australia had faced with other migrant communities, who had been absorbed into the mainstream.

Certainly, it is in the interests of all Muslims that their leaders focus on spreading the wo
rd about the Australian way of life and its qualities of mutual respect, equality of the sexes, tolerance and the freedom to worship or not as we wish.

A starting point would be to isolate the few extremists who seek to brainwash young Muslims with a curriculum of medieval hate. [/b]

 

[Proud Aussie]

Haters help Howard
Andrew Bolt
22feb06
http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/st...5E25717,00.html

More common sense from Bolt....

EVERY politician has enemies. John Howard's fantastic luck in his decade as Prime Minister is that these are his.

Look at them -- shrill artists, damn-Australia mandarins, group-think academics, stuff-you activists, sour journalists, gimme-rights ethnic bosses and the other discords of this cacophony of hate.
When Howard on March 2 celebrates his 10th anniversary in power, he owes these yammerers, now almost toxic with impotence, a silent prayer of thanks.

For they have helped him to win four electio
ns by demonstrating a truth few non-politicians know and even fewer politicians dare to exploit: that your enemies advertise your strengths better than can your frie
nds.

Do I sound too mystical and obscure? Well, let me show just how Howard haters help Howard win, starting with an example from only this week.

On Monday, Howard was quoted in The Australian saying something to which, you'd think, only someone as mad as the President of Iran could object.

He said he was sure most Muslim immigrants would integrate well, but did note a slight hitch -- among them was "a fragment which is utterly antagonistic to our kind of society", and which oppressed women and was "raving on about jihad".

Even the Islamic Council of Victoria knows this so well that it's drawn up a plan to protect Muslims from a backlash should some jihadist nutters here do a London and blow up a train.
<
br />So Howard said something true, and said it moderately. And his enemies once more picked up his plain rock of sense and used it to cave in their skulls.

The ICV, despite itself preparing for Islamist terrorism, accused Howard of peddling a "stereotype". The Australian Federation
of Islamic Councils attacked him for being "inflammatory".

They had their usual echo in the "elite" media. Howard "should have known better", than to "throw the Pauline Hanson voters a sly wink", fumed a Sydney Morning Herald commentator.

And there you have it yet again -- Howard's plain sense advertised and damned as outrageous by people whose obvious extremism would make the average voter flinch.

Even if you didn't like Howard yourself, would you really want to be on the side of such of his critics? ..........

[/b]

 

[Proud Aussie]

Howard wants to see the back of burqa
Email Print Normal font Large font By Farah Farouque
February 28, 2006
http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/how...1020024463.html

Another favourite bleating topic for the muslims. In nearly all Australian schools both public and private students are required to wear the school uniform. Of course, all teenagers rebel against such rules. The difference here is that muslim girls use their faith as an excuse for not wearing the uniform and then bleat racism when it is not permitted. Then the muslim community gets involved and the bleat-fest begins. Perhaps if a little more humility was involved rather than instant accusations of racism non-muslims would be a little more tolerant. Still waiting for a
fatwah against a school principle on this one.

[quote
]WHEN she steps out, Zeenath, 21, always dons her burqa. It's a voluminous black garment that covers her from head to toe.

Is she oppressed? And do others find her appearance confronting?

These are big questions that are once again resonating in Australian politics. Prime Minister John Howard weighed in yesterday with a quick sartorial assessment while riffing on John Laws' radio show.

While he wasn't contemplating the "Paris option" --legislating against Muslim headscarves in schools, which is what some coalition colleagues have advocated --Mr Howard said he found "the whole outfit" problematic .

"I don't mind the headscarf, but it's really the whole outfit," he said. "I think most Australians would find it confronting."

Warming to his theme, he said: &qu
ot;Now, that is not meant disrespectfully to Muslims, because most Muslim women --a great majority of them in Australia --don't even wear headscarves and very few of them wear the full garb."

In her "full garb" y
esterday, Zeenath, a computer science student recently arrived from Bangladesh, was occupied with more mundane matters --like shopping for new clothes at the Sydney Road emporium, Emaan: Islamic Garments. Here, they do a roaring trade in a rainbow of scarves ("the pink is the hottest, we sell a lot to the young," said proprietor Zurlia). One garment it doesn't carry is the burqa. "We don't get a lot of requests."

Her daughter, Fauzia, 19, a Melbourne University student who wears the headscarf, was disappointed by the PM's entry into what she believes is the marginal issue of the burqa-wearers in a diverse Australian Muslim community.

"Why did Mr Howard bring that up? It's not helpful at all for the Muslim comm
unity," she said. "It's a free country, you can (wear) clothes that show off your midriff and you can cover yourself."

There is a hugely trivial debate going on about conservative Muslim women's dress, according to Hanifa Deen, author of Caravanserai: Journey Among Australian Muslim
s.

Deen, a third-generation Australian of Muslim-Pakistani ancestry asks: "Why is what Muslim women wear so fascinating for Australian men? It's a 19th-century Orientalism --fascination with the exotic. In Australia, it comes down to choice: Australia is not like Afghanistan, where women have no choice."

Eva Cox, founder of the Women's Electoral Lobby, said: "I find it equally confronting when I see a woman in bra-top and tight knickers, gut hanging out. Blokes too, when their gut is out."

She said Mr Howard was playing "dog-whistle politics" again. "He is saying you can't really be an Australian unless you talk like us
and dress like us," she said.

And what does Zeenath, in her burqa, think? Mystified by the hullabaloo over her outer garments, she said: "Australia's quite a nice place."[/b][/quote]

 

[Proud Aussie]

Group inciting hatred against West
Thursday Mar 9 05:25 AEDT
http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=90453

The local muslim non-leaders bleat about opposing radical, violence inspiring islam. Yet they allow these pamphlets to be distributed in their mosques.

A radical Islamic group is distributing pamphlets in Australian mosques urging Muslims to rise up against coalition troops in Iraq and support the insurgency.

Hizb ut-Tahrir, which is banned in Britain, Germany and other countries, is distributing flyers inciting hatred against the West during Friday prayer meetings, The Australian said.

According to one flyer distributed at Lakemba mosque in western Sydney, it is coaliti
on forces led by the United States what are behind "the incidences of killing civilians, bombing markets and mosques, abducting scholars and killing those w
ho are sincere to the Deen (religion)".

The hardline political faction also told Muslims coalition forces were to blame for the bombing of a mosque in the Iraqi city of Samarra last month.

The attack has left the nation on the brink of civil war.

ASIO told Attorney-General Philip Ruddock last year there was not enough evidence to designate Hizb ut-Tahrir as a terrorist organisation in Australia.[/b]

 

[Proud Aussie]

Jihad on troops a duty, say fanatics
Richard Kerbaj
March 10, 2006
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/commo...55E2702,00.html

Wake up Australia. These terrorists are here now!

They have "unequivocally" thrown their support behind global jihad. What does this mean?

It is yet another veiled threat from muslims against Australia. They won't come out and say "We are tageting Australia. Expect terrorist acts soon." They use their un-holy words like jihad to do this. This group needs to be banned in Australia. Its members, families of members and all its supporters need to be deported or imprisoned. Do it now. Before they blow up a crowded train, building, plane, school, hospital, bridge, tunnel, airport .....
..

AN extremist Islamic group operating out of Sydney has directly blamed the Howar
d Government for killing Muslim children in Afghanistan and Iraq, and "unequivocally" thrown its support behind global jihad.

The Hizb ut-Tahrir, which is being investigated by ASIO, said fighting Australian troops and the other occupying forces in Iraq was a "universal right and religious duty".

"The Australian Government is part of a coalition that is inflicting untold horrors upon the Muslim world whether in Iraq or Afghanistan," the radical group's spokesman, Wassim Doureihi, told The Australian yesterday. "There are bombs being dropped and there are children being killed and there are entire cities being uprooted."

Mr Doureihi's comments come after The Australian revealed yesterday the inflammatory pamphlet disseminated by the group outside of Sy
dney mosques, urging Muslims to rise against Australian troops in Iraq and support the insurgency.

"We urge you to make the calamity of Samarra as a motivator to repel the invaders and that you take them as enemies," the flyer says, referring t
o the bombing of the Samarra mosque last month.

Mr Doureihi said the group stood by its belief that attacking the occupying forces in Iraq and other Islamic nations was an "Islamic obligation".

"And we say that quite loudly and we say that very unequivocally," he said.

Mr Doureihi said the fundamental political outfit was opposed to "violence" - a similar position to Hizb ut-Tahrir's website that says the party does not "advocate or engage in violence".

But Hizb ut-Tahrir (Party of Liberation) was set up by a Palestinian judge in 1953 to inspire the creation of a Khalifah (Caliphate) state ruled by a Muslim leader.

It has openly praised suicide b
ombers as martyrs, continues to circulate anti-Western propaganda and has been criticised by Mr Howard.

The radical global network was investigated last year by ASIO, but there was not enough evidence to classify Hizb ut-Tahrir a terrorist organisation.

But the new anti-terror laws have lowered the threshold for proscription of organisat
ions to include groups that advocate terrorist acts, rather than being involved in actually planning or carrying out terrorist acts.

Mr Doureihi said the group was still being investigated by the nation's security agency.

"ASIO has a job to investigate a lot of people and clearly I would assume we are one of those," he said.

Mr Doureihi said banning Hizb ut-Tahrir in Australia, as it has been banned in Britain, Germany and other countries, would reflect the Government's appetite for repressing discourse and dissent.

"If anyone was to be proscribed it would be the Australian Governmen
t itself," he said. "They are engaging in state-sponsored violence of the most horrific nature," referring to Australia's 1320-strong contingent in Iraq.

While the Sydney arm of the group lists more than 200 members, Mr Doureihi said Hizb ut-Tahrir was growing in popularity among the wider Muslim community.

"We've seen a lot of positive responses (to our work) and that only continues to increase," he
said.[/b]