Islam Down Under

Arab News ^ | Feb 25

[smpc]

There is every reason to be extremely worried about a survey in Australia last week indicating that nearly half the population believes that Muslims and people from the Middle East do not belong in the country.

Many may not find a growing Islamophobia in Australia all that strange. After all, Australia is one of the few countries that has backed President George Bush’s policies on Iraq; it was where mosques were attacked in the aftermath of Sept. 11, and the government has pursued a persistently hard-line policy against asylum seekers, invariably Muslims. Nor can anyone forget the notorious Pauline Hanson, founder of the far-right One Nation party, whose extreme views on asylum seekers and indigenous Australians briefly tapped into a vein of national prejudice. Although her party’s popularity soon subsided after winning almost a quarter of the vote in Queensland in 1998, only this week she announced a return to political life a year after saying that she was giving it up. It has to be seen as another sign of the Australian pendulum swinging toward intolerance. She would not have decided to run for the New South Wales state parliament if she did not think that she had some chance of success.

Yet Muslims, specifically Afghans, are not new to Australia. The railway from Sydney and Adelaide to Alice Springs in the heart of Australia is known by all Australians as “The Ghan”, an affectionate reference to the Afghans and their camel trains who kept the town connected to the outside world until the coming of the railway in 1929. Many descendants of those early Afghan operators still live in Alice Springs, worship at the local mosque, and are as authentically Australian as anyone whose family has lived in Australia for 100 years.

So why the change? Why have Muslims come to be regarded with such suspicion in Australia? The academics who carried out the survey blame media misrepresentation of Muslims and Western antipathy toward Islam.

But why the misrepresentation in the first place? Why the antipathy? In fact, the general rule is that the media in the West panders to public opinion rather than leads it. It finds out what people think and then screams it back at them.

Before jumping to the conclusion that Australians are incorrigible bigots and Islamophobes, ask instead why they may have become so. Muslims have to accept some responsibility for this. Australia, along with the rest of the non-Muslim world, is not getting a true picture of Islam. It is getting an image corrupted and twisted by the hate and barbarism of fanatics. The Bali bombing in which 88 Australians died cannot but have damaged Australians’ attitudes toward Islam. If ever there was proof of the harm done to Islam by extremism, here it is. The high-profile gang rape case, too, which shocked Australia last year after revelations that the 14 youths of Lebanese extraction involved had boasted that they were Muslims targeting “Aussie pigs” did almost as much as much damage. Of course, we know that this is not Islam, but many Australians do not.

Something has to be done to change the Australians’ image of Islam. There is no point expecting them to do it. The responsibility belongs to Muslims alone. A true image of Islam has to be presented. That is the challenge. Condemnation is certainly not the answer. That will only make things worse.

[smpc]

I particularly like 'Before jumping to the conclusion that Australians are incorrigible bigots and Islamophobes, ask instead why they may have become so.'

A bad attempt at diplomacy.

[headsonpikes]

"A bad attempt at diplomacy."

But an attempt; that's progress, of a sort. ;^)

[Shermy]

The Arab News is a Saudi paper. Must be difficult to be a liberal in Saudi carping about your own "image," while in complete denial about the state-sponsored bigotry and hate against non-muslims and shi'ites by your own country, one of the most repressive in the world. I suppose looking for faults in other lands distracts uncomfortable self-examination.

[fporretto]

Arab News and its American expatriate editor John Bradley are absolute in their resistance to the idea that there might be anything objectionable about Islam, or suspicious about the Islamic diaspora into liberal Western countries. Robert Spencer's book Islam Unveiled and Serge Trifkovic's The Sword Of The Prophet are more than Bradley and his people can bear. They've crossed swords with Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs many times.

In short, don't look here for any genuine examination of the clash of cultures.

Freedom, Wealth, and Peace,
Francis W. Porretto
Visit The Palace Of Reason:
http://palaceofreason.com

[joesnuffy]

Australians are incorrigible bigots and Islamophobes

Just put the suffix "Phobe" on any noun with a liberal socialist third way fourth reich gaia homosexual pedophile new world order UN global govt. agenda

[swarthyguy]

I haven't heard any reports about tensions between the Afghani cameldrivers of yore in Australia.

The tension seems to be with the newer, primarily >Arab< islami immigrants.

So a cute rhetorical trick of transposing Muslims when the tension is primarily with Arabs.

So effing hypocritcal of the Arabs to be concerned about the Afghanis now. Reminiscent of Zero Zogby's concern for South Asians (including non Muslims - opportunistic or what?) recently.

[Enemy Of The State]

[archy]

I haven't heard any reports about tensions between the Afghani cameldrivers of yore in Australia.

You are then unfamiliar with the events of New Years Day near the mining community of Broken Hill in 1915 when two of those Afghani Muslems, one a mullah, learned that jihad had been declared, took their rifles and set out to wage their war against a holiday excursion train of vacationing miners and their families, killing several men and one woman, and wounding several others, including a 15-year-old girl before finally being shot down by a combined party of police and hastily assembled members of the local veterans hall who had served in the fight against the Boers.

Their homemade crescent flag, their two rusty rifles, and the wheels of the ice cream wagon they impressed into service as an ammunition cart were still on display at the New South Wales police museum when I visited there last. They remain as a reminder that those willing to attack civilians and include women and children as their targets may do so at any time or place, no matter how remote, and that after the fact efforts by local and national governments won't save citizens' lives.

[SarahW]

The problem with this is that mainstream Islam is violent, anti-culture, and intolerant.

[marron]

Something has to be done to change the Australians’ image of Islam.

You have come to the right person. I can help.

Step 1. Stop raping and killing Australians.

Step 2. Stop killing innocents in general.

Step 3. Stop slaughtering each other.

Step 4. Stop murdering your women.

Step 5. Stop imagining you have anything at all to teach the world. Try on some well-earned humility. Try and learn something for a change.

Step 6. Stay home. You already live in a Muslim paradise. Why go in search of what you already have? After all, if the West has anything at all to recommend it, it must primarily be that you do not yet live there.

[smpc]

Thanks for that info,i'd never heard of that incident before.Interesting.

[farmfriend]

ping