The Australian reports today that members of the PM’s Muslim Community Reference Group (MCRG) have taken a break from calling for government acceptance of Hezbollah as ‘freedom fighters’, and chanting “death to the enemies” (of Lebanon) at anti-war rallies to put forward a rather novel idea. The MCRG are calling for the establishment of a mentoring program for converts to Islam, complete with an ‘orientation pack’ for new Muslims.

MUSLIM leaders have urged the Howard Government to back a plan that would help prevent new converts to Islam from having their minds poisoned by extremist clerics.

Under the proposal by John Howard’s Muslim advisory board, mentors would bring converts into the fold to stop them falling into the hands of radicals.

There appears to be a common pattern emerging in the MCRG’s dealings with government: highlight some supposed ‘threat’ and then propose a solution that requires the expenditure of public funds to achieve it. In this case, the MCRG are promoting the threat of the radicalised convert and then asking that the government ‘back’ (i.e. fund) the production and distribution of supposed ‘convert packs’.

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Nowadays, let’s face it, it’s just not PC for Muslims to question Hezbollah’s motives or raise doubts about the efficacy of supporting them. One doesn’t need to travel too far into the Australian Muslim community to see that everyone loves Nasrallah. Even the handpicked members of the government’s Muslim Reference Committee — card-carrying moderates, if ever there were — are demanding that the government delist them as a terrorist organisation. The timing is impeccable: say nothing when they were originally listed, but as soon as they start raining missiles on the “Zionist Entity”, we start demanding the government reconsider its assessment. With timing like that, it’s no wonder we are misunderstood.

Hezbollah, we are repeatedly told, are not terrorists but ‘freedom fighters’. They are defending Lebanon against an Israeli invasion. However, they are not simply a self-funded, self-armed, self-inspired localised grassroots militia. They clearly have better equipment and training than even the Lebanese standing army and may even eclipse the other Arab states in their on-the-ground capability. Certainly, they seem to be doing what no Arab army has done in living memory and that is put up a credible fight against the Israeli Defence Force. This is almost entirely due to the fact that they receive their funding, inspiration, training, weapons and direction from Iran.

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Over the last few years, a number of different cities have emerged as creative or technological hubs of sorts. Bangalore, in India, springs to mind as one such example: a city that has transformed itself into a world-class centre for technological talent that is now attracting diaspora Indians back to India. New Zealand is another country that has benefited from one of its cities — Wellington — evolving into what might, for want of a better term, be called an IQ hotspot.

I recently came across an interesting essay by Richard Florida that was published on the excellent Cato Unbound site. Florida writes about the Wellington experience, using Bill Gate’s term IQ magnet to describe these sorts of cities: cities where smart and creative people gather, from across the world, to work, do business and learn.

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Any favourable mention of ‘democracy’ in an Islamic setting will invariably provoke an outraged response from some Muslims. “Democracy is shirk (polytheism) because it replaces the laws of Allah with man-made laws,” will be the essential argument. Ergo, any Muslim who suggests that the absence of democracy in the Muslim lands is a bad thing is therefore, in the minds of these Muslims, advocating the wholesale replacement of the shariah with a law that gives ascendency to the ‘laws of man’.

The typical knee-jerk opposition to the concept of ‘democracy’ is, in reality, born from a misunderstanding as to the meaning of the word rather than a real ideological opposition to it. This is because when a person says or writes ‘democracy’, many Muslims hear or read ’secularism’. These are two very different concepts and, despite what some may say, one does not necessarily imply the other.

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The issue of consanguineous marriage (marriage between relatives) in the Muslim community is, for obvious reasons, a rather sensitive one. There are many people in the community who are in such relationships and even more who are the product of these relationships. Indeed, we know that such marriages are permissable under the shariah because the Prophet (saw) himself married his cousin, Zainab bint Jahsh. We also know that first cousins are allowed to marry under Australian law. There is absolutely no argument about the the legitimacy or legality of such marriages.

Whilst Western culture might view consanguineous marriage as somewhat distasteful, these marriages have been a common feature of Arab and some Muslim societies for thousands of years. The marrying of one’s child to a family member was seen as a means of maintaining the wealth of the family within the family, and mitigating against the risk of marrying one’s daughter or son into a family with which one might not be fully familiar.

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Sigmund Freud, the founder of the psychoanalytic school of psychology, would have been 150 years old this month.

Whilst many pieces have been written examining different aspects of Freud’s legacy, two stand out for capturing succintly and elegantly what is, without doubt, Freud’s greatest contribution to our contemporary understanding of the human condition.

In his inimical style, Anthony Daniels, writing in The Times, offers this summary of Freud’s contribution to our modern culture:

The influence of his ideas, albeit in vulgarised and simplified versions, has been culturally baleful and even catastrophic. For example, the notion that dysfunctional behaviour in adulthood has its origin in infantile or childhood traumas has led to a general belief in the existence of buried psychological treasure which, once unearthed and expressed in clear terms, automatically, in and of itself, causes the dysfunctional behaviour to cease, without any further conscious effort to control it on the patient’s part.

Freud thus strengthened a tendency for people to place the blame for their vices first on their parents and secondly on the doctors who failed to “cure” them of those vices. He was one of the most powerful modern destroyers of the concept of personal responsibility.

Writing in The Spectator, the British philosopher, Roger Scruton offers a similar assessment to that of Daniels.

The tendency, that Daniels mentions, for humans to seek to blame their vices on others may not have originated with Freud but certainly Freud’s theories bestowed upon this pathosis a level of credibility that had otherwise been denied to it. He legitimised the abdication of personal responsibility which has poisoned so many aspects and sections of our society: from the medicalisation of all sorts of deviant behaviours to the acceptance of social determinism (“He had a bad childhood, your honour”) as a mitigating factor in the sentencing of serious crimes.

Jenny Mikakos is a state Labor politician of Greek extraction in Victoria. On the 4th of May, she stood up in parliament and said a few words about the “Pontian genocide”.

On 19 May the Pontian community in Victoria and around the world will commemorate the 87th anniversary of the Pontian genocide that occurred in present day Turkey. Between 1916 and 1923 over 353 000 Pontic Greeks living in Asia Minor and in Pontos, which is near the Black Sea, died as a result of the 20th century’s first but less known genocide. Over a million Pontic Greeks were forced into exile. In the preceding years 1.5 million Armenians and 750 000 Assyrians in various parts of Turkey also perished.

She then called on the Turkish government to take responsibility for what took place and apologise to its victims:

Unlike Germany, which has taken responsibility for the Jewish holocaust, Turkey has never apologised to its victims. The Turkish government must begin the reconciliation process by acknowledging these crimes against humanity. The suffering of the victims of the Pontian genocide cannot and will not be forgotten.

Naturally, this is a contentious issue with Turkey maintaining that no such massacre ever took place. On the other hand, the Greeks and Armenians, along with a number of international human rights organisations, maintain that huge numbers of their people did indeed die and the Turkish government was responsible.

Regardless of whether one believes Ms. Mikakos’ interpretation of historical events, the hysterical reaction from some members of the local Turkish community is surprising.

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