Keysar Trad? Head of our top Muslim body?

Excuse me? Keysar Trad now heads the top Islamic body in the country?

The president of Australia’s peak Muslim body has stepped down and been ­replaced by community spokesman Keysar Trad…

Hafez Kassem sent the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils executive committee notice of his resignation on Tuesday night, suggesting Mr Trad as his successor. Mr Trad, a former treasurer of the organisation, was unanimously elected its president yesterday….

Mr Trad told The Australian he planned to raise awareness about Islam and step up deradicalisation programs…

This is surely a joke. Some history:

Trad was the former spokesman of the pro-Hezbollah Mufti of Australia, the extremist Sheik Taj Al-Din Al-Hilaly… [Trad] had been a translator for the pro-Osama bin Laden and pro-jihadist Nida’ul Islam magazine, where he wrote: “The criminal dregs of white society colonised this country . . . and the descendants of these criminal dregs tell us that they are better than us.’’

More history: Keysar Trad, ominously described as Sydney Muslim community leader, shedding far too many tears for the families of Islamic State murderers Khaled Sharrouf and Mohamed Elomar, reportedly killed in Iraq:

”My deepest condolences to their family and let’s hope we can give some support to their wives and children,” said Mr Trad, who maintains young Australians are joining terror groups because their “blood is boiling” at domestic persecution.

More excuse-making for jihadists:

Young Australians are joining terror groups because their “blood is boiling” at domestic persecution and international atrocities committed by the West, a local Muslim leader has warned.

Keysar Trad, founder of the Islamic Friendship Association, told a university forum that his comments may be “dangerous” and “politically incorrect” but they were crucial to understanding why more than 200 Australians have taken up arms in Syria and Iraq.

In a scathing assessment of Australia’s efforts to create a harmonious society, he said constant persecution, hypocritical Australian laws, vitriolic media and repeated invasions in the Middle East were pushing young Muslims “to the margins of society” and driving them to radicalisation.

“Denying the root causes is like applying a Band-Aid to an open wound before cleaning and disinfecting it,” he told an anti-radicalisation forum at the University of Western Sydney on Wednesday night.

Mr Trad, a controversial figure who described himself as a “roving imam”, said he could understand why young Australians were driven to join Islamic State but he tried to convince them it was not the solution…

Mr Trad said Australian Muslims were confronted with “systemic discrimination”, opportunistic political commentary, unemployment and “duplicitous standards” in law enforcement.

“It is hard to argue with a young person who starts to cite all these issues, you can see the fire in their bellies, you in fact feel the same fire yourself,” he said.

“All the above factors compound to different extents the sense of victimisation and alienation amongst youths in general and Muslim youths in particular.” 

More history, detailed by Senator Cory Bernardi in the Senate:

In 2009, the New South Wales Supreme Court found that Mr Trad ‘incites people to commit acts of violence’, ‘incites people to have racist attitudes’ and is a ‘dangerous and disgraceful individual’. This stemmed from a defamation case that Mr Trad brought against Harbour Radio…

The courts based their finding that Mr Trad incites people to commit acts of violence on the following evidence: Mr Trad’s own website used to have a link to a website he touted as having ‘very good articles concerning Islam and Muslims’. But the courts found that this website held ‘significant anti-Semitic views’… When he was interviewed by a journalist, Mr Trad said words to the effect of, ‘There are many Jews who question how many died in the Holocaust’, which the judge saw as ‘an attempt to diminish the significance of those events.’ In the end, both courts deemed that this showed that Mr Keysar Trad incited violence against Jewish people…

Then there is the finding that Mr Trad is a ‘dangerous individual’… This was based on the following opinion of Mr Trad: When talking about the gang rape of young women in Sydney by a group of Lebanese men, in one interview Mr Trad chose to tell a joke and described these types of perpetrators as ‘stupid young boys’. The court said that his comments about the issue ‘demeaned the victims of the crime’, ‘did not condemn the perpetrators’ and ‘trivialised the responsibility of rapists.’ ..

Mr Trad failed to condemn [Hilali’s] reference to ‘the blessings of the 11th of September’ and the Sheik’s condoning of the use of boys as martyrs in the cause of radical Islam. The court said that this ‘involved putting forward ideas which risk an unbalanced or fanatical person being encouraged, or encouraging others, to participate in such activities’…

In 2005, he wrote an article published in the Daily Telegraph that said ‘Australians should be more concerned with the United States than radical Islam.’ … And a year after the September 11 terrorist attacks on the US, Mr Trad was reported in the Weekend Australian as saying: 
Osama bin Laden would have trouble teaching someone to drive a car … how could a man living in a backward country mastermind the hijacking of several planes, with the whole operation going off like clockwork? … I just don’t want to believe Muslims were behind it. 

Trad says women are left in a vulnerable financial position if the man dies….

“If it was a business and the business had four partners, we’d recognise that, but why don’t we recognise it when it comes to consensual relationships among adults?”