Ameer Ali returns to the pages of the The Australian with the same argument he and others made famous during the Howard Era: the government must use taxpayer’s money to fund some project or else Muslims might do something really, really, really bad.
The Rudd government should urgently boost funding for high-quality Islamic studies courses, moderate Muslim community groups, and police liaison teams to counter home-grown extremism, a leading Australian Islamic expert says.
Such measures offered the best hope of blunting the potential radicalisation of hundreds of Muslim students who come to Australia to study each year. They would have a hugely positive impact on Australian Muslims, said Ameer Ali, vice-president of the Regional Islamic Council of Southeast Asia and the Pacific.
Ameer Ali has been talking up the threat of international students for several years. Here he was two years ago on the pages of the same newspaper:
Moderate Muslims warned yesterday that international students should be forced to undergo training about the Australian way of life to counter their radical interpretations of Islam.
The former chairman of John Howard’s Islamic reference board, Ameer Ali, said some international students needed to be stopped from poisoning the minds of local Muslims.
Leaving aside his obvious totalitarian yearnings for a government that attempts to reprogram foreign nationals entering our country and tries to intervene to stop citizen’s minds being “poisoned”, one must also ask whether the threat that is being promoted here is even remotely real. How many international students have been involved in planning or carrying out terrorist attacks in Australia?