Posted on 08/24/2005 10:01:16 AM PDT by Mark Felton
SYDNEY (AFP) - Muslims who want to live under Islamic Sharia law have been told to get out of Australia.
A day after a group of mainstream Muslim leaders pledged loyalty to Australia at a special meeting with Prime Minister John Howard, he and his ministers made it clear that extremists would face a crackdown.
Treasurer Peter Costello, seen as heir apparent to Howard, hinted that some radical clerics could be asked to leave the country if they did not accept that Australia was a secular state and its laws were made by parliament.
"If those are not your values, if you want a country which has Sharia law or a theocratic state, then Australia is not for you," he said on national television.
"I'd be saying to clerics who are teaching that there are two laws governing people in Australia, one the Australian law and another the Islamic law, that that is false.
"If you can't agree with parliamentary law, independent courts, democracy, and would prefer Sharia law and have the opportunity to go to another country which practises it, perhaps, then, that's a better option," Costello said.
Asked whether he meant radical clerics would be forced to leave, he said those with dual citizenship could possibly be asked move to the other country.
Education Minister Brendan Nelson later told reporters that Muslims who did not want to accept local values should "clear off".
"Basically, people who don't want to be Australians, and they don't want to live by Australian values and understand them, well then they can basically clear off," he said.
Muslim schools will have to denounce terrorism as part of an effort to stamp out home-grown extremism under measures announced after Howard's meeting with 14 Islamic leaders Tuesday.
The prime minister called the meeting in the wake of last month's London bombings by British-born Muslims, amid fears that Australia could be the target of a similar attack by disaffected members of its small Muslim community.
"The purpose of the meeting was to identify ways of preventing the emergence of any terrorist behaviour in this country," Howard told commercial radio Wednesday.
"You won't change the minds of people who are hardened fanatics and hardened extremists. You have to identify them and take measures to ensure that they don't become a problem."
Asked if he was prepared to "get inside" mosques and schools to ensure there was no support for terrorism, Howard said: "Yes, to the extent necessary".
Britain, shaken by the rail and bus bombings which killed 56 people, is debating new powers which could include closing mosques where clerics are suspected of supporting extremists and deporting those who glorify suicide bombers.
Australia, which like Britain has troops in Iraq, is also contemplating tougher anti-terror legislation. which will be debated next month at a meeting between Howard and leaders of state governments.
Meanwhile, an Islamic youth organisation that was not invited to Howard's Tuesday meeting said it would call an alternative conference -- on September 11 -- for what it says is the 80 percent of Muslims who were not represented.
The Affinity Intercultural Foundation (AIF) told national radio it wants to try to change the date's association with Islamic violence, and to highlight how mainstream Muslims have become victims of prejudice and bias.
AIF director Mehmet Saral said Muslims were feeling more victimised than at any other time in their history of living in Australia.
Some 300,000 Muslims make up just 1.5 percent of Australia's population of 20 million.
"If you can't agree with parliamentary law, independent courts, democracy, and would prefer Sharia law and have the opportunity to go to another country which practises it, perhaps, then, that's a better option,"
Well, I guess he's got to be somewhat pragmatic about it, being a publicly elected official and the like, but I think something along the lines of "If you've got a hankerin' for sharia, and we can prove it in a court of law, you will be parachuted into the sharia practicing country of our own choosing. You are not welcome back."
Owl_Eagle
(If what I just wrote makes you sad or angry,
Noice.
Would there be no room for doctrinal development in Islam along the lines of the same in Catholic and Protestant churches? It may not have been part of the deposit of faith, but certainly the views of both Protestant and Catholic churches until at least the Enlightenment period of the 18th century were decidedly against religious toleration and were in favor of established religion.
Ping!
...religion of piece(s). Another piece for reading.
"Meanwhile, an Islamic youth organisation that was not invited to Howard's Tuesday meeting said it would call an alternative conference -- on September 11 -- for what it says is the 80 percent of Muslims who were not represented.
The Affinity Intercultural Foundation (AIF) told national radio it wants to try to change the date's association with Islamic violence, and to highlight how mainstream Muslims have become victims of prejudice and bias."
Way to go Aussies!
---
They are oour strongest allies
http://www.neoperspectives.com/australia.htm
Beyond the US, there are 188 sovereign nations (give or take a microstate or two) and only one of them has fought beside it in every one of the major international wars the Americans have waged over the past 100 years. In the US's seven wars of the past century (not counting numerous and sometimes bloody military actions in Panama, Grenada, Somalia, Bosnia, Guatemala and elsewhere) - World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the Afghanistan war, and the Iraq war - only Australia fought in all seven wars, and every one of them was fought far from Australia's shores.
In World War I, when the population was only 5 million, 300,000 men enlisted for duty and the majority, 216,000 of them, were either killed, wounded or captured. To put this in perspective, it was the equivalent of today's US (with 290 million people) suffering 12 million military casualties.
This did not prevent Australia from fully committing, less than a generation later, to World War II, well before Japan started the Pacific war and forced the US to engage. Another quarter of a million Australians were killed, wounded or captured. Thousands more casualties were later endured in Korea, in Malaya and in Vietnam. Then came combat in the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan and a military face-off with the world's largest Muslim nation in East Timor.
Nothing changed this year. In January, long before the diplomatic dramas that would play out at the United Nations, the Howard Government began to deploy Australian forces to the Persian Gulf. In February, when the American Secretary of State, Colin Powell, was bombarded with complaints that the US would be isolated if it invaded Iraq, he responded, "Oh, I don't think we'll be going it alone." He already knew Australian and British forces were committed and in place. That same month, when the Gallup organisation conducted an international poll in 39 countries about attitudes to a war, Australia led the world in support for military action against Iraq.
Dead on. Australia is by far our greatest friend.
Just like all of us damn Papists, right?
Care to hold forth as the determinant of what qualifies people of any other religions? You know better than the groups that met with Howard what it takes to be a Muslim?
Anglo-Saxon Bump!
Way to go Aussies! They have said what needs to be said! President Bush should pay attention to this. "W" getting up and talking about 'the religion of peace' should get a clue. That the mouthwash ain't making it...Take a wise lesson from John Howard!
You don't see hate. You see a passion to defend the country. There is nothing arbitrary in their comments. they only wish to remove those people who wish to supplant the US Constitution, not every Muslim only those who would destroy the Constitution.
It is perfectly fair and reasonable to defend our laws, our government and our way of life.
Muslims who support the supremacy of Sharia law should not be allowed to stay in this country.
We used to have very strict immigration laws. People had to be sponsored and have a job, a good, professional level job. If they became bad citizens they were deported.
Any mosque which preaches the supremacy of Sharia over the Constitution should be shut down and the senior clerics deported.
That is rational, and lawful.
The Smith Act of 1940 needs to be reinstated.
It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For this very reason peoples of other faiths have been afforded asylum, prosperity, and freedom to worship here." -- Patrick Henry
Actually it was the Baptists in 1612 that first made "freedom of conscience" and "freedom of religion" a fundamental tenet of their faith.
After the Revolutionary war we had several states imposing State religion over the people. Were it not for the Baptists we would not have the 1st Amendment or even the Bill of Rights.
The Muslims need their own Islamic sect to champion the cause of freedom of religion, otherwise there is no hope for them ever creating a free nation.
The Baptists can claim credit for the most revolutionary political concept ever afforded to mankind and impacting civilizations worldwide; freedom of religion.
From "Baptists And Religious Liberty." BY BENJAMIN O. TRUE, D. D., PROFESSOR OF CHURCH HISTORY"The long and painful struggle for religious liberty in the Puritan colonies of New England did not cease in Connecticut until the new Constitution was adopted, in 1818, and religious equality was not attained in Massachusetts until 1834. In Virginia, the Episcopalian church was disestablished and practical religious liberty was secured, largely through the determined efforts of the Baptists, soon after the American Revolution, after a period of prolonged, provoking, and at times cruelly severe persecution. It seems strange that the Puritan founders of Massachusetts, who sought for themselves an asylum from the persecution which they despaired of escaping in the Old World, should have failed to recognize that to worship God according to the dictates of conscience is an inherent and an inalienable right-a right as valuable to others as to themselves.
"It seems strange that men who counted not their lives dear in their determined effort to secure their own religious freedom should have refused to grant to others that which they so highly prized for themselves. Their descendants were slow to learn the lesson which the fathers failed to understand; but we may confidently hope that this fundamental principle of Protestantism has at last, in this country at least, been well learned. Dr. Lyman Beecher says, in his "Autobiography," of the agitation which resulted in the adoption of the new Constitution in Connecticut in 1818, with its article in favor of religious liberty, that he "suffered what no tongue can tell’ for what he afterwards came to regard as "the best thing that ever happened to the State of Connecticut."
"Thanks to the vigilant foresight of Virginia Baptists, the first amendment to the Constitution prohibits, we may hope forever, any establishment of a national religion in the United States. Writing of "the establishment of the American principle of the non-interference of the State with religion and the equality of all religious communions before the law," Dr. Leonard Woolsey Bacon, in his "History of American Christianity" (page 221), says: "So far as this was a work of intelligent conviction and religious faith, the chief honor of it must be given to the Baptists. Other sects, notably the Presbyterians, had been energetic and efficient in demanding their own liberties; the Friends and the Baptists agreed in demanding liberty of conscience and worship and equality before the law for all alike. But the active labor in this cause was mainly done by the Baptists. It is to their consistency and constancy in the warfare against the privileges of the powerful "Standing Order" of New England, and of the moribund establishments of the South, that we are chiefly indebted for the final triumph in this country of that principle of the separation of Church from State which is one of the largest contributions of the New World to civilization and to the church universal."
Until the Muslims develop the religious conviction of the Baptists for freedom of religion, there will be no peace between our civilizations. We cannot endure them to grow into a sunstantial political force within our own nations either.
Until we as nation regain the same conviction as the Baptists we cannot retain the Constitution, it will be corrupted.
That will clean up Down Under! :)
Are you joking? Catholics obey the pope on matters of faith and morals. That's it. The Pope doesn't say here's the law of the land and here's how it's going to be enforced and here's the system you're going to use. If he does say something along those lines it's not binding on any Catholic.
That, actually, made me laugh. It's been a long day and is much appreciated.
thanks for the ping, methinks the recent statements from Prime Minister Howard and the Federal Minister of Education Dr Nelson will be like the shot that was heard around the world...give GWB time, there are bigger fish to fry in Iraq at this moment in time...
I can imagine it might be the turn of CAIR and the ACLU after Iraq has a federal government in place.
"Islamic youth organisation,... The Affinity Intercultural Foundation (AIF) said it would call an alternative conference -- on September 11."
Whaat! Sounds like they will be having an celebratory affair that day. They just realized that is a bad day for a Muslim "conference".
As far as Howard's direct approach, how refreshing. Now the phrase "Clear off", that's a catchy phrase.
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