One week ago, the old parliament building hosted a public conference between Muslim and wider Australia, the culmination of which was a tearful rendition of Waltzing Matilda by former Prime Minister Bob Hawke. Alongside the good and the great were the ever growing class of Professional Public Muslims (PPM) who ply their trade of interpreting Muslim Australia to the wider community and lubricating the wheels of “community relations”.
I listened and read extracts of the entire proceedings and watched snippets of it on TV. My reaction was that the image of Islam we give to wider Australia is one of self pity, an exaggerated sense of victimhood and a demand that wider Australia fund our “rehabilitation” with public money.
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On Monday, Andrew Norton made the observation that parents who choose private education for their children are treated less favourably by government than those who choose public schools.
On the federal government’s school funding policy, students at private schools get subsidies at somewhere between 13.7% and 70% of the government school rate, depending on the (presumed) socio-economic status of parents. So parents choosing private schools are financially treated less favourably than parents choosing government schools. Why is this not discrimination?
It’s a reasonable question and it does seem like discrimination.
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The Sun-Herald are reporting today that two Muslim women will be running for the seat of Auburn in Sydney’s South West.
A FORMER high school principal and a local councillor will become the first Muslim women to be aligned with mainstream political parties when they contest the March 24 state election.
Muslim converts Silma Ihram, who will run as a Democrat, and Malikeh Michaels, a Green, will contest the safe Labor seat of Auburn, held by Barbara Perry.
We have commented on the broader issue of Muslim political involvement in the past. One of the key concerns has always been that it could send the wrong message for a Muslim candidate to run on what they or others will promote as an “Islamic platform” designed to capture the “Muslim vote”. This furthers the perception of Islam as a “political ideology”; which seems to mean a potpourri of mostly Leftist economic nostrums wrapped up in some Rightist social conservatism and then rebranded as “Islam” with a foreign policy that starts with opposition to Israel and ends with opposition to America.
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Brendan O’Neill writes in Spiked Online about the West’s obsession with genocide, whether cracking down on genocide-denial at home (as the Germans are trying to make illegal across Europe) or searching for genocides in Africa:
In some circles, ‘genocide’ has become code for Third World savagery. What do the headline genocides (or ‘celebrity genocides’, perhaps) of the past two weeks have in common? All of them – the Serbs’ genocide in Bosnia, the Sudanese genocide in Darfur, the Turks’ genocide of Armenians – were committed by apparently strange and exotic nations ‘over there’. Strip away the legal-speak about which conflicts can be defined as genocides and which cannot, and it seems clear that genocide has become a PC codeword for wog violence – whether the genocidal wogs are the blacks of Sudan, the brown-skinned, not-quite-European people of Turkey, or the Serbs, white niggers of the post-Cold War world.
Consider how easily the genocide tag is attached to conflicts in Africa. Virtually every recent major African war has been labelled a genocide by outside observers. The Rwandan war of 1994 is now widely recognised as a genocide; many refer to the ongoing violence in Uganda as a genocide. In 2004 then US secretary of state Colin Powell declared, on the basis of a report by an American/British fact-finding expedition to Darfur: ‘We conclude that genocide has been committed in Darfur and that the government of Sudan and the Janjaweed bear responsibility.’ (4) (The UN, however, has not described Darfur as genocide.) Even smaller-scale African wars are discussed as potential genocides. So the spread of instability from Darfur into eastern Chad has led to UN handwringing about ‘genocide in Chad’. During the conflict in Liberia in 2003, commentators warned that ‘Liberia could be plunged into a Rwanda-style genocide’ (5).