Category Archives: Australia

Don’t force Aussie Muslims into ghettos

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Australian Muslim leaders are warning that repeated opposition by local councils and residents to the building of Muslim schools and worship places is pushing the sizable minority into ghettos, reported the Sydney Morning Herald on Saturday, December 27.

“When we’re not able to do that in some places, where the approach is unfairly delayed and unreasonably delayed, then it’s forcing people to go to one particular area, even though they don’t live in that particular area,” Keysar Trad, president of the Islamic Friendship Society, said.

Proposals by Australian Muslims to build schools and worship places have repeatedly been met with strong opposition from local councils and residents. For example, it took three years and a half to get approval from the Sydney local council to open a prayer center in Penrith city in New South Wales. Earlier this year, the Camden local council rejected a proposal to build a Muslim school to serve 1200 students in the city and surrounding areas.

Islam Online, 27 December 2008

Muslim cemetery plans anger Aussies

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Plans for building a Muslim cemetery in the ground of a historic Anglican graveyard in south-west Sydney are drawing a fierce opposition from locals, reported The Sydney Morning Herald on Thursday, September 25.

“My history is buried there,” Len English, from the Friends of St Thomas Church, said. “My grandparents, my parents, my aunts, uncles, my brother, cousins. Our family goes back 200 years in the district. They came to Camden Park and stayed there.”

The Lebanese Muslim Association (LMA) has paid $1.5 million for the St Thomas Anglican Cemetery at Narellan for the graveyard near Camden. The cemetery, which has capacity for 1900 single plots, has space for almost 4000 bodies.

“We all know they’ve got to bury their dead somewhere but I think they could have looked around and probably found some ground like every other religion has done in this area,” said English. “We’ve got a Catholic cemetery, we’ve got a Church of England cemetery, we’ve got a general cemetery just out of Camden. I’ve got nothing against migrants but when they want to take over your cemetery …”

Camden was the scene of a fierce opposition from locals to plans to build a Muslim school in the town. The locals, however, gave blessings for the construction of a Catholic school in the area.

In post 9/11 Australia, Muslims, who make up 1.5 percent of Australia’s 20-million population and who have been in the country for more than 200 years, have been haunted with suspicion and have had their patriotism questioned.

A 2007 poll taken by the Issues Deliberation Australia (IDA) think-tank found that Australians basically see Islam as a threat to the Australian way of life.

A recent governmental report revealed that Muslims are facing deep-seated Islamophobia and race-based treatment like never before.

Islam Online, 25 September 2008

‘Muslim massacre’ computer game condemned

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Muslim Massacre

A computer game in which players control an American soldier sent to “wipe out the Muslim race” has been condemned as offensive and tasteless by a British Muslim group. The goal of Muslim Massacre, which can be downloaded for free on the internet, is to “ensure that no Muslim man or woman is left alive”, according to the game’s creator.

Players control an “American Hero” armed with a machine gun and rocket launcher who is parachuted into the Middle East. Users progress through levels, first killing Arabs that appear on screen and later taking on Osama bin Laden, Mohammed and finally Allah.

The game’s creator, a freelance programmer known as Sigvatr, described the game on the SomethingAwful.com website as “fun and funny”. In a “How you can help” section, he writes to visitors: “Don’t whinge about how offensive and ‘edgy’ this is.”

British Muslim youth organisation The Ramadhan Foundation expressed its “deep condemnation and anger” at the game. The group said: “This game is glorifying the killing of Muslims in the Middle East and we urge ISP providers to take action to remove this site from their services as it incites violence towards Muslims and is trying to justify the killing of innocent Muslims.

“We have written to the British Government to urge an inquiry into this game and take action to shut down the site. This is not satire but a deliberate attempt to demonise Muslims.”

Independent, 11 September 2008

Update: See also “‘Muslim Massacre’ computer game blasted in Britain”, AFP, 12 September 2008

Study suggests ‘turban effect’ as a source of Islamophobia

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A Muslim-style turban is perceived as a threat, according to a new study, even by people who don’t realize they hold the prejudice, dubbed “the turban effect” by researchers. Research volunteers played a computer game that showed apartment balconies on which different figures appeared, some wearing Muslim-style turbans or hijabs and others bare-headed. They were told to shoot at the targets carrying guns and spare those who were unarmed, with points awarded accordingly.

People were much more likely to shoot Muslim-looking characters – men or women – even if they were carrying an innocent item instead of a weapon, the researchers found. “Whether they’re holding a steel coffee mug or a gun, people are just more likely to shoot at someone who is wearing a turban,” says author Christian Unkelbach, a visiting scholar at Australia’s University of New South Wales. “Just putting on this piece of clothing changes people’s behaviour.”

Unkelbach largely blames one-sided media portrayals for the bias.

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Australian Muslims win fight for mosque

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Abdul AzizThe small but determined Muslim community in Cairns has finally won the right to build the city’s first mosque after an eight-year battle against an at-times hostile community and claims the religion was trying to “spread its tentacles” to north Queensland.

Work is expected to begin on the mosque within weeks after the Planning and Environment Court dismissed the final group of objections, noting freedom of religion was part of the fabric of the Australian community. “It is in the public interest that persons who choose that faith, just as those who choose any other faith, have access to a safe and reasonably comfortable place of gathering and worship,” judge Keith Dodds said.

Cairns imam Abdul Aziz Mohammed, a former cane farmer and Rotary stalwart whose father moved to the city from India in 1900, yesterday welcomed the decision. He said the ordeal to build the mosque had been the first time he had experienced racism in the 76 years he had lived in the region. “A lot of the objections were just crazy,” he said. “I mean, they wouldn’t know what goes on in a mosque. I was disappointed, but you’ve got to remember the objectors didn’t really number that many.”

Opponents claimed Mr Mohammed was planning to build a “mega-mosque” in the suburban street and that it would become a hotbed of terrorism.

Continue reading →

Town moves against Islamic school

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Camden protest hatWith its lace curtain bungalows and steepled Anglican church, the once tranquil town of Camden in New South Wales seems the most improbable of settings for a row that combines race and religion.

Proud of its rich history, the town promotes itself as “the birthplace of the nation’s wealth”, for it was here, in the early 19th Century, that the sheep and dairy industries first began to flourish. Now the town, which lies on south-west fringes of Sydney, is confronting a very 21st Century issue: the proposal to construct an Islamic school for some 1,200 Muslim pupils.

Back in November, more than 1,000 local people took part in a public meeting. Many participants expressed themselves with little regard for political correctness.

“This has to be one of the nicest places in New South Wales,” said one woman, who has lived in Camden for the past nine years. “Everywhere is being destroyed.”

“Why don’t we tell the truth. They’re wrecking Australia. They’re taking us over,” she said. “Why hasn’t anyone got any guts? They’ve got terrorists amongst ’em… They want to be here so they can go and hide in all the farm houses… This town has every nationality… but Muslims do not fit in this town. We are Aussies, OK.”

Some of the loudest cheers of the night greeted a speech from a local man in his late 70s. “Can I just say this without being racist or political?” he said. “In 1983, in the streets of London a parade by Muslims chanted incessantly ‘If we can take London, we can take the world’. Don’t let them take Camden.”

BBC News, 26 May 2008

Update:  See “Australia Muslim school rejected”, BBC News, 27 May 2008

See also the Daily Telegraph, which tells us that “residents demanded an apology for being labelled racists”, while the Sydney Morning Herald reports that “a resident, Kate McCulloch, emerged from the meeting declaring a victory for ‘decency’ – and insisted Muslims were incompatible with the local community. ‘The ones that come here oppress our society, they take our welfare and they don’t want to accept our way of life’, she said.”

Update 2:  See “A win for racists in Camden”, Green Left Weekly, 31 May 2008

Tariq Ramadan – ‘dangerous radical’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Tariq_Ramadan“Fourest has rendered an invaluable service. She demonstrates with great skill that Ramadan is a dangerous radical who, far from modernizing Islam, is in fact attempting to Islamize modernity.”

Ibn Warraq reviews Caroline Fourest’s book Brother Tariq: The Doublespeak of Tariq Ramadan.

City Journal, 29 February 2008

Note that this English language edition of Fourest’s Frère Tariq is published in the UK by the right-wing think-tank the Social Affairs Unit and features an introduction by Labour MP Denis MacShane.

See also The Australian for the controversy over Tariq Ramadan’s current visit to Australia.

Update: The Australian has commissioned Mad Melanie Phillips to deliver a characteristic rant under the headline “Master of Islamist doublespeak“, which warns the people of Australia that Professor Ramadan is “probably the most dangerous Islamist in the Western world”!

See also “MP warns scholar on racist messages“.

Airport tells faithful to take off turbans, veils

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Security at Brisbane Airport has gone into a spin after an unprecedented crackdown on turbans and other culturally-sensitive headgear worn by passengers. A federal investigation has been launched into an edict by the company in charge of the airport’s security to demand passengers remove for security checks religious headwear, including turbans, veils and Jewish skull caps.

At least one international flight was delayed at the weekend when staff from the company, ISS Security, demanded 13 people of the Sikh religion remove their turbans and a Muslim woman to take off her face veil. The Department of Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Development is investigating whether the clampdown by ISS breached federal airport policy.

It is standard airport practice around the world that religious headwear is only removed after conventional screening methods raise an alarm. But ISS employees yesterday said a directive was issued on Saturday demanding all passengers remove their religious headwear for security checks, regardless of whether there was any cause for suspicion. “We were told you have to take them off, or you’ll be stood down,” one worker said.

NEWS.com.au, 26 February 2008

ABC tricked us, say Muslim women

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Two Muslim women say their participation in an ABC documentary pitched as a “bridge-building” exercise between Islam and the wider community has left them fearful for their safety.

Raisah bint Alan Douglas and 54-year-old Rabiah Hutchinson, the so-called “matriarch” of radical Islam in Australia, have accused the makers of an ABC documentary, Jihadi Sheilas, of deceitful and unethical conduct, saying they were tricked into participating in what they fear will be a misleading documentary.

Yesterday, the women delivered a formal letter of protest to the ABC’s Sydney headquarters.

The two women told The Australian that they were approached separately by an ABC documentary crew last year and invited to participate.

They said they were explicitly and repeatedly told the material would be used on the ABC’s long-running Australian Story, a show Ms Douglas described as “patriotic (and) sympathetic”. She said she was told the focus of the program would be the women’s conversion to Islam, not their alleged links to extremists.

“They said, ‘We’re going to put you on Australian Story’,” Ms Douglas told The Australian. “‘We’d like to because there’s a lot of negative publicity around Muslims and it seems to be getting worse. We, as a community channel, want to do something about it … It will be a bridge-building exercise between the Muslim community and the Australian general public.”‘

The women – neither of whom has seen the program – are concerned the final product portrays them as traitors.

Ms Hutchinson said she had already been verbally abused after being recognised from a promo for the show. She said in one incident, which occurred at Bankstown shopping centre on Sunday, a man yelled at her to “go back where you came from”.

“They actually mentioned the television program,” she said.

The Australian, 5 February 2008