Category Archives: Australia

Sunday Telegraph sued over ‘extremist’ claim

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Yahya_IbrahimAn Islamic preacher is demanding libel damages of up to £100,000 over a Sunday Telegraph story.

Yahya Ibrahim launched an action for defamation claiming the story suggested he was a proponent of terror who holds offensive, violently extreme and anti-Semitic beliefs. The story, headed “Hardline cleric banned in the US will preach to British universities” ran in the paper and online in January last year.

According to a writ filed with the High Court, Ibrahim says the story suggests he intended to preach his dangerous beliefs to students in the Yuk in a bid to radicalise them and turn them to violence. Ibrahim says he is a moderate teacher committed to religious tolerance, denies he holds radical views, and is opposed to violence.

After he complained by email, the writ claims, publishers Telegraph Media Group ran a short apology and changed the online version of the story. However, Ibrahim claims the article included defamatory allegations until April last year.

Ibrahim, who lives in Western Australia, claims he suffered acute embarrassment and distress, and argues that his personal and professional reputations were damaged by publication.

He also claims his distress was compounded by the paper’s solicitors who falsely accused him of having discriminatory and anti-Semitic views. The solicitors also tried to tarnish him by citing untrue and defamatory material from the internet to support their position, without any proper research, the writ claims.

Ibrahim is seeking aggravated damages, saying the paper ran the stories without checking the facts with him first or giving him the chance to comment, and then published a woefully inadequate and insulting apology in the print edition. He is also seeking an injunction banning repetition of the allegations at the heart of his legal battle.

Press Gazette, 16 March 2011

Via ENGAGE

The offending article, by Patrick Sawer and Philip Sherwell, which was published in the Sunday Telegraph on 24 January 2010, was a typical scaremongering piece about “extremist preachers” speaking at British universities.

The reliability of the article may be judged by the fact that the main source for the attack on Yahya Ibrahim was David Ouellette, formerly of the (now defunct) right-wing Zionist website Judeoscope, which specialised in portraying mainstream Muslim figures as dangerous extremists. Ouellette was quoted as saying that while Ibrahim was “widely considered as a ‘bridge builder’ between Muslims and non-Muslims” in Australia, he was in reality “a hard-core activist of the Wahhabi strain working to spread in the West the hateful, terror-inspiring Salafi ideology, the likes of whom should not be welcome in free societies fighting Islamic extremism”.

The article also quoted critics who had “called on the Government to take a tougher line on barring extremists from Britain”. Predictably, these critics were Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens and Paul Goodman.

Melbourne: civil libertarians slam anti-Islam group

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Q Society logoAn anti-Islamic group’s opposition to a weekly Muslim prayer session being held in Melbourne’s inner suburbs has been condemned by a civil liberties organisation, Liberty Victoria.

Q Society opposes what it calls the “Islamisation of Australia”, saying accommodating Islamic custom and law threatens Australia’s basic freedoms. It has started a petition against a planning amendment at Melbourne’s Port Phillip Council that would formalise an existing weekly hour-long prayer session at a St Kilda community house.

Muslims have been praying at the weekly Friday session for years.

Liberty Victoria president Spencer Zifcak said Q Society’s campaign “bears all the hallmarks of a deliberate attempt to deny to one religion the freedom of religious belief accorded to every other religion”.

With a large Jewish community living in the St Kilda area, Professor Zifcak said Jewish groups in the area had welcomed the planning application but Q Society was arguing that allowing more Muslims to pray in the community house “would be contrary to social cohesion in the area where people of the Christian and Jewish faiths are in a majority”.

Prof Zifcak said the Islamic prayer group had been meeting without incident or concern for years.

A spokesperson for the Q Society has described it as “a group of individuals from varying backgrounds, of different cultural and religious persuasions who are committed to safeguard and promote Australia’s free, open and democratic society”.

AAP, 2 March 2011

Indicative of the Q Society’s politics was their response to the proposal (later adopted) that Marrickville Council in New South Wales should join the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel. The Q Society organised a petition claiming that the councillors responsible for this initiative had “formally aligned their municipality with terrorist organisations seeking to overthrow the State of Israel” and were “supporting the worldview of totalitarian Islam”.

Melbourne: anti-Islam campaigners claim Muslim prayer group will ‘strike terror into the hearts of local residents’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A row has broken out in a Jewish-dominated area of Melbourne over a Muslim prayer group that meets in a council-owned hall.

The St Kilda Islamic Society has held Friday prayers at the facility for years, but the council now wants to change the venue’s permit to formalise the arrangement. That council decision has given opponents of the prayer group the opportunity to get vocal.

The prayer group started in 2008 with a group of Melbourne taxi drivers who were looking for a place to worship. They began meeting at the Alma Road Community House in Melbourne’s inner south-east, an area recognised as a Jewish enclave and does not have a local mosque.

These days about 35 men attend Friday prayers, including Qaiser Mohammed. “They think that we are going to occupy this place. We are here for one hour [a week], just for the Friday prayer,” he said.

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Nearly half of Australians are anti-Muslim: study

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A decade-long national study has found that nearly 50 per cent of Australians identify themselves as having anti-Muslim attitudes.

Researchers from universities across the country polled thousands of people about their attitudes to different cultures and whether they had experienced racism. The research found around one in 10 Australians identified themselves as prejudiced against other cultures.

About one-quarter of those surveyed said they had anti-Semitic or anti-Asian attitudes, while a slightly larger number were prejudiced against Aborigines. Anti-Muslim sentiment was even higher, at 48.6 per cent.

Lead researcher Professor Kevin Dunn from the University of Western Sydney says recent political rhetoric has not helped. “If you continue to speak about a group as a problem, whether that be asylum seekers or Muslims, that will [be] cast within the public mind,” he said.

ABC Online, 23 February 2011

See also Michael Brull, “Islamophobia, not Islam, is the real threat”, ABC Online, 23 February 2011

‘Say no to burqas’ mural is replaced … with pro-Israel mural

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Fiona Byrne muralThe Greens candidate tipped to take the once-safe Labor seat of Marrickville from the Deputy Premier, Carmel Tebbutt, in the state election has been targeted in a mural over her council’s decision to boycott Israel.

Marrickville Council’s support for the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign (BDS) against Israel in December has already been the subject of hostile questions to the Greens candidate and mayor of Marrickville, Fiona Byrne, at a debate with Ms Tebbutt last week.

Yesterday a mural in Newtown stating “Say no to the burqa” was temporarily repainted by its artist, Sergio Redegalli, to read “Say no to Fiona Byrne”. The burqa-clad woman with a strike through her was replaced by a figure in green and a mayoral sceptre stabbing a Star of David.

Mr Redegalli, a Newtown resident, said he was only keeping the new mural up for 24 hours to document it.

The artist said he was not a member of any political party and “hates” Labor. “[I wanted to] get people to look up Fiona Byrne, see who she is, what she stands for,” he said.

Sydney Morning Herald, 23 February 2011

Australia: opposition leader is deliberately allowing extremists to promote Islamophobia, says Labor

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Labor has accused Opposition Leader Tony Abbott of harbouring extremists, as debate heated up over MPs’ comments on Muslims and immigration policy.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard has called on Mr Abbott to send two senior coalition members – Senator Cory Bernardi and immigration spokesman Scott Morrison – to the backbench over their recent comments.

While Mr Abbott has resisted the call, he used a party room meeting on Tuesday to admonish the two members for going “a little too far” in their public comments.

Senator Bernardi told a radio station last week that: “Islam itself is the problem – it’s not Muslims”. He added that: “Islam is a totalitarian, political and religious ideology”.

Mr Morrison gave a qualified apology a day after he publicly questioned the taxpayer-funded travel arrangements for asylum seekers attending the funerals of people killed in the Christmas Island boat tragedy. It also was reported that Mr Morrison had suggested to shadow cabinet last year the coalition capitalise on fears about Muslim immigration.

But, Mr Abbott said, the coalition did not support a discriminatory immigration policy and believed Australia benefited from being a multicultural society. “We will never say to perfectly good Australians that they are not fully valued in their own country,” he told coalition MPs.

However, the federal parliament’s only Muslim MP, Labor’s Ed Husic, said Mr Abbott had allowed the comments to be “deliberately floated in the public arena for political advantage”. “The extremists continue to cloud commonsense and decency within the coalition,” Mr Husic said.

AAP, 23 February 2011

‘Islam is a totalitarian political and religious ideology’, Australian senator claims

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Cory BernardiOpposition Leader Tony Abbott has been forced to dissociate himself from controversial remarks by his shadow parliamentary secretary Cory Bernardi, who said he was ”against Islam”.

Senator Bernardi, one of the party’s most prominent rightwingers, said on radio that, in the past decade or two, there had been ”an increasing indulgence of people who are pursuing an ideology and a values system that is at complete odds with Western society and with Western culture”. If he said he was against Islam, Senator Bernardi said, ”I’m called a racist or a bigot.”

Asked whether Mr Abbott had tried to stop him from expressing his views, Senator Bernardi said: “He certainly hasn’t”.

He said that “Islam is the problem – it’s not Muslims. Muslims are individuals that practise their faith in their own way. But Islam is a totalitarian political and religious ideology. It tells people everything about how they need to conduct themselves, who they are allowed to marry and how they are allowed to treat other people.”

Mr Abbott said last night: ”There are Islamic extremists just as there are other extremists that are a problem in a tolerant and pluralistic society. In suggesting that Islam itself is the problem, Cory does not represent my views.”

The latest embarrassment follows a damaging week for the opposition, which started with a furore over comments from its immigration spokesman Scott Morrison objecting to the government flying relatives from Christmas Island to Sydney for the funerals of asylum seekers who drowned late last year.

This was followed by a leak alleging Mr Morrison had suggested at a shadow cabinet meeting that the opposition capitalise on public sentiment against Muslim immigration.

The Age, 19 February 2011

Update:  See the Sydney Morning Herald, 20 February 2011

Australia: opposition immigration spokesman accused of advocating anti-Muslim campaign to win votes

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Scott Morrison protestEmbattled Opposition immigration spokesman Scott Morrison has rejected as gossip a report that he urged shadow cabinet to take advantage of fears about Muslims.

A Fairfax report says Mr Morrison urged the Coalition to capitalise on electorate fears of “Muslim immigration”, “Muslims in Australia” and Muslim migrants’ “inability to integrate”.

The report says Mr Morrison’s suggestion was slapped down by senior Liberals including Julie Bishop and Philip Ruddock, but the Opposition has been under pressure over reports of a continuing split within the party over the issue.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard called on Opposition Leader Tony Abbott to set the record straight and confirm if the discussion took place. She also called for Mr Morrison to be sacked if he did suggest the Coalition pursue a discriminatory immigration policy.

Former Liberal prime minister Malcolm Fraser, a strong supporter of multiculturalism, told ABC Radio he was not surprised about the alleged discussion. “It’s what I would have expected of Scott Morrison. I think that is politics at its very, very basest. I really do,” he said. “I wouldn’t tolerate such views. My government would not have tolerated such views.”

ABC News, 17 February 2011

Australia: anger at anti-Muslim petition in Senate

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Gary HumphriesACT Liberal senator Gary Humphries has upset Canberra’s Islamic community by tabling a strongly worded anti-Muslim petition in the Senate, even though he says he does not agree with its content or know the signatories to it.

The petition, signed by three people from suburban Sydney, calls for a 10-year moratorium on Muslim immigration and a review of Australia’s immigration policy to ensure priority is given to Christians.

Citing the Constitution, the founding fathers and the current parliamentary prayers, the petitioners insist Australia is a Christian Commonwealth. They want any attempt to establish a Muslim nation in Australia to be rejected.

Senator Humphries tabled the petition on Thursday, the last sitting day of the week. He did not speak in support of it, but tabled it to be recorded in Hansard.

Under parliamentary convention, presenting a petition does not necessarily mean a senator or MP agrees with its contents. Senators and MPs are not required to table petitions on behalf of constituents, although it is generally accepted that they will.

When contacted by The Canberra Times yesterday, Senator Humphries said every citizen had a right to be heard.

Canberra Times, 15 February 2011

See also “Religious prejudice gone ‘beyond a joke'”, Canberra Times, 15 February 2011

Update:  See “Abbott backs anti-Muslim petition MP”, ABC News, 15 February 2011

Tackle ‘extreme Islam before it’s too late’, Aussie MPs warn

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Australia risks becoming a nation of “ethnic enclaves” that unknowingly buys livestock slaughtered “in the name of Allah”, senior Liberal MPs have warned.

Opening up a new political faultline, former immigration minister Kevin Andrews lashed out at political leaders who failed to speak out on the rise of extreme Islam, claiming the silence contributes to the rise of One Nation-type movements. Another Liberal frontbencher, Mitch Fifield, warned of the danger of “parallel societies” developing as has occurred in Europe where hardline Muslim groups preached sharia law rather than Western values.

Amid a robust debate in Europe over failed “state multiculturalism”, Liberal Senator Cory Bernardi warned Australia must avoid the mistakes of nations that allowed religious fanatics to prosper “before it is too late”.

Senator Bernardi warned of a growing “cultural divide” in Australia as hardline followers of Islam turned their backs on mainstream values. He cited the advent of Muslim-only toilets at a Melbourne university and the halal method of meat slaughter as cultural practices that must be opposed.

“I, for one, don’t want to eat meat butchered in the name of an ideology that is mired in sixth century brutality and is anathema to my own values,” he said.

Herald Sun, 9 February 2011