Two opinion pieces in each of Sydney’s two daily newspapers deserve special mention today.
Firstly, a Sydney Morning Herald journalist writes a 709 word piece revealing — perhaps for the first time ever in the opinion and analysis pages of a major newspaper — that some Muslims don’t shake the hands of members of the opposite sex. This is explosive enough but the same article goes on to report that some Muslims even choose to have separate wedding parties for men and women. Let’s prepare for the backlash.
And the Daily Telegraph has an opinion piece from Hizb ut-Tahrir that argues, amongst other things that, their “courageous stance in mobilising public opinion in the Muslim world has earned it the universal support of Muslim masses and caused widespread consternation among its opponents”; and they are being targeted by governments because their group, “continues to courageously expose the crimes of Western governments to a global audience; it unrelentingly challenges the West’s neo-liberal interventionist policies in the Muslim world and it works to present Islam as an ideological alternative to Western secular capitalism as a model of governance in the Muslim world. “