Posted on 10/19/2002 11:31:54 AM PDT by libertarian_au
IT IS well and good for members of Australia's Muslim communities to denounce terrorism and claim in the local press that such murderous activity is un-Islamic, but they're telling the wrong audience.
We've heard it before – and, unfortunately, their declarations fly in the face of the growing, charred mass of evidence now accumulating in Bali's makeshift morgues, and in the historical record of the flattened World Trade Centre site, the rebuilt Pentagon, bombed Indonesian churches, holed ships and dead French, Germans, Kenyans, Tanzanians and others.
While any backlash against local Muslims is condemned, as all lawlessness must be, the leaders of the Australian Muslim communities should be directing their pacific thoughts and interpretations of the Koran to those who claim to be their co-religionists abroad.
Because clearly, those here who find only messages of peace and love in the Koran are dramatically at odds with thousands of mullahs in mosques around the world who are preaching a hate-filled sermon that has found a deadly resonance with a lethally activist minority fighting to install Islam as the sole global religion.
A few days ago, Abu Bakar Bashir – who, according to a number of confessed plotters interrogated by authorities in several countries, has masterminded numerous terrorist plots and is alleged to be behind the Bali atrocity – told a reporter from The Australian that the world will be safe only when it is totally Islamic.
Saying that he wants "Islam to regulate the world's people", Bashir told the newspaper: "I believe that Muslims and non-Muslims will only feel safe under Islamic law."
When asked by a reporter from The Boston Globe whether he feels the same sympathy for the slain Western tourists in Bali that he does for Palestinians killed by Israeli forces, the Koranic teacher replied coldly: "No, because the people who died in Palestine will go to heaven, while the people who died in Bali will go to hell. They are infidels."
Perhaps someone from the Australian Muslim community could indicate exactly where the Koranic message of love and compassion lies in that statement and how it fits in with the oft-quoted claim that Islam respects all religions equally.
If they cannot, they must denounce Bashir's remarks and assist the authorities who are seeking his followers in Australia, before those followers decide or are ordered to strike here.
We know there are followers here because Bashir and Abdullah Sungkar, his alleged co-founder of the extremist Jemaah Islamiah group, made several visits to Australia during the 1990s.
The Lakemba-based Islamic Youth Movement's website – http://www.islam.org.au – carries an interview with Sungkar in which he clearly calls for the transformation of Indonesia into an Islamic State (Dawlah Islamiyyah).
This interesting site also carries interviews with other Islamic extremists, including the jailed blind sheik Omar Abdul Rahman, the spiritual leader of the group that bombed the World Trade Centre building in New York City on February 26, 1993.
A number of phone calls made by those bombers shortly before they detonated a truckload of explosives in the car park beneath the centre were traced by the authorities to western Sydney.
Almost exactly a month earlier, on January 25, I had a brush with terrorism when, as I drove to my Washington office through peak-hour traffic, I was forced to swerve around the traffic jam caused when another Islamic assassin, Mir Aimal Kasi, gunned down two Central Intelligence Agency analysts outside the CIA's Virginia headquarters.
Kasi, a Pakistani national, expected to be executed for his crimes on November 14. He later said in an interview: "I wanted to punish those who do wrong things against Muslim countries like Iraq."
He shot only men, he told the FBI after his arrest, because shooting women would violate his Muslim religion.
There have been few acts of terror perpetrated on Australian soil and those that have occurred have been almost entirely the work of foreign nationals directed against foreign governments and political movements.
Now, however, we are a target – along with other Westerners – for a variety of reasons that all, essentially, have to do with the freedoms our liberal democracies permit us to enjoy.
Surely, if Islam is a broad church, as so many of its supporters claim it to be, there is room for other religions to exist, for people everywhere to be at liberty to choose whether they wish to follow the Koran or any religion at all?
Surely, they must show their respect for our culture, for the freedom of women to dress as they wish without fear of being insulted, for the right to enjoy all their liberties under Australian law.
So far, the silent majority of Australian Muslims, who claim to be moderates, have been unable to give us any assurances that our very lifestyle is not under attack.
They say those who engage in terrorism abroad are not Muslims – unfortunately, the terrorists would kill to defend their arguments that they are.
We need an assurance and a guarantee from followers of Islam in Australia that they have no desire to forcibly impose their religion upon others and that they would oppose those who might.
Foolishness. Yes, they'll get the assurances and guarantees from the msoslems, of course they will. But westerners in general had better wake up to the accepted practice of al taqiyah-- moslems are allowed to lie as much as necessary to further the spread of islam. You cannot believe any of them about this.
Islamic concept of Al-Taqiyah to infiltrate and destroy kafir countries
Does anyone know if this is true or not? I know rape and degradation don't violate their "religious" standards, but shooting does?
They have been killing each other more than the rest of us for over a thousand years. I think the world will be far safer when Islam is totaled. Killers kill each other, unless of course they are dead...
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