Entries Tagged 'News' ↓

Johann Hari, writing in The New Republic, offers an amusing (and slightly disturbing) travelogue on the National Review cruise. Some highlights:

I am standing waist-deep in the Pacific Ocean, indulging in the polite chit-chat beloved by vacationing Americans. A sweet elderly lady from Los Angeles is sitting on the rocks nearby, telling me dreamily about her son. “Is he your only child?” I ask. “Yes,” she answers. “Do you have a child back in England?” she asks me. No, I say. Her face darkens. “You’d better start,” she says. “The Muslims are breeding. Soon, they’ll have the whole of Europe.”

I am getting used to such moments, when holiday geniality bleeds into–well, I’m not sure exactly what. I am traveling on a bright-white cruise ship with two restaurants, five bars, and 500 readers of National Review. Here, the Iraq war has been “an amazing success.” Global warming is not happening. Europe is becoming a new Caliphate. And I have nowhere to run.

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Tariq Nelson and Umar Lee both have pieces up about the so-called Mapping Sharia in America Project.  Apparently, someone ‘converted’ to Islam at a mosque open day and then went on to engage Umar in a very strange email conversation that includes such questions such as:

2. From reading the various articles you wrote on Salafism and my being a new convert, do we at Dar Al Hijrah strive for a Caliphate State in America? From my readings I understand Saudi Arabia practices the purest form of Islam in regards to Sharia Law.

The “convert” then proceeded to publish a number of claims supposedly based on his experiences at the mosque open day and after his “conversion”.

Both articles make for interesting (and disturbing) reading.  The email exchange between Umar and the “convert” and then his concerned “father” are especially bizarre.

I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so. This is what happens when you appoint one man as the representative of 300,000 Muslims: every word he has ever said and will say is analysed, politicised and/or given an importance surpassing what it would ordinarily receive. Every word that Sheikh Fehmi has ever uttered on the public record, every letter of support he has written to the Immigration Review Tribunal, every lecture ever held at the sheikh’s mosque, and every other detail of the sheikh’s life is going to be scrutinised by those with an interest in selling papers or selling a particular agenda. This is one of the many reasons why this position of mufti should have been abolished. Sheikh Fehmi is a decent man who has, over many decades, served Islam and the Muslims of this country. He deserves better than this.

The Sunday Herald Sun report today:

DEMAND for Muslim schools has soared in Victoria, with waiting lists of more than 300 students at some campuses.

Australian Council for Islamic Education in Schools chairman Abdul Rahman Najmeddine said demand for Islamic education was unprecedented, with a need to build more schools.

This is not surprising and would seem to reflect the overall trend towards private education. Whether or not one views children being educated outside of the state system as a good thing depends largely on whether one believes parents have more right to decide what and how their children are taught than public servants.

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The Age and ABC are reporting today that Sheikh Taj ad-Din al-Hilaly, the so-called mufti of Australia and New Zealand, has stood down. He has been replaced by Sheikh Fehmi Naji El-Imam, the imam of Preston Mosque in Melbourne’s north.

Controversial muslim cleric, Sheik Taj el-Din Al Hilali has declined the position of Mufti of Australia and a new mufti has been elected.

Imams from across the country were at Melbourne’s Preston Mosque for a meeting of the National Imam’s Council.

The Council has announced Sheik Fehmi Naji El-Imam as the Mufti of Australia for a two-year term.

The Council said Sheik Al Hilali was appointed first, however he declined the position and proposed Sheikh Fehmi to be appointed Mufti.

Time will, of course, tell whether the appointment of Sheikh Fehmi is an improvement or not. Nobody can doubt his moderate credentials and he is certainly well respected in the Victorian Muslim community. If we must have one imam as the face of Islam, then I suppose Sheikh Fehmi is a relatively safe choice.

However, rather than appointing a new mufti (and therefore exposing the Muslim community to the same problems that plagued Sheikh Taj’s tenure) the National Imam’s Council should have just abolished the position forever. There is no need for a ‘mufti’ in this country and it causes more problems than it solves by making the entire Muslim community, in all its heterogeneity, hostage to the pronouncements — past and present — of one man. It is also a poisoned chalice for the imam who takes the position: there will, almost certainly, be a frenzied rush to find anything controversial about the new mufti so that he too can be placed on the front page of the nation’s newspapers.

Firstly, let’s say a few words about Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the celebrity apostate who is in town for the Sydney Writers’ Festival, to spruik her book amid what I’m sure she and her publicists hope will be a suitably outraged reaction from the local Muslim community. There. That’s about all that needs to be said (nothing).

Sadly, after viewing a few of her interviews, we must conclude that her commentary is on an entirely different intellectual plane to more worthy and thoughtful opponents such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Pipes or, say, the octogenarian caller to talkback radio complaining about the smell of “Moslem cooking”. In other words, nothing to see here. Let’s move on.

And so we come to The Age who, in covering Hirsi Ali’s story, report:

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The Courier Mail reports today:

NEARLY half a billion dollars may have been spent on a the national plan to help assimilate Muslims into Australian society – but it is not clear exactly where the money has gone.

Here are half a billion reasons why governments should not be funding assimilation, integration or, for that matter, any other form of cultural or social engineering. As for the sorts of things that this money is being spent on, then I refer interested readers to this fascinating extract from Hansard [pdf] in which the Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs discuss some of the government-funded projects being conducted as part of this “national action plan” (starts on page 71).

Here’s one such exchange in which the government describes its attempts to counter something called “rigid thinking” among Muslims.

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Theodore Dalrymple in the LA Times on the rise and rise of the celebrity as a moral and political guide:

THE CULT OF CELEBRITY is not new, but it is increasing in its scope and effect. At one time, people wanted simply to gawp at the famous, and possibly dress like them. Now, many take their moral and political opinions from them. For example, most young people’s view of Africa, insofar as they have one at all, probably derives more from the pronouncements of Bono, U2’s lead singer, than from any other source of knowledge about the Dark Continent.

As it happens, Bono has boned up on his subject, even if his conclusions about what should be done to help Africa are eminently disputable and deeply hypocritical. His authority arises from his celebrity, not from his knowledge. An equally knowledgeable but otherwise totally obscure person would not be able to hector the leaders of France, Germany and Italy for falling behind on their promises of aid, as Bono did last week. When Bono speaks, they have to listen — he is more famous than they are.

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ICRA’s All Eyez on Youth report resurfaces in the media again today with the news that an “alarming number” of Muslim girls are turning to drugs, and Muslim parents need classes to help them speak English and be good parents.

MUSLIM parents are being urged to take parenting and English classes to help improve their relationship with their children, says a report into social problems.

The Independent Centre of Research Australia (ICRA) Youth Centre’s All Eyez On Youth also reported an alarming number of Muslim girls were turning to illicit drugs to escape family and social problems.

ICRA president Fadi Abdul Rahman said parents needed to recognise the signs of a troubled child.

“We are naive as a community and as parents,” he said. “Because we are under the microscope we are focusing on dealing with the issues outside rather than looking at what is happening to these children.”

Parents didn’t want to think about drugs but “it’s simply unrealistic”, he said.

If a late night talkback host on an AM radio station said Muslims needed to be taught how to be good parents and needed English lessons because an “alarming number” of their children were now involved in drugs, how would we react?

Obviously, there are problems in some sections of the Muslim community.  However, there are problems in sections of every community and so I’m not sure it is particularly helpful for common issues such as drug-use to be highlighted in just one of these communities and treated as though there is something intrinsically different about Muslim drug-use that warrants special attention or emphasis.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali has a rather strange opinion piece doing the rounds in which she comments on the current situation in Turkey and the ongoing tension between the elected representatives of the Turkish people and the military.

The idea of an army under civilian control doesn’t seem particularly controversial to us, but Hirsi Ali opposes it, calling on the EU to abandon the notion that, “Turkey’s army should be placed under civil control like all armies in the EU member states. ” This is, she contends, perfectly consistent with liberalism, with the Kemalist Turks who ban schoolgirls from wearing hijab and who stipulate prison sentences for men who chew gum in front of statues of Ataturk cast as ‘liberals’; the heroes in Hirsi Ali’s titanic struggle between a liberal/military alliance and the so-called “Islamists” with their hijabi wives. Never mind, of course, that the “bad guys” have the backing of up to “70 percent of voters”.

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