Islam’s unholy alliance

Cameron Stewart and Richard Kerbaj/The Australian

Thanks to Rosie

ON a hot summer’s night two years ago, a carload of Islamic gunmen drove along Auburn Road in Sydney’s west and sprayed bullets into a row of shops owned by Iraqi Australians.

Sunni spiritual leader Fehmi Naji el-Imam, left, and Australia’s Shi’ite spiritual leader Kamal Mousselmani

Australia’s Muhammedans are seething over Wafa Sultan’s visit

This was no run-of-the-mill crime. On this night in January 2005, the gunshots echoed far beyond western Sydney and into the Canberra offices of ASIO, the domestic spy agency. The attack seemed to confirm what ASIO and other law enforcement agencies had long feared: that tensions between rival Sunni and Shia Muslim communities had spilled into violence.

It occurred only a week before the landmark free elections in Iraq, where Sunnis and Shi’ites were locked in a bitter and bloody power struggle.

The Sydney shooting of Shi’ite-owned shops followed the harassment of Shi’ite voters in Auburn the previous day as they lined up to cast their postal vote for Iraq.

A group of Sunni protesters had disrupted the voting, holding up a sign in Arabic saying “vote and die” and chanting anti-Shia slogans. So bad was the harassment that local sheik Haydar Naji advised his fellow voters for their own safety to scrub the blue fingerprint ink off their fingers, ink that was proud proof of their democratic vote.

In the eyes of the authorities, the clashes and the shooting in Auburn were a grim portent for the future. The last thing the nation’s counter-terrorism agencies needed was a mini Australian version of the bloody feud between the Sunnis and Shi’ites in Iraq.

So far, their worst fears have proved unfounded. The global divide between Islam’s two main groups, Sunnis and Shi’ites, has not become a flashpoint in Australia’s Muslim community. On the contrary, as was revealed by The Australian, the nation’s Shi’ite and Sunni leaders have formed a united front against Israel, declaring their support for the Iranian-backed terrorist network Hezbollah.

Yesterday Muslim leaders from both sects attacked the Howard Government and the Opposition for meeting a controversial US-based Muslim thinker, Wafa Sultan, who considers the prophet Mohammed evil and who says there is no difference between moderate and radical Islam.

The Australian yesterday revealed that Sultan, a psychiatrist who shot to fame last year following an interview on the Arabic news and current affairs television channel Al Jazeera in which she attacked Islam, met Attorney-General Philip Ruddock, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer and Opposition Deputy Leader Julia Gillard while in Australia on an “under the radar” visit to talk aboutIslam.

Sydney-based Shi’ite leader Salah Qurnawy yesterday joined Sunni leader Keysar Trad warning against anti-Islamic Muslims, saying they were as dangerous as radical clerics who wanted to destroy the West.

* Sure. Keysar Trad and his ‘out of context’ brigades really believe they have a monopoly on destroying Australia

Qurnawy, president of the Al Sajjad Association, believes Sultan’s views and outlook on Islam threaten to undermine the relationships formed between Muslims and wider Australia. He says Sultan – who last year featured in Time magazine’s list of 100 most influential people in the world – should not have been allowed into Australia.

“She will create disharmony for the community,” Qurnawy says.

* Really? Informing the government about the Muhammedan agenda creates ‘disharmony?’ It wouldn’t occur to these ‘moderates’ that they themselves created the problem in the first place…

Using our liberal laws against us:

Trad, president of the Islamic Friendship Association of Australia, has called on Ruddock to investigate Sultan’s views under sedition laws. “These politicians are free to go to bed with whom they choose,” he says of the ministers who met Sultan. “But if they allow people like Wafa Sultan to colour their views about the Australian Muslims with her crusade of misinformation, then they will not be serving the interest of Australian society. Her views are divisive to Australian society.

* Hmm, interesting concept “-crusade of misinformation”– what kind of ‘misinformation’ could that be, Keysar? And what about dividing the world in believers and unbelievers and teaching your kids that unbelievers are ‘the vilest of creatures and must be killed for Allah and then claiming it was all out of context?’

“I would expect (Ruddock) to search through the sedition provisions that he introduced (to see if) the views she has already stated would create division or hatred within Australian society.”

* Sure. In the Islamic state stoning would be the proper penalty for apostasy. There would probably be some extra bit of torture for ‘blaspheming the prophet’ and an few other ways to kill Wafa Sultan. Right Keysar?

Read it all…

*

Janet Albrechtsen meets Wafa Sultan:

Breakout from Islam’s mental prison

Question: Why did the Australian government have to sneak Wafa Sultan in?

Answer: Why does Ayaan Ali Hirsi and Salman Rushdie need body guards 24/7?

Wafa Sultan: “Look at any Islamic country. Tell me what you see. Poverty, backwardness, oppression, dictatorship, miserable lives. Somehow we have to help them change their way of thinking, their way of life. We have to re-create a new generation clean of hatred. We have been consumed by hatred. We are not practising our humanity. It’s very sad.”

Read it all

*

From dawa to jihad – the various threats from radical Islam to the democratic legal order