Posted on 01/26/2007 1:49:58 AM PST by Aussie Dasher
SHEIK Taj al-Din al-Hilali pulled out of giving the Friday sermon at his Sydney mosque today after being warned to tone down his "freak show" rhetoric.
Members of the Lebanese Muslim Association (LMA), which runs the popular Lakemba mosque, intercepted Australia's most senior Muslim cleric on his way to give the sermon.
LMA president Tom Zreika said the sheik pulled out after being told his sermon had to be apolitical, avoiding talk of the Lebanese Muslim candidates expected to run at the March state election.
The sheik yesterday ruled himself out of running, but said he would endorse the candidates, possibly all women, who are expected to run in the Sydney seats of Lakemba, Burwood and Auburn.
The sheik must give the LMA an undertaking that his sermons will be apolitical before he is allowed to give another sermon at the mosque, Mr Zreika says.
"The mosque is not going to become a campaign office," Mr Zreika said, adding the LMA has nothing to do with the candidates, who are yet to be named.
The LMA's move is sure to meet with opposition as the sheik is popular at the southwestern Sydney mosque that regularly attracts thousands to Friday prayers.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.com.au ...
There's something odd about our interpretation of what is written in the koran, it's almost as if we treat the 'fight and kill the infidel' verses as metaphors...for something else...like as if it was a spiritual struggle that never left millions of indigenous people minus their heads, arms and legs... throughout the lands islam conquered by the sword.
I am reminded of something Immanuel Velikovsky wrote about the passages in the Old Testament that we also read metaphorically...he says, (paraphrased) by burning rocks falling from the heavens, the authors meant burning rocks, by pitch ensnaring the people of the exodus, they meant pitch, by a darkness that lasted for many years, that's exactly what was meant...and yet, we read it all as some fairy tale meant to frighten us.
Just as the history of the Israelites in the OT describes the effects of a catastrophe, the koran is clear on islam's intentions for the 'infidel' and why we translate this as a metaphor, really really beats me. They couldn't be more clear about it if they tried. Are we deaf, or just to scared?
Too cowardly to see it for what it is, and hiding behind the rock of wishful thinking, IMHO.
Someone needs to tell the muslims in Australia may have to shuddup and take a back seat:
According to the same census, by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, there are more Buddhists there (at 357,800 vs 281,600 mohammadans) and Buddhism is the fastest growing religion there at 79.1% vs islums 40.2% from '96 to '01.
The Buddhists also have early claims to have reached Oz too (under Cheng Ho in the 15th C) and it may have been early Buddhist contacts, possibly thru traders (even those from early Indon-Malay states) who may have passed on the concept of physical reincarnation to the Aboriginal peoples.
The difference is they don't invoke this to claim your land from under you feet or to destroy your way of life.
Spin on that one, oh slaves of allah.
Oh, they are spinning all right, I read a claim recently (lost the source) they have a settlement somewhere - where a thousand aboriginal converts to islam are living.
If I find it, I'll let you know!
The only reason islam is interested in our native population is their land-rights. Islam would LOVE to take their lands from them ( for allah)
Good luck with that. Converting an aboriginal in an outback settlement might be easy, but keeping them sober or getting them to pray five times a day might be like trying to herd cats!
No insult to aboriginals (or cats)intended.
PS. We live in an area where many Sikh familes live, they are second/third generation, most are banana growers, beautiful, hard working people - and real aussies from head to toe.
So, some of the 'afghans' the islamists are claiming were muslims, weren't!
That figures!
Hope you enjoy this as much as I did:
He harvests bananas with his golden Sikh dagger strapped to his side, his never-cut beard and hair wrapped inside his turban and his friendly carpet snakes asleep in a shed.
Welcome to the life of Bhupinder Lalli, one of the 500 or so banana- growing Sikhs of Woolgoolga. Bhupinder symbolises the synthesis of two worlds.
There's the Sikh side: the conservative life, an arranged marriage, the importance of praying at Woolgoolga's Sikh temple. Then there's the Australian side: the hard yakka of a lifetime cutting bananas on a plantation north of Coffs Harbour, the bond he knew with his neighbours in Queensland, the joy of living in a land relatively free of religious violence.
"Australia is my home," he says in a Punjabi accent that's accepted the odd stretched Aussie vowel.
"When I go back to India, I can only stay for a couple of months because I get too homesick. This place is where my heart is."
Occasionally, those worlds conflict. Until five years ago, the local RSL club refused to allow turban- wearing Sikhs inside. "We have to wear hats when we go into their temple," they said. "Why shouldn't they take their turbans off inside the RSL club."
The dispute was finally resolved after the threat of court action.
Sikhs arrived in Woolgoolga in the 1960s. They'd been in Australia since the early years of the century, cutting cane in Queensland and gradually moving south. But in the first half of this century Queensland laws prohibited many migrants from owning land, so the Sikhs ended up around the northern rivers district of NSW, following the work until they moved to Woolgoolga. They stopped seeing Australia merely as a place to make money when the Whitlam Labor government made permanent migration a possibility.
They've built two temples and made Woolgoolga the biggest community of Sikhs in rural Australia.
Almost all the men work as cane cutters, blueberry pickers or banana growers. Bhupinder chose banana growing because he can work his crop alone if he needs to harvesting all year round. Some days on his property it's just him and the five carpet snakes that live beneath the warm tin roof of his banana shed.
Woolgoolga's still a pretty conservative town, says Rashmere Lynette Bhatti, a Sikh woman who has just won a grant to co- author a book about the Sikhs of Woolgoolga.
"It's as though it's stuck in that era that existed when the first migrants arrived," she said. "When I speak to some of the brides who come here straight from India, they say, 'It's like India was in the 1950s'."
Things change, slowly. Every day, Rashmere does things that Sikh women are not supposed to do. Like speaking to a Telegraph reporter in a closed office or talking at a public meeting.
"I think that I'm a good role model for some of the women here. I say to them, 'You can be Indian and you can be Australian you can do both, this is what it's about."
I may be wrong, but this may be more of an old cultural restriction on females of the subcontinent than religion based. In India and Pakistan, including the Punjab region, and you get the sense it's considered polite not to corner females alone (unless it's urgent business) but it's not infringing on their religion unless they are from the RoP. Sikhism was formed as a rejection of islam. Women can attend their temples (unlike most mosques who do not accept females, and even the "progressive" ones that do segregate them) and have way more rights than muslim females who get treatment and limited rights based on the way the mohamMAD treated his wives.
In areas Hindu areas outside of the Punjab, the locals seem to like having Sikhs around, but not the RoPers. Sikhs are usually armed with their kirpan (one of their "five k's") and have appear to have settled in to a "traditional" role as armed guards. In some areas, all the stores were owned by Hindus, but every single one had a Sikh guard outside armed not only with kirpan, but with shotguns or revolvers too. The modern day equivalent I suppose.
Most Sikhs have been told, from the time they learn to speak, of muslim barbarity, torture and violent forced conversions to islam of both Sikhs and Hindus. After the islamic slaughter of their spiritual leaders, Bhai Mati Das, of wave after wave of Sikhs, they learned to stay armed and watch their backs. They also seem adept in taking in the best aspects from other cultures and assimilating too.
HEAR YE SIKHS OF THE WORLD!!, DON'T EVER FORGET WHAT YOUR GREAT ANCESTORS WENT THROUGH AT THE HANDS OF MUSLIMS (MOGHULS) IN INDIA.
[PLEASE CLICK ON THE IMAGES TO ENLARGE THE PICTURE FOR FULL VIEW]
Brave Sikh mothers watch while 300 infants speared to death during Muslim rule
http://www.hinduunity.org/articles/sikhs/evidence1-4.html
A wide range of painted historical images.
(sorry about the caps...as in the original.)
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