Author: Andrew Bolt
Publication: Herald Sun
Date: April 11, 2007
URL: http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/column_stop_the_hatred/
Maybe this time, I thought. Maybe this first
Australian Islamic Conference would at last show us the moderate Muslim leaders
we've searched for.
God, we need them. Look at the latest doings
of the hate-preachers we have now.
Take the Mufti of Australia, Sheik Taj el-Din
al-Hilaly, who has just given interviews in Iran demanding Muslims stand "in
the trenches" with its hostage-taking regime, and is now being investigated
for allegedly giving $12,000 to a Lebanese propagandist linked to terrorists.
Meanwhile, the head of the Lebanese Muslim
Association, which pays him to preach at Australia's biggest mosque, has had
to seek police protection for suggesting this fool had best shut up.
Yet, even now, the Federation of Islamic Councils,
which made Hilaly mufti, refuses to sack him, though he's vilified Jews, praised
suicide bombers as "heroes", called the September 11 terrorist attacks
"God's work against oppressors", excused convicted pack rapist Bilal
Skaf and said raped women should be "jailed for life".
The greatest pity is that Hilaly isn't the
only hate-preacher in our mosques.
Other radical sheiks have been accused of
telling followers not to pay taxes to this infidel Government.
Worse, the Howard Government sidelined its
Muslim Community Reference Group after finding a third of the 14 "moderates"
it handpicked actually backed the Iranian-backed Hezbollah extremist group,
notorious for its terrorist wing.
So, after all this and more, we desperately
need to hear from those moderate Muslim leaders we keep telling each other
must surely exist. Must.
Was it so dumb to think Mercy Mission would
at last provide them-Muslim leaders who would demonstrate (in the mission's
own words) that they "benefit the communities in which they live"?
You may have dared to hope, given this new
group's leaders include the highly educated Tawfique Chowdhury, a Bangladeshi-born
and Australian-raised IT project manager, and Adel Salman, who so impressed
his employers at Cadbury Schweppes that he was selected for the prestigious
Asialink leaders program.
It was Salman, so polished, who organised
for Mercy Mission its first annual Australian Islamic Conference at Melbourne
University over the Easter weekend.
The odd timing was surely just an innocent
coincidence, because the conference had a noble aim: to "present a true
picture of 'Islam in action' to the wider community" and convince Australians
that "Islamic values are universal values".
So who, among all the Muslims in the world,
did Mercy Mission choose to fly in to give us this "true picture"
of a moderate Islam?
Of the six international speakers it advertised,
let me introduce you to two.
The first is Bilal Philips, a Jamaican-born
Canadian who was a communist and worker for the Black Panther terrorist group
before converting to Islam and becoming a preacher.
His message is uncompromising: "Western
culture led by the United States is an enemy of Islam." Which makes him
an odd choice as speaker at a conference to reassure us that "Islamic
values are universal values".
But the choice of Philips is even odder given
the United States named him as an "unindicted co-conspirator" over
the 1993 bombing of New York's World Trade Centre, and our own security agencies
judged him such a threat he was banned from coming here.
Philips insists he rejects terrorism and considers
al-Qaida a "deviate" group. But from his own website and interviews
you'd see why some might not take him at his word.
He freely admits he was hired by the Saudi
air force during the first Gulf War to preach to American soldiers stationed
in Saudi Arabia and convert them to Islam.
He says he succeeded, and "registered
the names and addresses of over 3000 male and female US soldiers".
Philips didn't just take down their names;
he also visited them back in America. "My role was confined to encouraging
them to train Muslim-American volunteers and go to Bosnia to help the mujahidin
and take part in the war (against Serbia)," he boasted. That worked,
too.
Philips says his name was dragged into the
investigation of the first World Trade Centre bombing, in which six people
were killed, because some African-American soldiers he'd converted were offered
by someone else to Sheik Abdel Rahmen, spiritual head of the terrorists behind
the attack. These ex-soldiers would be great for domestic sabotage, the sheik
was told.
But Clement Rodney Hampton-El, an al-Qaida-trained
American bombmaker now serving a 35-year sentence for the World Trade Centre
bombings, claimed Philips also gave him the names of soldiers who were about
to leave the military and who might help the Bosnian jihadists.
To repeat: Philips denies any links to al-Qaida,
and swears he is opposed to terrorism, although he does say Muslims are entitled
to defend their faith by force.
But given his support for jihadists, his past
contacts with jailed terrorists and the allegations against him, why on earth
did Mercy Mission choose him to preach here?
To invite one such extremist speaker might
seem like bad luck, but to invite two might make you think Mercy Mission wouldn't
know a moderate Muslim if he blew up in their face.
I say that because also high on Mercy Mission's
guest list was another convert, British journalist Yvonne Ridley, with a much
nastier line in preaching.
Ridley didn't just marry a colonel in one
terror group - Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Liberation Organisation - but has
been busy since defending others like it.
Some highlights:
Soon after the September 11 terrorist attacks
Ridley actually accused Islamic sheiks of going soft.
"Muslims have lost confidence since September
11," she complained. "Something as simple as suicide bombers being
martyrs is being denied by prominent sheiks."
That's one of her mantras. At a Belfast meeting
of Islamic students, she insisted there were no innocent Israeli victims in
suicide bombings. Not even children.
"There are no innocents in this war,"
she reportedly raged, because Israeli children could grow up to become Israeli
soldiers.
She even hailed as a "martyr" the
Chechen terrorist Shamil Basayev, who planned the attack on the Beslan school
in which 333 hostages-many of them children-were killed. An "admirable
struggle", she called his life's work.
Ridley has never called on Muslims to boycott
such terrorists, but instead demanded British Muslims "boycott the police
and refuse to co-operate with them in any way, shape or form".
And when relatives of al-Qaida's then leader
in Iraq, the head-hacker Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, denounced his bomb attacks
on three hotels in Jordan, she was livid.
"While the killing of innocent people
is to be condemned without question, there is something rather repugnant about
some of those who rush to re-
nounce acts of terrorism," she sneered.
True, among the 61 dead were many members
of a wedding party, she conceded, but some of them "were part of Jordan's
upper echelons of society", and "others had flown in from America".
What's more, the "bars (were) serving
alcohol", and the evil Jordanian regime "provides backing, support
and intelligence to the American military".
Having proved to her satisfaction the guilt
of the dead civilians, she asked: "I wonder if you see that attack on
the Jordanian hotels in a different light now?"
And she concluded: "I'd rather put up
with a brother like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi any day than have a traitor or a
sell-out for a father, son or grandfather."
What, in Ridley's foul incantations of hatred
and her defence of child-killers and wedding bombers, makes her the kind of
Muslim who would "benefit the communities in which they live"?
What does it say about Mercy Mission that
Ridley-and Philips-were hired as speakers to tell us "Islamic values
are universal values" and we have nothing to fear?
Oh, and about that fear.
It was this same Ridley-happy to "put
up with a brother" like Zarqawi, once filmed cutting off the head of
American hostage Nick Berg-who last week accused Australians of being among
the worst haters of Muslims.
How like her to condemn the fear her own words
rightly provoke. And how disturbing that Mercy Mission holds her up as the
kind of Muslim who does us good.
Or - I hesitate to ask - is this really the
best our Muslim leaders can offer? Is this really their "true picture"
of Islam?
I beg of them. Prove it isn't. Until you do,
I'm afraid I shall take you at your grim word.
