Author: Geoff Strong
Publication: The Age
Date: August 31, 2005
URL: http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/australiahating-muslims-unchecked-says-teacher/2005/08/30/1125302570133.html
The warning signs were apparent to Chris Doig
at least 10 years ago. A small group of the teacher's students made it clear
they despised Australia, regarding it as a degenerate culture to be disrupted
and ultimately swept aside.
Two Muslim students danced with joy after
the September 11 attacks in the United States. Other students told him these
attitudes came out of ideas picked up at Melbourne's northern suburbs mosques.
The teacher says he tried to voice concern
to his school administration, to the Education Department bureaucracy, even
to senior political figures in his own Labor Party, but his warnings were
ignored.
The school was Moreland City College in Coburg,
which closed at the end of last year when enrolments fell to 270, from a high
of 1000 a decade before. The official reason for the closure was that community
confidence had fallen, particularly after adverse media reports when students
vandalised mini-buses belonging to the neighbouring Yooralla Society.
Now there is renewed soul searching after
London's July bombers were found to have grown up in Britain.
Mr Doig isn't claiming his former students
were potential bombers, or that their behaviour was entirely to do with their
religious views, but he is concerned that some of their attitudes were so
hostile to Australian culture that their behaviour descended frequently to
violence. He is especially critical of what he says was a faint-hearted response
from the school and the educational hierarchy and what he claims was their
tolerance of intolerable behaviour and attitudes.
The Age has spoken to two other former teachers
from the school who declined to be named but who endorsed Mr Doig's claims
about an under-
current of anti-Australian values among a
small core of students.
The Education Department refused to allow
former principal Margaret Lacey to speak, offering instead the director of
the Education Department's northern region, Wayne Craig. Mr Craig said he
had been involved in investigating the problems at the school and Islamic
fundamentalism among the students was never raised as an issue.
"There were many problems at the school
and I'm not saying this might not have happened when this teacher was there,
but it never came up among anyone we spoke to. I believe that if these values
are out there, principals and teachers will know about it."
The senior imam at the Preston Mosque, Sheikh
Fehmi Naji el-Imam, denied that anti-Australian values would have come from
his mosque's religious teachers. "I am 100 per cent sure of that, but
it is possible these views came from conversations they had with other people
or with other kids when they were at the mosque."
The vice-president of the Victorian division
of the Australian Education Union, Meredith Peace, was involved in negotiations
over the school after the decision had been made to close it.
"There were some extremely disruptive
students at the school, but no evidence was presented that they were Islamic
or that the problems were based on religion," she said.
But Ms Peace said the union became involved
with the school at the end and was more concerned with developing a new school
on the site.
Mr Doig insists that some students were openly
attacking Australia and ridiculing values such as respect for the rights of
others. "Some of the disruptive ones would say Australia was degenerate
and our legal system would be replaced by Shariah (Islamic) law in the not
too distant future."
He emphasised that the troublemakers were
not among the most religious Muslim students, who tended to show respect for
teachers.
He believes the troublemakers were a key to
the breakdown of the school, which gained some notoriety as being where Muslim
students were reported to have danced with joy after the September 11, 2001,
attacks on the US. He said two students did this in one of his classes although
one apologised the next day.
"The problem for all of us is how to
respond to this. There was an unwillingness to challenge their destructive
behaviour and attitudes because it was seen as culturally insensitive. This
was irresponsible political correctness.
"We have seen from the London bombings
what can happen when the sort of attitudes these kids expressed are allowed
to go unchallenged. These students expressed open defiance and an obvious
antagonism for Western cultural values, dismissing the sort of middle-of-the-road
tolerant values that are the basis of the Australian system."
This small group of highly disruptive students,
he said, had no respect for others, property, most women or the rights of
any culture other than what they saw as their own.
About half the students at the school were
Muslim, and Mr Doig says the vast majority were respectful and well behaved.
The troublemakers, he says, made up no more than 5 per cent. Most were the
Australian-born children of parents who had come from a handful of small neighbouring
villages in Lebanon during the civil war that raged from the late 1970s to
the early 1990s.
"Some of these were so disruptive and
even violent that staff and other students abandoned the school when they
could." He said he was threatened with stabbing and had to call the police
three times.
Mr Doig, who was head of English and humanities
at the school, now teaches at another college, but he kept notes, letters
and incident reports from more than 10 years.
"We were constantly being told that these
kids were the disadvantaged and it is true many came from difficult backgrounds
and large families. I think there was also an unwillingness among school administrators
to acknowledge that some core values of the Australian society, such as respect
for others and their right to learn, needed to be taught.
Mr Doig's claims have been backed up by two
other former teachers at the school who did not want to be identified.
One, whose background is Middle Eastern, said
there was a tendency in the educational climate of the school to take the
side of disruptive students and blame the teachers. "You could never
throw them out of the class; if you did they would just be sent back in."
The administration's attitude was that these
troublemakers had a right to an education, he said. "The problem kids
all came from a small community in Lebanon and were related by blood. They
would pick on the non-Muslim kids - and even other Muslims from Turkey and
Iraq. I think in they end the Education Department twigged, and they basically
closed the school down to break the group up, sending small groups of these
kids to different schools in the surrounding area.
"Just to keep the numbers up they used
to take problem kids that were thrown out of other nearby schools. We even
got the ones who were expelled from private schools like King Khalid (Islamic
College in Coburg)." The teacher said these students used to boast that
Australia would become a majority Islamic country in 50 years.
"They would do this by converting the
infidel and by out-breeding the rest of the community."
